The Islamic republic and the world : global dimensions of the Iranian revolution

220 Pages·2007·0.672 MB·English

by  Panah, Maryam

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The Islamic Republic and the
World
Global Dimensions of the Iranian
Revolution
Maryam Panah
Pluto Press
London • Ann Arbor, MI
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First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Maryam Panah 2007
The right of Maryam Panah to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2622 1
ISBN-10 0 7453 2622 6
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Curran Publishing Services, Norwich
Printed and bound in India.
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Dedicated to my children, Leyla and Kilian.
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Contents
Chronology ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1. The Iranian Revolution in international context: a
theoretical perspective 4
Atheoretical framework: causes and consequences 6
Revolution and the Islamic Republic: an analysis 13
2. The Iranian Revolution: internal and external causes 16
Historical legacy of foreign influence in Iran 16
Socio-economic development and structural change 21
The revolutionary coalition 28
Evolution of a revolutionary discourse: international
influences 32
3. Populism and the Revolution: domestic and
international impact 42
Populism and ‘Khomeinism’ 42
The revolutionary centrifuge: a fragmenting coalition 44
Khomeinism: nationalism, anti-imperialism, universalism 47
Khomeinism’s decisive moment: 1979–80 51
The domestic consequences 57
International consequences 65
Export of revolution: Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and the Gulf 69
4. International containment of the Islamic Republic 76
After the hostage crisis 76
The Iraqi response: onset of the Iran–Iraq war 80
Regional policies of containment: the Gulf states
and beyond 82
The United States and the West: policy in the 1980s 86
Exporting revolution: a unique failure 93
5. Populism, war and the state 97
‘War populism’ and revolutionary images of the
international system 97
Popular mobilisation and war contributions 101
War, populism and repression 104
[ vii ]
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CONTENTS
Development of the instruments of state coercion 106
Abasement of ‘social populism’ 111
Social basis of the war 114
6. State crisis and change 118
State, revolution and class: a theoretical explanation 119
The critical conjuncture: external and internal pressure
and the economy 122
The end of an era? The important concept of ‘maslehat’ 128
7. Reform and reaction 1990–2005 131
The reform years 133
The conservative backlash 139
8. Revolutionary foreign policy and international tension 148
Revolutionary continuity: Islamic universalism 148
Military and security strategy 156
International tension 158
9. Conclusion 163
Notes 168
Index 204
[ viii ]
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Chronology of key events
since the Second World War
1941 Occupation of Iran by Britain and Russia. Deposition of
Reza Shah in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza. Iranian
Communist Party founded.
1943 Deployment of US missions in Iran.
1951 Mohammad Mosaddeq becomes Prime Minister.
Parliament votes to nationalise British-dominated Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company.
1953 Mosaddeq overthrown in coup engineered by US and
British intelligence. Shah assumes autocratic control.
1957 SAVAK secret police agency established.
1959 Signature of bilateral defence agreement between United
States and Iran.
1960 Confederation of Iranian Students in Europe established.
1963 Launch of shah’s ‘White revolution’ – programme of land
reform and socio-economic modernisation.
1964 Khomeini’s historic speech against granting of
capitulatory rights to United States leads to his later exile.
1965 Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MKO) guerrilla organisation
established.
1978 Riots, strikes and mass demonstrations against shah
escalate.
1979 Shah exiled (January); Khomeini returns to Iran
(February); Islamic Republic of Iran proclaimed following
referendum (April); 52 Americans taken hostage in US
embassy.
1980 New government established and launches nationalisation
programme. Invasion of Iran by neighbouring Iraq
(September).
1981 Dismissal of first Iranian president, Bani Sadr, repression
of MKO and other leftist organisations.
1983 Communist Party of Iran (Tudeh) banned.
1988 Shooting down of Iran Air passenger plane by USS
Vincennes. Iran accepts ceasefire to end eight-year war
with Iraq.
1989 Khomeini dies and is succeeded by Khamenei. Rafsanjani
becomes president.
[ ix ]
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CHRONOLOGY
1996 New trade and investment sanctions imposed by United
States on Iran.
1997 Khatami becomes president following landslide election
victory.
1999 Pro-democracy student demonstrations crushed by
regime.
2000 Reformists gain majority in parliament. Judiciary imposes
tighter limits on freedom of press.
2001 Khatami re-elected president for second term.
2002 US President Bush describes Iran as part of the ‘axis of
evil’. Work commences by Russia on construction of
Iranian nuclear reactor in Bushehr.
2003 Demonstrations against regime repressed.
2004 Conservatives regain control of parliament. Iran comes
under pressure from IAEAto suspend uranium
enrichment.
2005 Conservative Mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, elected
president. Stand off between Iran and US on nuclear issue.
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Acknowledgements
I am first and foremost indebted to Fred Halliday, my PhD supervisor,
for inspiring me to study revolutions – and the Iranian case in partic-
ular – in an international context. The ideas behind the book developed
further through numerous discussions with graduate participants of
the modernity and historical materialism seminars at the Department
for International Relations, LSE. The manuscript benefited from the
insights of Nikki Keddie during my brief stay at UCLA and the
comments of my examiners Sami Zubaida and Hazel Smith. It goes
without saying that weaknesses and deficiencies in the text remain
mine alone.
I am grateful to the Pluto editorial and production teams, and in
particular to my editor Chris Carr at Curran Publishing Services, for
their speed and efficiency in the race to ensure the manuscript was
completed before the arrival of our son in April 2007!
Finally, special thanks go to my mother for her help and support
over the years and, of course, to Benno for his comments from the very
start and his persistent encouragement and motivation to return to and
complete this project.
Maryam Panah
May 2007
[ xi ]
Introduction
Over a quarter of a century after the Revolution of 1979, the Islamic
Republic of Iran continues to challenge policymakers and scholars
alike. The outbreak of the Revolution attracted the attention of state
leaders, policy analysts, commentators and social activists globally.
The Islamic turn of this ostensibly modern revolution confounded
almost all. Its ‘anti-imperialist’ proclamations, its anti-Western slogans,
the pictures of burning US flags and the taking of hostages were cause
for consternation, while the Islamic Republic’s policy of ‘exporting
revolution’ stimulated a range of hostile responses from policy makers
in the region and beyond.
The recent escalation of tension throughout the Middle East has
again thrust Iran into the centre-stage in a pivotal role. Domestically,
meanwhile, the election in 2005 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the previ-
ously little-known hardliner and conservative presidential candidate,
took the world by surprise. Here was a new Iranian president who, in
contrast to his reformist predecessor, ratcheted up the revolutionary
rhetoric against US imperialism, who called for Israel to be ‘wiped off
the map’, and who vehemently asserted Iran’s right to the develop-
ment of nuclear capabilities in the face of international condemnation.
The election ended a long period which some had seen as an Iranian
‘Thermidor’, the onset of which had come with the end of the Iran–Iraq
war of the 1980s and with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. It
signalled the end of the precarious reform and reconciliation
attempted by the Khatami governments since 1997. Shortly after his
election, Ahmadinejad pronounced that Iran remained not just a
regional force to be reckoned with, but also an Islamic revolutionary
state which continued to challenge the prevailing international order.
How and why did this resurgent revolutionary populism emerge in
2005? Why is it that after almost three decades, Iran has not, as many
expected, consolidated the reform process initiated in the 1990s, but
has reasserted the militancy and rhetoric of its early revolutionary
years? The key to understanding the ‘Ahmadinejad phenomenon’ lies
in the history of the Iranian Revolution and the early formation of the
Islamic Republic. It lies particularly in the early post-revolutionary
period – the decade of the 1980s – and the revolutionary rhetoric of the
Ayatollah Khomeini in which Ahmadinejad and his generation were
schooled. It was also during this period that the institutional structures
of the post-revolutionary state were established. Thus, not only does
Ahmadinejad’s language mirror the nationalist, anti-imperialist and
Islamic universalist populism of Khomeini in the 1980s, but the origins
[ 1 ]
THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AND THE WORLD
of the current state apparatus on which he relies, with all its contradic-
tions and peculiarities, can be found in the 1980s and, in particular, in
the war years. It was during that decade that the Pasdaran (Islamic
Revolutionary Guards), and the basij (mobilisation militia) forces – of
which not coincidentally Ahmadinejad was an active member – were
formed. It was in the early 1980s when the first Revolutionary Guards
were dispatched to Lebanon to form the Hezbollah. It was during the
same decade that the Islamic Republic’s state and para-statal institu-
tions were consolidated in the hands of a religious minority who
remain in control of the means of distribution, production and coercion
and who are able to wield power and obstruct attempts at true reform.
To see Ahmadinejad merely as a face of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ in
the region is crude and simplistic. He is, rather, to be situated in a
contradictory process of post-revolutionary state building and
ideology formation in Iran.
To explain Iran’s current political order, we must understand not only
the revolutionary movement of 1979 – its social bases, discourse and
rhetoric – but importantly also the formation of the post-revolutionary
state during the 1980s, a period marked more than any event by the long
Iran–Iraq war. The Islamic Republic is, in this sense, not just a post-revo-
lutionary state. It is a state formed both by revolution and by war, and
the resurgence of militancy since the 2005 election is a manifestation of
a 25-year-long contradictory process of post-revolutionary and post-war
state formation.
This book deals primarily with the emergence of an Islamic state
subsequent to the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, its conse-
quences for the global order and the consequences of global responses
to it. Chapter 1 sets out a brief theoretical context on states and revolu-
tions, and the framework for the narrative analysis of the subsequent
chapters. Chapter 2 provides an account of how international develop-
ments and the policies of foreign powers shaped Iranian politics in the
decades before the Revolution. It considers the impact of socio-
economic changes during the pre-revolutionary period on various
social groups, and the consequent impact on the formation of a revolu-
tionary coalition. In this sense, this chapter shows that the Iranian
Revolution was very much a modern social revolution. However, the
Iranian revolutionary movement also displayed its own specificity and
it is at the nexus of the more general impact of global social processes
and the particular and specific conditions of the Iranian social forma-
tion that we should seek the emergence of the Revolution.
Chapter 3 then develops the theme of specificity as it pertains to the
evolution of the rhetoric and ideology of the Revolution. It explains the
transformation from modern social revolution to Islamic state by
analysing the emergence of ‘Khomeinism’ – Ayatollah Khomeini’s
[ 2 ]