The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in 1979. A war, reconstruction, reform efforts and their failure followed. Today, Iran's economy is limping, and international sanctions are back in force. Iran expert Alessandro Topa looks back at 40 years of Iranian history.
"The essence of Iranian history," former President Mohammed Khatami once told students, "is the struggle for democracy."[1] While the successes of this struggle were repeatedly thwarted in the past by internal systemic forces, the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the international nuclear agreement has, for the time being, shattered the historic possibility of setting in motion a gradual opening of the Islamic Republic supported by the intensification of economic relations and preparing its geostrategic rapprochement with Europe.
Revolution and war (1979-1989): the founding years under Ayatollah Khomeini
When 98 percent of Iranians voted in favor of an Islamic republic in March 1979, few knew what this would mean in concrete terms. The people followed their leader, 77-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had just delivered them from the dictatorship of the shah and his secret service. "I vote yes for the Islamic Republic," the aged cleric now proclaimed from posters. Following his example was not difficult, even for the 60 percent illiterate among the 21 million eligible voters at the time: With the green section of the ballot paper, one voted for Islam; with the red section, against God.
For observers, however, it became clear that the referendum was the beginning of a confrontation in which the Islamist, liberal and Marxist forces, united in their opposition to the shah, were now turning against each other. In particular, Mehdi Bazargan, who had been appointed prime minister by Khomeini and who called for a "democratic Islamic republic," was forced to admit the powerlessness of his transitional government in October 1979: "Khomeini is in charge, along with his Revolutionary Council, the committees and his relationship with the masses." [2] This was already evident in the summer when Khomeini replaced Iran's Constituent Assembly with the Council of Experts, which was dominated by clerics.
When students occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, Bazargan resigned. Khomeini, however, used the anti-American agitation of the hostage crisis to further curtail the influence of the democrats in the drafting of the constitution. Thus, a month later, he was able to secure 99 percent approval for a constitution that, by virtue of the doctrine of the "rule of the jurist" (velayat-e faqih), secured him the preeminent position of power in the state.
The first years of the Islamic Republic were marked by excesses of violence, which, after the liberals, also eliminated militant Islamo-Marxist opposition groups. By 1988, thousands of opposition members had been killed. [3] In the course of a rigorous cultural revolution, the judicial and educational systems as well as the economy and media were simultaneously Islamized.
For the population, these developments took place within the historical framework of the so-called "holy defense" against Iraq, whose tanks invaded Iranian territory on a broad front on September 22, 1980. A war began that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives, especially as Iran itself went on the offensive beginning in 1982. As a myth of self-sacrificing resistance against the aggressors from the neighboring country and in the belief in solidarity with the revolution, the glorification of the war continues to shape the Islamic Republic's social model and self-image to this day - and is part of an Iranian-Shiite history of salvation.
Reconstruction and Deideologization (1989-1997): Pragmatism under Hashemi Rafsanjani
With the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq in July 1988 and Khomeini's death in June 1989, a phase of de-ideologized confrontation over pressing political and socioeconomic problems began.
The problem of establishing a new order of power after Khomeini was solved by a constitutional reform that modified the principle of velayat-e faqih: The revolutionary leader was no longer required to combine supreme religious and political authority. Instead, the constitution now made it possible to compensate for a lack of theological qualifications with political expertise. Thus, the Council of Experts appointed as leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei, a "mere" hojjatoleslam who had previously served as president of the state. A short time later, Khamenei was upgraded to the theological rank of ayatollah. Hashemi Rafsanjani, another middle-ranking cleric who had also been part of Khomeini's inner circle of advisors, was elected president.
Rafsanjani's policies focused on rebuilding the industry and infrastructure destroyed during the war and on eliminating inefficiencies by privatizing state-owned enterprises. The path of debt was taken to supply the country with imports. With its modernization projects, the Rafsanjani government partially tied in with plans of the shah and sought exiled experts whose return would help overcome deficiencies in management, technology and education.
At the same time, Rafsanjani faced increasing left-wing Islamist criticism, which admonished a lack of fidelity to the egalitarian ideals of the revolution and denounced the opening of the economy to foreign investors as a betrayal. In particular, the leaders of religious foundations (bonyadha), whose holdings manage the state-owned means of production, objected to the liberalism of Rafsanjani, who could hardly count on the support of parliament in his second term after the population lost confidence in him. Economic liberalization failed, and corruption was rampant.
Dialogue and democratic hopes (1997-2005): reformism under Mohammed Khatami
Rafsanjani's pragmatic policies, especially the strengthening of the private sector, better education and the relaxation of censorship, significantly prepared the way for the victory of Mohammed Khatami, who was elected president in May 1997 with 70 % of the vote. The left-liberal cleric understood public discourse and political participation as key to liberalizing the Islamic Republic within the framework of its constitution. Accordingly, he ran on an agenda of strengthening civil society and advocating women's rights and freedom of the press.
While Khatami's foreign policy of a "dialogue of civilizations" improved relations with Arab and European countries, he was hardly able to keep his promises domestically-despite initially unbroken approval in the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2000 and 2001: Although culture and political discourse flourished, at the same time the conservative forces around revolutionary leader Khamenei began to organize and countered by arresting reformists and banning many newspapers. Every third law passed by Parliament failed to be vetoed by the Council of Guardians.
When the forces of order brutally cracked down on students demonstrating for press freedom in July 1999, riots broke out across the country and several people died. Khatami did not comment on the events at first, but then - after massive pressure from the military and the revolutionary leader's camp - ostentatiously backed Khamenei.
By turning his back on the students, who could only see it as a betrayal, Khatami missed the historic opportunity, in the view of secular reform forces and many young Iranians, to dare a direct confrontation with the revolutionary leader, supported by the people. The political actions of the spiritual reformer thus revealed the systemic limits of the Islamic Republic's democratic potential. In this respect, the summer of 1999 represents a decisive caesura in recent Iranian history. Many former followers of Chatami remain disillusioned to this day.
When U.S. President George W. Bush placed Iran on an "axis of evil" in January 2002, reformism came under additional pressure in the course of the U.S.-led "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, Iran's previous cooperation with U.S. forces in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda had initially been celebrated as a foreign policy success for reformism.
In the 2004 parliamentary elections, 3,600 reformists were not allowed to vote, so that-in part because of an election boycott by the reformists-the conservatives regained a majority in Parliament.
Aggressive Foreign Policy and Left-Islamist Populism (2005-2013): Neoconservatism under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The failure of reformism in realpolitik solidified the view among observers that the Islamic Republic could not be democratized within the framework of the given constitution. Reformism also indirectly triggered a re-profiling of conservatism and set in motion the shift of the revolutionary leader's power base to the empire of the Revolutionary Guards. These had been founded in 1979 as an antithesis to the regular army with its monarchist tradition.
Both developments culminated in the 2005 presidential election, in which none of the reformers succeeded in activating old voter potential. Instead, a fundamentalist politician of a new type triumphed over Rafsanjani, the candidate of the clerical establishment: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran's first head of government since 1981 who did not belong to the clergy.
Ahmadinejad was a traffic engineer and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. He came from the milieu of the lineage-loyal Basij militia - a paramilitary volunteer militia that mobilizes the Revolutionary Guards as an auxiliary force when needed. Other neoconservatives, in opposition to reformism, also made their way into local administrations, institutional leadership positions, parliament and, eventually, the government.
Ahmadinejad's offensive posturing, his denial of the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist, and his intransigence in the nuclear conflict further isolated Iran and resulted in UN Security Council sanctions. Domestically, his left-wing Islamist program, based on the core concept of social justice, was repeatedly criticized as populist patronage politics and an illegal waste of foreign currency.
In June 2009, Ahmadinejad was unexpectedly re-elected as president by a clear margin (over 62 percent). The "deep state" around revolutionary leader Khamenei was subsequently accused of having falsified the election results, which led to the most serious legitimacy crisis of the Islamic Republic's political system to date.
Mass rallies of the rapidly forming neo-reformist "Green Movement" took place, with the urban middle classes protesting what must have seemed to them - probably rightly - a blatant electoral fraud. But Revolutionary Leader Khamenei and the security forces reacted: there were dozens of deaths, hundreds of injuries, and a wave of arrests that systematically silenced the voices of thousands of opposition figures.[4] Numerous well-known opposition figures were tried and convicted in show trials for supporting a revolution allegedly directed from abroad. The defeated reformist candidates Mir Hossein Mussawi and Mehdi Karroubi, who had documented violations of electoral law and pushed for new elections, remain under house arrest today.
Hegemonic Forward Defense and Failure of the Nuclear Agreement (2013-2019): Neopragmatism under Hassan Rouhani.
The Islamic Republic's political history over the past decade has been largely defined by the deliberate expansion-military, religio-political, economic, cultural, and academic-of its sphere of influence in the region's civil war-torn states. This "forward defense" is done in the short and medium term with the goal of being able to compensate for conventional military weakness through strategic depth and a network of Shiite militias. In the long term, the goal is as ambitious as it is precarious: to be able to consolidate accumulated hegemonic power in the construction of an "Iranosphere." The youth protests that have been held down with extreme violence in Lebanon and Iraq since late summer 2019, which are directed against the corruption of local clients and Tehran's pan-Shiite expansionism, show how deeply this now permeates the everyday reality of citizens' lives. The nuclear conflict, which has been at the center of media attention in recent years and will be highlighted as a narrative leitmotif in the following, must be placed in this overall picture and probably also put into perspective in terms of its historical significance.
Nevertheless, Hassan Rouhani's election as the seventh president of the Islamic Republic in June 2013 undoubtedly heralded a radical change of course in foreign policy and diplomacy. Admittedly, this change of course was largely facilitated by the novel gesture of U.S. President Barack Obama's Iran policy (2009-2017). Ahmadinejad's ideologically concealed stance of maximum intransigence was followed by the solution-oriented pragmatism of the liberal jurist and security expert Rouhani and his urbane Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif, who was deeply committed to the nuclear agreement project.
Talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom) including Germany and the European Union soon showed progress. After a series of negotiations, they led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed in Vienna, also known as the "international nuclear agreement." Under this July 2015 agreement, Iran committed itself - in return for the gradual lifting of sanctions - to suspending and regularly monitoring the potentially militarily useful components of its nuclear program for 15 years.
The euphoria in Iran and Europe over the opening up of opportunities for economic cooperation in the context of Iran's technological modernization soon gave way to concerns after Donald Trump's election as U.S. president in November 2017 that the new U.S. administration might withdraw from the agreement. It was feared that the U.S. intended to force Iran back to the negotiating table by tightening sanctions, in particular to include Iran's ballistic missile program in what the U.S. saw as an improved agreement.
The U.S. president's official declaration on May 8, 2018, to withdraw from the agreement was followed by the reinstatement and tightening of sanctions in November 2018. Since then, the aim has been to further isolate the Islamic Republic economically and bring it to the brink of financial collapse by completely halting oil exports, and in so doing, to encourage the emergence of protests in the country's interior. In response to rising food prices, lack of wage payments and the costly support of Shiite militias abroad, the turn of the year 2017/18 saw nationwide protests, some of which were extremely violent. Similarly, in November 2019, peaceful demonstrations that initially arose because of unannounced gasoline price increases developed within a few days into nationwide protests against the Islamic Republic system and its leadership. The martial intervention of the security forces led to the deaths of hundreds of demonstrators. [5]
Following the escalation of the conflict with the United States at the turn of 2019/2020, the Islamic Republic appears to be at an epochal crossroads at the beginning of the new decade. The developments set in motion by the assassination of Quds Brigades commander Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq on January 3, 2020, can hardly be overlooked at present because of their domestic and global political complexities. Iran responded to Soleimani's killing by firing on military bases in Iraq used by U.S. forces. The scale of the attacks made clear Tehran's desire to avoid war. At the same time, millions of Iranians participated in several days of mourning processions for Soleimani; the November protests seemed forgotten for now. But on January 11, the Revolutionary Guards made an official admission of guilt for accidentally shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane with 176 people (mostly of Iranian nationality or descent) on board near Tehran on January 8. Once again, there were protests against the regime. Prominent public figures published messages distancing themselves from the Islamic Republic system.
Given the hopeless economic situation and the Trump administration's strategy of subjecting the Islamic Republic to a permanent "stress test," it can be assumed that the Islamic Republic will make both domestic and foreign policy course corrections in the direction of constructive pragmatism. These course corrections could explode the basic consensus that has prevailed so far among all political camps in the Islamic Republic, if a way out of isolation and the country's complete exhaustion in the conflict with the United States is to be avoided.
This consensus has so far included, first, the conviction that U.S. policy toward Iran is working toward regime change in Tehran. Second, this consensus includes a military defense doctrine according to which the massive armament of the Gulf states and the military threat potential of the new Washington-Tel Aviv-Riyadh axis can only be neutralized by expanding hegemonic "forward defense" in order to be able to drive the costs of an attack on one's own territory ever higher. Third, this consensus includes the conviction that the more pressure from abroad increases, the more Iranian society will show solidarity with the regime.
Of these premises, only the first seems to be accepted with certainty in Tehran.
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Footnotes
Zit. n.: Abrahamian (2008), S. 186
Ebd., S. 163
Vgl. "Amnesty beklagt Zerstörung von Massengräbern in Iran", ZEIT Online, 30. April 2018. Online unter: https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2018-04/gefaengnismassaker-iran-amnesty-international-cover-up (Stand: 2401.2020)
Vgl. die Bestandsaufnahme der Ende Juli 2009 vorliegenden Informationen im "NewsBlog Iran" des Guardian. Online unter: https://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2009/jul/29/iran-election-protest-dead-missing (Stand: 24.01.2020)
Vgl. Fassihi, F. und Specia, M.: Iran Used Firearms in Deadly Crackdown on Protesters, Officials Admit, in: New York Times, 05.12.2019. Online unter. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/world/middleeast/iran-protest-crackdown.html und Fassihi, F. und Gladstone, R.: With Brutal Crackdown, Iran Is Convulsed by Worst Unrest in 40 Years, in: New York Times, 01.12.2019. Online unter: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/world/middleeast/iran-protests-deaths.html (Stand: 24.01.2020)
German Text: Alessandro Topa für bpb.de, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0