De-nationalising Nationalism in Iran: An Account on the Interaction between Domestic and International Dynamics/Iran'da Milliyetciligi Millilikten Cikartma: Ulusal ve Uluslararasi Dinamiklerin Etkilesimi Uzerine Bir Degerlendirme.

• Author: Ozdemir, Zelal

Intro

By the 1990s, students of International Relations (IR) began to pay greater attention to nationalism as a way to understand global politics. (1) Despite this increased interest, studies mainly engaged in nationalism from a rather narrow perspective and centred on the effects of the national idea and nationalist movements on the world order. IR scholars later drew attention to other forms of political, sub-national and supra-national identities. (2) This study aims at re-building analytical bridges between IR and nationalism studies through Historical Sociology in International Relations (HSIR). There are a number of studies that have employed the premises of HSIR. (3) Our aim is to apply the HSIR framework to studies of nationalism with reference to the case of Iran. This article problematizes the nature of the interaction between domestic and international factors and its impact on the processes of nation building. The literature on nationalism in Iran is limited in that most recognition is directed towards the international context rather than taking it as a constitutive part of national identity. (4) The Iranian case is illustrative since it provides an exemplary case to understand how international factors shape a non-European and semi-colonial context. The stories of Iranian nationalism(s) and Iranian interaction with the globe are distinct but interwoven. There are multiple international connections forming Iranian identity, from modernization to Westernization, Aryanism to non-aligned nationalism, and militarism to secularism; many aspects of Iranian nationalisms and their struggle against alternative nationalisms is coloured by these interactions. This article provides a historical-sociological account based on a review of the secondary sources and an analysis of the speeches and biographies of key political actors, including the leaders (Reza Shah and Mossadegh), ministers, members of the parliament, journalists and intellectual elites.

When we consider the theories of nationalism in the context of Iran or other late modernizing countries in the Middle East, conceptual problems arise. (5) The generalizations derived from the Western experiences remain limited. The Iranian case is more complex than any other Middle Eastern countries, most of which underwent direct colonial control. As Afshin Marashi reminds, (6) Iran's history of nationalism must be understood as emerging out of the specific context of Iran's position as semi-colonial in the world system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, the international milieu has played a constitutive role in the formation of Iranian identity(ies). The production of a Western-type identity at the beginning of the Reza Shah period, the invention of supposedly racially superior Aryanism in the context of rising fascism in Europe, and the anti-colonial movement all swept through the world and affected Iran, including the blossoming of Mossadegh's non-aligned nationalism and the "positive nationalism" (7) of Mohammed Reza Shah against Mossadegh's non-aligned nationalism. All of these turns of Iranian state nationalism reflected the importance of incorporating the realm of the international to the domestic historiography.

We argue that HSIR has much to offer not only to studies of nationalism and/in Iran but also to the discipline of IR. HSIR provides tools with which we can better understand this interrelationship through the concepts of historicization, multi-causality, and most-importantly negation of the binary of domestic/international factors. We start by discussing two strands of approaches in nationalism studies and the place of nationalism in IR studies. Nationalism should also be understood in relation to the international context and with reference to the ways in which it interacts with the international milieu. We then present a framework by discussing the tools that HSIR provides in analysing nationalism with reference to the case of Iran. We focus on the period between 1921 and 1953 and comparatively analyse changing definitions of Iranian identity framed by Reza Shah (1921-1941) and the Prime Minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh (1951-1953). While the Reza Shah era, as the foundation years of the Pahlavi Dynasty and modern Iranian state, refers to the beginning of a systemic construction of Iranian national identity by the modern state, the premiership of Mossadegh refers to brief but critical years during which a powerful alternative nationalism arose against the definition of Pahlavi nationalism during second Shah's weak reign. This period is a key example of how the politics of nationalism was the main node of oppositional politics in twentieth-century Iran and partly explains the success of the revolutionary process in 1979. Centering on the key tensions of the era, the clash of two nationalisms, the section focuses on the differences between Reza Pahlavi's and Mossadegh's nationalisms by using historicization, multi-causality, and co-constitution of domestic/international factors.

HSIR enables us to escape territorialized logic in understanding nationalism: 'methodological nationalism' and 'methodological internationalism'. The former refers to the inclination to explain domestic dynamics in isolation from international forces, whereas the latter refers to the tendency to explain all social phenomena with international factors. (8) As various studies in Historical Sociology show, modernization does not follow a single trajectory but different historical specificities lead to different paths and outcomes. As in the Iranian case, the emergence and development of Iranian state building and (re)construction of national identity took place in the phase of an overwhelmingly international context. This is extremely important when we consider the multiple alliances established in Iran, which vary from relations between a weak central state and great powers to non-state actors' relations with the foreigners and even includes the sponsoring of military coups by foreign actors. Neither the domestic, as the former claims, nor the international, as the latter argues, but the interaction of the international and domestic factors forged Iran's path of modernity and this interlocking conditioned the construction and reconstruction of Iranian nationalisms.

An interdisciplinary re-engagement between HSIR and the Modernist School of Nationalism can provide an important key to the complex puzzle of the politics of nationalism without falling into the trap of Middle East exceptionalism. HSIR, moreover, presents a way to re-tune and re-imagine research on nationalism in IR. We therefore aim to showcase what HSIR knowledge offers to nationalism studies, an area deemed understudied in IR.

Modernist School of Nationalism and IR

There is an ever-growing literature on nationalism, with its competing theories. There are several social science questions involved in the field, such as when nations emerged, what a nation actually is, by what criteria one can determine nation-ness, and what will be the future of nationalism. There are now at least three different schools of thought within the field, which vary more within themselves. Broadly, they are primordialism, (9) the approach that takes the antiquity of the nations as given; ethno-symbolism, (10) which argues for the ancient myths, symbols, and memories as the founding elements of the modern nations; and finally modernism, which claims that nations are modern phenomena and should be analysed solely within the framework of modern politics. The dominant paradigm in the field is the modernist school, which is mainly composed of two lines of analysis: one that focuses on structural factors and one that scrutinises the cultural aspects of nationalism.

Objectivist approaches centre on the structural and socio-historical processes in analysing the emergence of nationalism that is seen as a product of modernization and as a response to the problems generated by modern society. These studies tend to ponder on the objective determinants and first causes of nationalism. For Ernest Gellner, (11) it is industrialization; for Eric Hobsbawm (12) it is capitalism; and for Tom Nairn, (13) it is the uneven and combined capitalist development. Building on the dichotomy between traditional and modern societies, nationalism was borne out of the necessity of the modern state and modern politics and in relation to specific economic and social conditions. "It was not an aspect of the human condition that would last forever, nor did it correspond to some inner need of the human psyche"; it was "genuine, objective, practical necessity." (14) The objective accounts also acknowledge the invented character of nationalism. (15) Understanding nationalism from a mobilization perspective, Miraslav Hroch (16) points out that the crises within societies make nationalist ideology and movements relevant. John Breuilly, in a similar vein, argues that nationalist ideology matters, not so much because it directly motivates most supporters of a nationalist movement, but rather because it provides a conceptual map that enables people to relate their particular material and moral interests to a broader terrain of actions. (17)

The objectivist approach seeks to prove the modernity of nationalism and the nation state as opposed to the perennial understanding of nationalism. Instead of describing the nation as a coherent something that is awakened or revived, it analyses the issue within the realm of modern politics through historicization. This task has a paramount importance for the IR discipline. It is an 'emancipatory task' (18) as these scholars are indeed denaturalising the central concepts including "nation" and "state" upon which IR based itself. Their weakness is resorting to structural explanations and prioritization of 'why' questions over 'how'. Yet, here, there is the danger of overlooking specificities of various...