BRIEFLY recapitulating the history of a century long struggle for democracy and civil society in Iran, this paper discusses why civil society has remained a subaltern concept until only recently. Central to the argument is Iran’s entry into political modernity in the context of the Russo-Persian and Anglo-Persian wars in the first half of the 19th century that resulted in significant territorial losses for Iran, as well as in the Iranian state’s concessions to the Europeans for the monopolized development and control of trade and export of resources.

These historical events, aided by despotism of the Qajar Shahs, created the context of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, a pioneer movement of its kind in Asia, an event that marked the country’s entry into political modernity in general, and democratic citizenship and national self-assertion in particular. Both the democratic spirit and associated conceptions of civil society were, however, soon lost in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution, with the establishment of the secular but authoritarian Pahlavi dynasty.

Constitutionalism was an exemplary effort in political modernity, even as the country was also urgently in need of economic and infrastructural modernization. These two forms of modernization cannot usually be properly thought of without one another. Social modernization, edified in the form of civil society, is an outcome of the interaction between political and economic modernization insofar as these two, hypothetically, advance through mutual relations and simultaneous development.

The Iranians, therefore, faced the dilemma of modernization without their agency, where the modern state mutated into an authoritarian, omnipotent, and non-responsive state and the sole agent of the country’s development marked by its remarkable conceit. Instead of the expansion of civil society and enactment of a democratic culture, which are preconditions for modern social life, Iran ended up inheriting a state that monopolized agency in order to modernize the country.

It goes without saying that as an Asian country, Iran did not have the historical contexts that produced the concept of civil society in Europe. Civil society must be understood in the context of 17th and 18th century Europe where the formation of political modernity through concepts of constitutionalism, citizenship, rights and liberty, emerged in response to dying empires and absolute monarchies.

Specifically, civil society was located in the relationship between propertied elite lords and the intellectuals who desired a balance between security of property provided by the state and the freedom that the propertied men needed to thrive economically (partly by engaging in politics).¹ This political transition coincided with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, of course. A rising elite successfully claimed the production of profit out of monetary, trade, or industrial transactions – a form of production no longer attached, and thus limited, to land.

 

From Hobbes to Rousseau, the various conceptions of social contract, despite differences, can be viewed in this context. So is the case with respect to the advocacy of individual rights, just laws, and the separation of powers in the works of les philosophes in France. Let us recall Rousseau, in passing, whose remark about the voluntary nature of ‘civil association’ in The Social Contract captures the essence of the legal conceptions of liberty.² Rousseau writes during a changing of eras in France (and Europe) when, with the advent of social mobility in the context of feudalism and rise of capitalism, it was no longer possible to keep individuals in ‘their place’. Thus, civil society is the realm of freedom of man, of designated spaces of liberty and the activity within such spaces, and thereby the foundation of modern society – that is, the social contract.

 

Hegel’s conceptualization of the civic community that mediates between the family and the state within his ethical system in Philosophy of Right was a dialectical approach to the issue. ‘While Hegel’s conception of civil society may not be the first modern one… his is the first modern theory of civil society.’³ The Hegelian conception, of course, aimed at a synthesis between civil society and the state. This mutual integration, by and large, is true about the West. As Axel Honneth observes, ‘In the western democracies the concept [of civil society] was not directed against the state apparatus but was rather used to found a new conception of radicalized democracy.’⁴ 

For Karl Marx who lived during the unrelenting rise of industrial capitalism, the uninhibited expansion of bourgeois class, and the heyday of authoritarian states in Europe, the existing conceptions of civil society deserved a ruthless critique as for him civil society meant the realm of ‘egoistic man… an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.’⁵ In the realms of freedom of propertied men, Marx saw the unfreedom of the unpropertied majority.

Civil society was, simply stated, the realm of activity – economic to start with but also inevitably political and social – that fell outside the state tutelage but was nonetheless connected to it, as by the last quarter of the 19th century both civil society and the state were interdependent components of the emerging modern nation states. Again, as is well-known, the French Revolution pushed to the fore the idea that rights can be detached from property ownership. The modern idea of citizenship was thus born and with it conceptions of civil society expanded, although it took some time for the actual civil societies in Europe to take shape as the realm of free association of rights-bearing citizens.

To cut a long story short, the 19th and 20th centuries became the centuries of worldwide struggles for universal suffrage, for the inclusion of unpropertied men and women in the political community. Political modernity, as expressed in terms of democratic citizenship today, is the result of this historical process, of the ever-expanding conceptions of rights advocated by social movements.

 

It is, therefore, not surprising that the modern conception of politics, in particular constitutionalism and citizenship, reached Iran devoid of the aforementioned (European) histories and debates. In particular, what was missing in Iran in comparison to Europe was the fact that for ages and up until the mid-19th century, property was not linked to rights in Iran, but only to the privileges that were utterly contingent upon many factors. This difference between Europe and Iran (and Asia for the most part) is sociologically significant.

Cosroe Chaqueri asserts that, ‘In Europe there existed, on the basis of Roman law, an inalienable, indisputable right to ownership, whereas in Islamic, tribal Iran, such a right had never existed. Where and when private property did exist, it was at best a privilege and not a right.’⁶ The Iranian system of land tenure was not feudal.⁷ So at the time of constitutionalism, political representation and civil society were not linked to economic interests.

 

In the Islamic tradition land originally belonged to God and it was placed under the tutelage of the Shah who needed to extract levies and shares from land production in order to finance the royal court, royal travel, and military excursions. As such, given the tribal structure of pre-modern Iran, the Shah would use land reallocation as the means of compensating military (tribal) commanders for their contribution to campaigns. Called ‘iqta’, this system of property ‘ownership’ cannot be farther from property right strictu senso. The insecurity of life and property arising from this kind of ownership is so significant that it has led Homa Katouzian to consider Iran as a ‘short-term society’ in contradistinction from Europe as a long-term society.⁸

Because private property did not exist in Iran and there was no right to land,⁹ capitalism did not take off in Iran either: it was not safe for long-term investment.¹⁰ It was not until 1888 when Nasser al-Din Shah decreed property rights under British pressure, that colonialism could ensure the entry of Iran into the world capitalist mode of ownership and market.¹¹

The absence of sociological context and property rights foreclosed debates over, and understanding of, citizens’ rights within a realm of civic participation simultaneously independent from and under the protection of the state. For the clerics, constitutionalism meant the greater influence of Islamists over the state and was in a way an attempt at creating a state that accorded with the principles of Shi’i Islam, a state that in turn protected the basics of Islam (beyzeh-ye Islam). For the secularists, constitutionalism was a fresh breeze, an opportunity for their badly needed social reintegration.¹²

 

These divergent interests, however, had significant social implications. These objectives could not have been achieved without freedom of the press, associations and political parties. Secular intellectuals supported such freedoms, while the clerical establishment’s support, if such was the case, came with major reservations. It was back then that journalism in Iran began to function as a virtual civil society, a phenomenon that still exists today.

A proper conception of civil society was therefore never developed, as it must be. The clerics’ advocacy of overseeing affairs of state by the Shi’i clerical establishment, through the Majles, emphasized and reinforced the role of the state at the cost of expansion of civil society. Thus, one of the objectives of the Constitutional Revolution was the creation of a centralized and authoritarian state bound by the supreme law of the land that would guarantee security. Both the secular and religious constitutionalists supported this demand.

But when it came to restrictions on clerical social power or the expansion of freedom of association or the press, the clerical establishment withdrew support. Constitutionalism was meant to reduce the harm of the state, undo tyranny and place the Shah under the scrutiny of the people’s representatives. There is a refreshing democratic spirit here, but note that the emphasis is actually on curbing and controlling the state rather than expanding civil society.

The constitutional movement was an experiment in self-rule at the grassroots level, as represented by the widespread presence of the anjomans at the time,¹³ an experiment lost in light of destabilizing turmoil in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution and thereby focusing on establishing strong state beginning with Reza Shah and continuing into the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah and the Islamic Republic. This centrist tendency is apparent even when analyzing the militant opposition to the Shah in the 1970s which, by polarizing Iranian society, moved the country away from the precious experience of the constitutional movement and laid the ground for yet another autocratic state in Iran.

 

No wonder then, it took only fifteen years after the victory of the Constitutional Revolution that opened the country’s path to democracy, for Iran to end up with Reza Shah’s ultimate strong state. It was an authoritarian and secular state that with unrelenting vigour, modernized Iran institutionally, developed it infrastructurally, and improved the overall conditions of the country’s inhabitants. However, it did not allow for the expansion of civil society and rendered useless or ineffective the democratic clauses of the Constitution and the democratic institutions of the country. I have called this phenomenon ‘repressive development’: social and economic development without political modernization. During the Pahlavi era, as also under the Islamic Republic, a strong state has dominated the lives of Iranians, inhibiting internal social development of the country based on codetermination and interdependence of various social groups and classes and societal factors.

 

It is sociologically difficult to pinpoint the reasons behind the advent of such rigorous authoritarianism as that of Reza Shah out of the uninhibited spirit of freedom loving and the trust in just laws that invigourated the constitutional movement. The reason behind such a retreat can be attributed to cultural factors. But here let us focus on the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi in order to provide admittedly partial explanations, ex post facto, as to why constitutionalism degenerated into authoritarianism.

One factor contributing to the rise of Reza Shah (1878-1944) was Russia’s atrocious invasion of northern Iran in 1911 in reaction to the ill-fated, and much feared, appointment of American Morgan Shuster to Iran’s (bankrupt) Treasury Department and dividing Iran into zones of control by British and Russian colonial powers.¹⁴ Other factors include political assassinations (e.g., those of Amin al-Soltan and Ayatollah Behbahani) and instability in post-revolutionary Iran as they contributed to the diminishing of visions of democracy and civil society.¹⁵ Loss of internal security in the country in the years following the victorious constitutional movement immensely served to justify the future dictatorship.

 

A military officer, Reza Khan’s gradual ascent to power began through a series of military and political manoeuvres in 1921 and ended with his becoming the Shah by a secret vote in the Majlis in December 1925.¹⁶ Reza Shah’s rise to power vividly captures the eroding spirit of the Constitutional Revolution. The rest is a well-known story of the degeneration of democracy into an autocratic rule: while in power Reza Shah nullified the legislature through ‘rigged elections’ to create ‘a packed Parliament’ as his solution to parliamentary independence.¹⁷ 

He banned the socialist and communist parties in 1927.¹⁸ Then began a long history of the Shah executing or exiling anyone whom he perceived as a threat. Reza Shah also used his position to acquire vast agricultural properties through confiscation or forced sale, despite property laws, and at his abdication owned over ten per cent of Iran’s agricultural land and was the country’s largest landowner. This story has continued to this date.

Reza Shah, however, is admired for authoritatively transforming Iran from a backward, peasant country into a modern one – institutionally, socially and economically. For his ambitious projects, he was gifted with the newly found petroleum income, but he also relied on taxation. In a way, this kind of ‘command modernization’ became the epicentre and the model for the modernization of the entire country in the decades to come.

 

Above all, a modern state emerged in Iran as the sole agent of social and economic transformation. As one person, and him alone, who embodied the state, it is interesting to observe how the Shah’s control of the people was achieved though a combination of legitimate government laws and regulations – necessary for the sanctioning of modernization – even as the Shah acted above the law to persecute and eliminate those whom he saw as threats to himself and to ‘his’ state. The Iranian intelligentsia that was once at the heart of the movement for democracy, accountability and rule of law, giving it vision and direction (albeit not without major weaknesses), was visibly in retreat during Reza Shah’s reign.

Reza Shah’s reign represents a time in Iran’s recent history when the country’s political entry into modernity, through the Constitutional Revolution, was halted by economic, social and administrative modernization, as if one negates, or is an obstacle to, the other. Except for the period between 1941 and 1953, civil society faced continuous restrictions.

As is well-known, the occupation of Iran by the Allies ironically granted Iranians a remarkable period of flourishing of political freedom. It took the young Mohammad Reza Shah some time to establish efficient relations with the Iranian ruling classes, exercise authority over the Iranian Army, and assert himself in the international scene as the leader of the country. In the period between the fall of Reza Shah in 1941 and the 1953 CIA-engineered coup d’état that toppled the popular, nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iranian civil society gained a unique chance to show its remarkable ability to expand and educate the people.

 

The short-lived national democratic self-assertion movement led by Mosaddeq provided the springboard for the incomplete formation of civil society. This is evidenced not only through the relative freedom of political participation but also participation in free associations such as labour, trade, and student unions. In the period following 1953 though, the Constitution was practically suspended in favour of an autocratic state, and the civil society sustained major setbacks. Once again, as under Reza Shah, it appears that in Iran there has always been a mutual alienation between civil society and the state.

The Shah, after the 1953 coup, relied on increased oil revenue and subsequent investments. As such, a huge rentier state shaped up in Iran – a repressive state with perpetual and lucrative revenue. It did not need the active participation of the private sector in its ambitious developmental projects, as the state could handle all modernization plans by using oil revenue. What especially made the state repressive was that it had monopolized the agency for modernization in the country and as such could not, and did not, allow alternative scenarios of modernity – those of intellectuals, experts, visionaries, political ideologues, or advocacy groups – to be voiced.

In fact, for alternative avenues of modernization to be discussed, the country needed the creation of a public space for public debates around the issue of development – economically, politically, socially, culturally, and in terms of the relations between Iran’s various ethnicities. In this case, the country also needed to take economic actors (investors, planners, and the market) seriously, integrating their views and interests into the overall direction of future developmental plans. These two aspects would have contributed to the expansion of civil society. Instead, ‘repressive development’ – the term I have used to designate this genus of modernization under the state’s uncontestable agency – alienated great sectors of Iranians as it excluded the people from having a role in the future of their country. The state had now become the country. Civil society was cautiously allowed to develop by the 1960s and 1970s but only insofar as it acceded to the state’s grandiose plans.

 

As such, several decades after the Constitutional Revolution, the processes that enabled secular-democratic socialization in Western European civil societies were absent in Iran. An overwhelming state acted as the sole agent of modernization, imposing setbacks, deformities and maldevelopment on the nascent Iranian civil society. During the Pahlavi era the mismatch between the concepts of the nation state and citizenship became more vivid.

The mismatch, of course, goes back to the time of constitutionalism. Instead, as Theda Skocpol observes, ‘The state’s main relationships to Iranian society were mediated through its expenditures – on the military, on development projects, on modern construction, on consumption subsidies, and the like. Suspended above its own people, the Iranian state bought them off, rearranged their lives, and repressed any dissidents among them.’¹⁹ 

As such, Iranians for the most part never felt that they were right-bearing citizens who belonged to a nation of equals before the law, and the state as the sole representative of the nation became ever more frightening in its aloofness. The people’s alienation from their state is a phenomenon that continues to this day.

 

Repressive development increasingly lost its developmental character in post-revolutionary Iran, as a new elite arising from the military-intelligence complex and from the clerical and non-clerical statesmen class, used its political position to tap into the Iranian economy, thereby alienating the Iranian entrepreneurial class. The Islamic Republic was founded, in both theory and practice, upon a strong state, as Vanessa Martin has argued.²⁰

The Islamic strong state, envisaged by Ayatollah Khomeini, bears an unmistakable influence from the time of Reza Shah.²¹ Not only did it inherit the authoritarian character of the state, it amplified it significantly, intruding into the people’s private lives, regulating every aspect of socialization, in sum, robbing Iranians from the few spaces formerly available to the people without state intervention. Under the Islamic Republic, planned, centralized, authoritarian development, characteristic of the Pahlavi era, was suspended due to the diverging economic ambitions of the new economic elite interested above all in quick plunder of the economic resources made available to them due to their political positions.

The reformist President, Mohammad Khatami, during his presidency between 1997 and 2005, launched a campaign of expansion of the ‘Islamic civil society’. It was then that for the first time, civil society in Iran transformed from a concept into a project and the subject of debates in the restricted public sphere of the country. In the face of increased pressure imposed by the hardliner enemies of the reformists, however, the project failed to establish an enduring civil society. But even in its failure, the experience of activity within civil society became a part of Iranians’ collective conscience. Discourses of human and citizen rights, inalienable dignity of the individual, nonviolent social and political change, and the rule of law, have since the 1990s flourished in the country, causing a great legitimacy crisis for the ruling hard-liners of the country.

The chief promoters of the above ideas, however, were secular intellectuals and writers such as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Mohammad Ja’far Puyandeh, Mohammad Mokhtari, as well as numerous women’s movement activists and advocacy lawyers such as Shirin Ebadi and Mehrangiz Kar. The Green Movement that emerged in the aftermath of the disputed presidential elections in June 2009 is in fact an indication that civil society lives on in the hearts and minds of the commons. In the absence of formal venues that embody civil society, social movements and critical journalism have emerged as key indicators of the possible directions of Iran’s future.

 

Footnotes:

1. See John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development. Macmillan Press, London, 1983; C. J. Holt, Colonial England 1066-1215. Hambledon Press, London, 1997.

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract. Penguin Books, London/New York, 2004, p. 126.

3. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, 1992, p. 91.

4. Axel Honneth, ‘Conceptions of "Civil Society",’ Radical Philosophy 64, Summer 1993, p. 19.

5. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Robert. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader. W.W. Norton, New York, 1978, p. 43.

6. Cosroe Chaqueri, The Russo-Caucasian Origins of the Iranian Left: Social Democracy in Modern Iran. Curzon, Richmond, UK, 2001, p. 45. Italics in original.

7. Ibid., p. 37.

8. Homa Katouzian, ‘The Short-Term Society: A Study in the Problems of Long-Term Political and Economic Development in Iran’, Middle Eastern Studies 40(1), January 2004, pp. 1-22.

9. Ibid., p. 10.

10. Ibid., p. 16.

11. Chaqueri, op cit., p. 46. This trend, later on, led to the decline of peasantry in Iran (ibid., 53).

12. See Mashallah Ajudani, Mashruteh- ye Irani (The Iranian Constitutionalism). Nashr-e Akhtaran, Tehran, 2004.

13. It is interesting to observe the comparison between the Constitutional Revolution and the Islamic Revolution that took place seventy years later: ‘There was no single charismatic leader in the Constitutional Revolution… On the whole, the anjomans, collective leadership, and cooperation were the hallmark of this period’ (Chaqueri, The Russo-Caucasian Origins, p. 111).

14. See ibid., pp. 97-113.

15. Ajudani, Iranian Constitutionalism, p. 426. As is known, the Terror Committee (hey’at-e modhesheh) was part of the clandestine group of Social Democrats that carried out several high-profile operations at this time, including the assassination attempt at the life of Mohammad Ali Shah (ibid., p. 427).

16. On the Rise of Reza Shah to power see, Homa Katouzian, State and Society in Iran: The Ellipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis. I.B. Tauris, London, 2000.

17. Matthew Elliot, ‘New Iran and the Dissolution of Party Politics under Reza Shah’, in Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zurcher (eds.), Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization Under Ataturk and Reza Shah. I.B. Tauris, London, 2004, p. 84.

18. See Ali Ansari, Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After. Pearson, London, 2003.

19. Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 244.

20. Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran. I. B. Tauris, London, 2000, p. 10.

21. Ibid., pp. 109, 111.