The nation is a love story. At least this is how governments would like to have it because love for the nation is necessary to rule. To that end, governments have several ‘romantic’ devices to persuade. All governments use a range of national narratives imbued with emotional vigour and tantalising myths. At the time of writing, right-wing politicians are winning elections with the help of highly populist, almost hysterical themes such as ‘making America great again’, the winning campaign slogan of Donald Trump in the United States. These are the siren songs of (psycho-)nationalism. They are engineered to be persuasive enough to assail and conquer the cognition of the populace. Whether in Asia, Africa, America or Europe, one is continuously enticed to believe in the beauty of the nation. For example, in Britain the word ‘Britannia’ started as the Roman designation of the British Isles before it metamorphosed into a heroine of the seas in Elizabethan England and the emblem of the naval prowess of the British Empire two centuries later. Today, the idea and symbolism of Britannia has lost some of its meaning. Embattled as a national icon, much in the same way as the idea of Britain itself, the ideational stamina of Britannia has been affected by the historic vote to exit the European Union in June 2016 in the name of national sovereignty, which has led Welsh and Scottish nationalists to question the idea of the United Kingdom once again because they adhere to their own romanticised national myths. The point is that in the familial language of (psycho-)nationalism, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, the nation is routinely represented almost like an irresistible muse, a siren song with distinctly emotional undertones. ‘God bless America’ – the target of such phrases is our state of mind and emotional habitat. My term ‘psycho-nationalism’ derives from such psychological dynamics. Government, the media, social networking sites, even popular culture in the form of soap operas and music have emerged as the primary carriers of the symbols of this emotive discourse. The target of these subtle forms of political manipulation is our mind and our emotions.
At the same time, the state hovers over a complex system in which psycho-nationalist narratives are moulded and implemented. Hence it claims the Gewaltmonopol, defined by German sociologist Max Weber as the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. So if ‘romantic’ persuasion is not enough, if the siren song of the nation fails to entice, the nation-state can be enforced through violence, brute if necessary. You can be ‘beaten’ into submission. There are important differences in the ways in which state violence is implemented against assertive dissenters, but governments routinely crush opposition in the name of the nation. This systematic power is exercised through the machinery of laws, norms and regulations. If these strategies are not enough to deter a revolt, the state uses violence through its security forces, police, the military, etc. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben remains firmly within the Eurocentric universe, but his focus on the ‘state of exception’ is a good conceptual tool for understanding this violence of state sovereignty.Footnote 1 The state allows itself to suppress. Thus, our lives are determined by this nation-state, whether we like it or not. From provisions for housing, university fees and food to war and peace, the nation-state continues to be a major factor in the lives of its citizens all over the world. In many ways the nation-state is more consequential in our lives than our parents. It ‘stalks’ us all the way to our living rooms, regulating everything from TV programmes to schooling issues. If this regulatory power, which always also includes surveillance, is not checked properly by civil society it threatens to turn into a form of arbitrary tyranny.
Therefore, this book takes seriously the power of the nation-state and modes of resistance to it. I will attempt to dislocate some of the debates on nationalism by investigating several ‘sites’ where ‘psycho-nationalist’ dynamics appear. I will keep a close eye on ‘new’, avant-garde disciplines such as global thought, global history and comparative philosophies, and my evidence is primarily discussed with reference to Iran. Admittedly, Iran is a convenient case study. In his influential book about nationalism, the late Eric Hobsbawm, Professor at Birkbeck and long-standing member of the British communist party, identified Iran as a ‘relatively permanent political’ unit alongside China, Korea, Vietnam and Egypt.Footnote 2 According to him, these countries ‘had they been in Europe, would have been recognized as “historic nations”’. Hobsbawm mentioned Iran within the context of European imperialisms and movements that espoused nationalism as an anti-colonial strategy. According to him, the Iranian nation-state, as opposed to other ‘entities’ in the region that were a direct product of the Sykes-Pikot agreement, did not emerge out of imperial conquest. Rather, the idea of Iran pre-existed the short colonial interlude that created much of the so-called ‘Middle East’.Footnote 3
Certainly, Iran serves as a good example for the way the idea of a nation-state is created and sustained. But Hobsbawm and other European scholars of nationalism refer to the country only in passing, without much emphasis on the way Iran has been thought of and manufactured as a nation-state. In the absence of a critical review of the way Iran has been imagined, the country is wrongly assumed to be quintessentially Islamic, Shia, Persian or other. Therefore, what is needed, is an appreciation of the country that escapes the platitudes of ‘identity’. If Iran has been invented as a ‘historic nation’ as Hobsbawm argues, then this history speaks to nationalism studies throughout the world. Yet the lack of emphasis on the country is also apparent in Hobsbawm's second pre-eminent publication in the field, The Invention of Tradition, which he edited with Terence Ranger, a passionate anti-colonial activist and Afrikanist who was deported from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) by the white-minority government in 1963 because of his support of the African nationalist movement. Their study, with its emphasis on the role of the ‘formalisation’ and ‘ritualisation’ of traditions in the making of national myths, is required reading in most courses covering nationalisms today.Footnote 4 So if Iran is a relatively permanent political entity as Hobsbawm suggests, studying the traditions, norms and institutions of the country is a ‘hard case’ with which to gauge some of the mechanisms at work in the making of contemporary nation-states, even as they emerged in Europe and North America. In turn, this is important to assess how states control and manipulate their citizens. Hence, to understand psycho-nationalism, is to understand our daily lives and how the state impinges on everything that we do.
While I am certainly not claiming to present a comprehensive historical analysis (which has been provided by others), it is the task of this book to understand conceptually how the idea of Iran is created, in order to understand the mechanisms and effects of psycho-nationalist discourse.Footnote 5 At the same time, I am also paying attention to forms of resistance to those inventions which are engineered primarily by the state and its underbelly. The locus of psycho-nationalism, I claim, is the state; the language of resistance to it is spoken by actors within society. In this way, for instance, I discuss Ayatollah Khomeini, the late leader of the Iranian revolution, alongside Dariush Eghbali, the iconic Iranian pop singer who resides in exile in Los Angeles.
A second, rather more recent impetus for the idea that nations are invented came from Benedict Anderson. Comparable to Hobsbawm, Anderson only mentions Iran in passing when he discusses the impact of print-capitalism on the making of ‘national’ languages. He mentions how ‘conscious’ manipulations by the nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century disturbed the relative unity of the ‘Turkic speaking peoples’ in Iran (Turkey, Iraq and the USSR). Turkish was appropriated as a European language through compulsory romanisation by Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) in order to signify a ‘Turkish’ national consciousness ‘at the expense of any wider Islamic identification’.Footnote 6 Language as a marker of a cloistered identity functioned in the same way in the USSR. The Russian communists first enforced ‘an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory Romanisation’ which was followed under Stalin in the 1930s by a ‘Russifying compulsory Cyrillisation’.Footnote 7 Indeed, Russia looms large in the imagination of Iranian nationalists because of the treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmenchai (1828), according to which Iran lost all of its Caucasian territories, including contemporary Dagestan, eastern Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, to the Russian empire. As one prominent professor at the University of Tehran put it: ‘These humiliating events deeply shocked Iranian society and its political elite’.Footnote 8 Moreover, the Soviet Union plotted the occupation of northern Iran in 1946, one of the first crises diffused by the United Nation Security Council. Ultimately, Russian, British and US imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth century facilitated the articulation of a ‘postcolonial nationalism’ in Iranian society that was opposed to foreign domination of the country. As we will see, after the revolution of 1979, the Iranian state readily stoked up and played to such sentiments.
I have started with Hobsbawm and Anderson in order to ease the reader into the topic. There are at least four themes in the available literature on nationalism which their work touches upon, including studies about Iran. First, nationalism is largely treated as an elite project driven by the state and its underbelly. This emphasis on ‘nationalism from above’ is apparent in recent research by historians of contemporary Iran, whose contribution to the field traces ideational and institutional conceptions of the country.Footnote 9 Others have given particular attention to the blind spots of Iran's contemporary nationalist projects.Footnote 10 This scholarship covers a lot of ground in terms of both the role of the state in nationalist discourse and the impact of western modernity on the state-building process in Iran. And yet, the battlefield of nationalism is by far wider. Horizontally, the idea of Iran is a global phenomenon and has to be engaged with as such. Vertically, the idea of Iran has been inscribed into the very consciousness and body of Iranians. The psycho-nationalism of successive states ruling the Iranian terrain is cognitively intrusive and physically demanding. There is a physiognomy of Iran that has taken its psychosomatic toll on the way Iran is imagined both within the country and elsewhere. As an invented mental space, psycho-nationalism in Iran represents a locus for identity, which is not merely cultural, civilisational or national. It is exactly personal because the ‘modern’ Iranian state has assaulted the cognition of its people on a deep psychological level. ‘Cultural schizophrenia’, in the words of the contemporary Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan, is a symptom of centuries-old psycho-nationalist dynamics which have affected the way Iranians perceive themselves and others.Footnote 11
These coercive psycho-nationalist strategies by the state have been resisted in Iranian poetry, philosophy and popular culture. When the world-renowned diva of Iranian popular music Googoosh, who left Iran in 2000 after 20 years of artistic silence, called her comeback album ‘Zoroaster’, she was appropriating this ancient Iranian religion in protest against the Islamicised national narrative of the Islamic Republic. At least for Googoosh, the imagery of Zoroastrianism became a vehicle of protest much in the same way political interpretations of Islam became a carrier of resistance to the dictatorship of the Shah in the 1970s. This is not because she is a Zoroastrian ‘fundamentalist’. Neither were the revolutionaries in 1979 particularly and coherently ‘Islamic’. Such imageries and symbols of the past are used to call for an idea of Iran that safeguards diversity and multiculturalism. Before the revolution and after, there have been several revolts in the name of an inclusive and culturally tolerant idea of Iran and this power-resistance dialectic between the state and society has left an indelible imprint on the way Iran is perceived. In this way, Iran has become one of the most contested topics of contemporary global history. This is one of the reasons why Iranians that I have interviewed for this study – even second and third generation citizens in Europe and North America – find the country ‘inescapable’, ‘mesmerising’ and central to their personal identity.Footnote 12
The primary material that I have gathered for this book through years of fieldwork in Iran and outside of the country shows the inherently global imagination that many Iranians hold. Many Iranians imagine the country in cosmopolitan and multicultural terms: Iran as the quintessential melting pot of world history, if you like.Footnote 13 Many others think the country as monolithic, either primarily ‘Persian’, ‘Islamic’ or ‘Shia’, or even French as the Shah once wrote in Life Magazine.Footnote 14 This is why I approach the topic as an exercise in global thought and comparative philosophies. Iran as a subject matter stands at the crossroads of disciplines and theories. A pluralistic approach to the country ensures a pluralistic appreciation of its meanings. I have invented the ‘fields of study’ of ‘Global Thought’ and ‘Comparative Philosophies’ as a part of my academic title at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Much like an engineer of a mini state with one inhabitant (myself), I am now giving meaning to an invented outfit. Titles and corresponding ‘identities’ start with imagined ideas, even if they are entirely new as is my title. Nation-states follow a similar pattern. They are imagined and continuously filled with meaning. Therefore, I am presenting this study as a ‘psycho-ethnography’ of the way nation-states are imagined. Hence, this is not a project limited to Iran. It is research that contributes to a global understanding of nation-states and the psycho-nationalist politics that they pursue.
Psycho-nationalism Explained
Even the most ardent ‘globalist’ who believes in the de-territorialisation of space, must be surprised that the nation continues to be presented, partially successfully, as a source of identity. When I was a student at the universities of Hamburg, America (Washington, DC) and Cambridge everyone spoke of the ‘global village’. Conversely, studies into nationalism were outdated and largely confined to the postcolonial ‘Third World’. There are nuances of course: national sentiments in North Korea are very different from those in Germany. The Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un propagates an aggressive nationalism. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel refrains from speaking about a ‘German nation’. But it is rather surprising that even very intelligent people continue to defend national pride beyond innocent expressions of national affinity. This is largely because until very recently, nations were thought to be primordial and self-evident. In Europe and elsewhere, the nation was produced as a people with a common ‘race’, history, culture, set of habits and in particular with a shared language. In the course of the last four centuries, and in Europe certainly since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the allegiance that used to tie communities to smaller polities such as city-states even within larger imperial entities, gradually came to be integrated into a tightly defined and formally delineated territory. In Iran this process was equally complicated. The position of the country at the crossroads of ancient human history forced successive leaders of the Iranian terrain to integrate and centralise a notion of Iran that would legitimise the ruler – a rather arduous task trying to unify the satraps and ostans that were ruled by the Cyruses, Xerxes, Dariuses, Alexanders and Gengis Khans of this world. And what to do with the loose ethno-geography of a place like that? The problem is exactly that the idea of Iran and its political management has an ancient genealogy. The point that I am making is that high politics in the region, including the politics of the nation, precede European modernity. It is just that the western archives haven't adequately captured this Iranian presence in global history.Footnote 15
It is not then that the nation-state that came into existence through this process is a distinctly ‘modern’ phenomenon as Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Kedourie famously argue.Footnote 16 There were ‘nationalised’ entities in antiquity. Certainly, Sassanid Iran (224–651) had its own sense of the nation, with its own religious narrative (Zoroastrianism), symbolic capitol (Ctesiphon), official language (middle Persian) and Persian-centric ethno-ideology. But the absence of modern forms of communication such as the printing press, as Anderson argues, the ‘techno-politics’ of mass communication today and in particular recourse to ideological systems of psycho-controlling and monopolising the national narrative for the state made it that much more difficult to keep the nation together without the exercise of brute force and military dominance. In other words: modernity equipped the state with rather more sophisticated psycho-nationalist devices. In terms of dissemination and impact, mass producing pamphlets about the ‘divine’ rulership of the current Iranian leader Ali Khamenei in the seminaries of Qom, as well as his Twitter account with over 235,000 followers, is very different to propagating a divinely ordained universal order dominated by the king of kings, as Cyrus II proclaimed in the so-called ‘Cyrus cylinder’ in the sixth century bc. The psycho-nationalist intention is comparable, both strategies are meant to solicit submission to the ruler, but the ability of the ruling elites to get their message across is, of course, fundamentally different:Footnote 17 the Cyrus cylinder has been parked in the British Museum across from my office at SOAS on Russell Square, the Twitter account of Khamenei transcends spatial restriction.
We can agree that contemporary psycho-nationalism is distinctly invasive. Michel Foucault has termed such mature forms of political mind control ‘bio-political’.Footnote 18 According to Foucault, bio-power is intimate; it targets our bodies. Despite his fascination for Iran during the revolutionary years of 1978–9, Foucault's empirical material remained Eurocentric. If he had studied the Iranian case beyond his journalistic articles for Corriere della Serra in Italy, Foucault would have discovered how state power in Iran failed to ‘discipline’ and subdue resistance.Footnote 19 Bio-power in Iran, which has been implemented through ideological education and measures to optimise the penetrability of the population through psychological control, has not brought about political uniformity and subjectification. The emphasis of Foucault on Europe brought with it overindulgence in the power of capitalism and its disciplinary effects on the individual. According to Foucault, modern forms of (neo)liberal capitalism determine us all the way down to our bodies, even our sexual preferences. In countries such as Iran, however, (neo)liberal capitalism has never really determined subjectivity. Even the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies in the 1990s and the shift away from a Islamo-socialist, state-centred economy to an increasingly capitalist system has not ‘normalised’ state–society relations. So where there is bio-power, there is also resistance, and where there is psycho-nationalism, there is opposition.Footnote 20
In Iran, psycho-nationalism has been pursued not only as a very sophisticated strategy of control over bodies and individual conduct. Psycho-nationalism is a cognitive strategy. From the Achaemenidian idea of metaphysical kingship which was plagiarised in the twentieth century by the Pahlavi dynasty to the Islamicised, Platonic philosopher-king which entered the doctrine of Ayatollah Khomeini in the form of the rule of the ‘Supreme Leader’ underpinning the constitution of the Islamic Republic today, the efforts to discipline the people living under the jurisdiction of successive Iranian states have been intrusive. In this process, cognition is targeted; it is given a hegemonic role. Psycho-nationalism attempts to rule over the meaning of the national narrative and it is within this dense psychological space that the strategic surveillance as well as the counter-tactics of resistance reveal themselves. Today, psycho-nationalism attempts to extend the sovereignty of the state and turns citizens into objects of power. Ideally, psycho-nationalism surrenders citizens out of free will. Once we are psychologically coded, we lay down our arms voluntarily. But this effort to turn us into compliant subjects is routinely resisted by those pockets of society that try to escape such psycho-nationalist dynamics. Once this dialectic is understood, it becomes clearer why recent resistance to the state in Britain emerged from the ghettoised youth in North London on the one side, and university students on the other. Both ‘spaces’ of society are relatively unfazed about the machinations of state power. The former because the state and its police force are deemed discriminatory and racist, the latter because of similar reasons and a quasi-liberal sense of entitlement. In Iran in 1979, the revolution was driven by similar strata of society. It was primarily the university students and the workers who created the largest demonstrations in human history. Given that their movement was transversal, that is, it cut through all layers of Iranian society, the revolution gained momentum. This is one of the major differences between a local riot and a transnational revolution.Footnote 21
In its very essence the nation is an empty space and there has been continuous resistance to state-engineered (psycho)nationalisms from ‘below’. There is no reality to any nation beyond inventions of the human mind. In essence, the nation-state is like my academic title. It was created at some stage and then it developed a life of its own. This understanding of nations as imaginary constructs developed more forcefully towards the end of the twentieth century. Several western scholars (e.g. Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm) supported the notion that nations are concocted, either through textual representations, inventions of identity or more generally through culture. In Europe, before this hiatus, nations were taken as a given. They were assumed to be primordial; a fact of human existence that was necessary. Even though it has become a cliché, John Lennon was correct to assume that imagining and then living a borderless life would minimise the power of the state. Without strong sentiments towards the nation, the sovereignty of states loosens. Where there is a nation, there must be a state. Where there is a state, there must be a nation to be ruled. Understanding this dialectic contributes to understanding one of the main factors of human existence today.
Drawing from the Iranian experience, this book dissects some of the sites where this ‘nation-state’ is produced. On a more general, conceptual level, it identifies what I call psycho-nationalist dynamics in the production of nation-states. By psycho-nationalism, I am not referring to an innocent sense of belonging, the affinity with national folklore, or the nation as an administrative and institutional point of reference. You are not a psycho-nationalist if you are Iranian and love the poetry of Hafiz, the aesthetics of Isfahan, the popular songs of the LA-based singer Dariush or the architectural splendour of Persepolis. However, the borderlines between ‘national pride’ and what I call psycho-nationalism are thin. States routinely and readily exploit the grey zone that opens up between innocent sentiments of national affinity and hegemonic emotions geared to nationalist aggression. Love for the nation, after all, almost always ends tragically; the kind of psycho-nationalism that I am talking about in this book is a destructive sentiment.
Yet, psycho-nationalism remains one of the most potent forces in human history, certainly in the modern period and in our current seemingly ‘post-modern’ condition. At the time of writing, right-wing politicians in Europe and the United States are stoking up fears and xenophobia as a winning formula at the ballot box. US President Donald Trump, for instance, has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and a wall to keep Mexican immigrants out of the country. His campaign slogan, ‘making America great again’, is a typical connection between the nation and sentiments expressing superiority to other peoples. In Europe, right-wing leaders such as Marine Le Pen in France are winning elections on the back of anti-immigrant and distinctly psycho-nationalistic slogans and imagery. The flag and the hymn, it seems, are celebrating a surprising comeback. Of course, if you love Paris as the quintessential manifestation of French savoir vivre you are not a psycho-nationalist. But if this sentiment turns into rejection of those who you do not consider to be French, then you are cultivating a destructive attitude. Psycho-nationalism does to thinking what orthodox historians and philosophers do to the history of other peoples: it keeps them out.
Psycho-nationalism is a source of identity for all of those who are considered a part of the in-group or ‘imagined community’, while it fosters intolerance and hate towards those who do not belong to it. People who think beyond identities and strict group affiliations are psychologically relieved of such destructive feelings, which the founder of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) would have called ‘libidinous’ in Vienna back in the early twentieth century. Throughout this book, I will equip myself with poetry, selected philosophical traditions and other forms of life-affirming thoughts and practice to dismiss the notion that we have to feel the nation, and that we have to love it beyond our own lives and existence.
Psycho-nationalism is about ‘othering’. It is about delineating the community (or in-group) from the ones who are not thought to be part of it due to racial, linguistic, ethnic or other reasons. Freud explains hostility against people of other races, religion and nations in terms of narcissism: ‘In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do, we may recognize the expression of self-love – of narcissism’.Footnote 22 Psycho-nationalism has certainly a lot to do with an irrational love for the nation, which implies love for the ‘self’. The narcissistic gain catered for by psycho-nationalist propaganda is clear. It suggests that you are better. The followers of the community (or in-group), simply by belonging to it, are thought to be purer, greater and superior to those who are outside of the group who become the objects of psycho-nationalist mind control. This is called ‘positive distinction’ in social psychology. Indeed, neuro-physiological research claims a strong connection between the brain and this urge to make ourselves feel better in comparison to others. So if you think yourself superior to other people in West Asia and North Africa simply because you think you are ‘purely Iranian’, then you are trying to elevate yourself to a higher status; you are distinguishing your ‘self’ in opposition to the ‘inferior’ other. This could also be caused by self-hate and not narcissism as Freud assumes. For if you are comfortable with your identity, why would you want to proclaim your superiority in the first place?
One of the central arguments that I intend to pursue in this book is immediately related to what I have just extracted with reference to my understanding of psycho-nationalism. The Iranian case shows in a very illuminating way how states pursue the politics of identity in order to sustain their legitimacy to rule. In that regard, Iran is a typical nation-state and Eric Hobsbawm is probably right to identify the country as a ‘relatively permanent’ historic nation, as indicated.Footnote 23 Certainly, the Iranian national narrative has been evident since antiquity. Iran has been imagined almost throughout global history. With this historical legacy (some would call it a burden) comes an intense focus on what it means to be Iranian. The lines of division between those who claim to speak for Iran and those who live in Iran as citizens on a daily basis have been strictly drawn by successive states ruling the country. Self and other are not distinguished merely in terms of Iran and the rest of the world. The main problem in contemporary Iranian history is the political divisions that hegemonic, state-centred national narratives created within the country. Today, the elites governing the Islamic Republic differentiate between khodi (those who belong to the revolutionary core) and the gheire khodi, essentially the rest of humanity including Iranian reformists, the ‘west’, etc., who become the targets of propaganda and ideological manipulation. Psycho-nationalist methods and procedures are at the heart of keeping this distinction functional for the state. This book is about revealing some of them.
Psycho-nationalism is a division-creating device. The Islamic revolution of 1979, like any other massive upheaval in global history, was all about creating ideational difference. The narcissistic gain suggested by the revolutionary leaders, that Iran is the vanguard of a global revolution of the oppressed, was meant to suggest to their followers that simply by belonging to the revolution they would be more pious, purer and morally superior to the rest of the world who were by definition excluded from this process of self-fulfilment. This is why for the deep state in Iran, certainly for the core of the Revolutionary Guards and the Baseej who support the theocratic establishment led by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticism of the state is synonymous with betrayal of the nation. Research into totalitarianism in Germany offers some clues as to why there is such rage against people with a different view and lifestyle. In the words of Theodor Adorno, one of the chief critical theorists of the Frankfurt School: criticising the ‘in-group’ ‘is resented as a narcissistic loss and elicits rage’.Footnote 24 A totalitarian structure based on supreme truths cannot afford ‘what they deem zersetzend, that which debunks their own stubbornly maintained values and it also explains the hostility of prejudiced persons against any kind of introspection’.Footnote 25 The Persian word for zersetzend is fetnehgar or seditionists, which is the exact reference given to the leaders of the so-called Green Movement and others who were a part of the massive demonstrations against the government of the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. As Ahmadinejad pronounced at the time: ‘The nation's huge river would not leave any room for the expression of dirt and dust’ accusing his opponents of ‘officially recognising thieves, homosexuals and scumbags’.Footnote 26 Psycho-nationalists are averse to complexity, dissent, diversification and a multicultural, multi-sexual composition of society. Ultimately, they adhere to a rather patronising notion of politics that is based on sophisticated forms of divide and rule tactics.
I began this book with a short sketch of global flashpoints of psycho-nationalism and brought the discussion closer to the Iranian case. In the midst of the current cultural reconfigurations, partially provoked by immigration patterns that defy borders, notions of nationhood – including as we have seen psycho-nationalist ones proclaimed by the right-wing – are celebrating a comeback. In largely secular societies in Europe and North America, psycho-nationalism continues to fill the void left behind by other forms of identification, including organised religion. In most societies with an instilled sense of nationhood, including in seemingly religious ones such as Iran, the idea of a national community addresses the need to belong and turns such sentiments into powerful drivers of ‘national and personal identity’. This powerful re-emergence of the idea of the nation in response to processes of de-territorialisation and transnational dynamics has been compared to the period of the emergence of the contemporary nation-state from the mid-nineteenth century that I explored above. Then and now, psycho-nationalism fulfils a sense-giving mission. Homi Bhaba correctly observes in this regard that in situations like this, the ‘nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor’.Footnote 27
Yet, perhaps this discourse is not so much metaphorical but psychological. Metaphors certainly propel the nation along a wide space, along ‘distances and cultural differences that span the imagined community of the nation-people’.Footnote 28 But in order to function adequately, the idea of the nation needs a powerful cognitive momentum, a ‘psycho-discourse’ penetrative enough to assault the senses of its citizens. Psycho-nationalism, indeed, is about life and death. Soldiers die for the ‘motherland’. The main ministries and government institutions all over the world tend to be surrounded by statues and monuments commemorating ‘the fallen’, certainly at Whitehall in London, in Washington DC, Moscow and Tehran. Accordingly, national sentiments, itself a term that alludes to psychological dynamics, have to be coded in order to accept this sacrifice. This dynamic may have been perfected very recently in human history, but the idea that it came about merely in the wake of European ‘modernity’ in the nineteenth century is false and an unfortunate residue of Eurocentric scholarship.
Which parameters qualify my term psycho-nationalism further? I am certainly not implying that Iran or any other country is ‘abnormal’. Psycho-nationalism refers to a discourse and truth regime driven by powerful actors, in particular the state and its underbelly which is aimed at affecting and codifying the cognition of receptive objects within the nation and other potential targets beyond. I will unravel and explain the intricacies of this conceptualisation along empirical examples throughout this book. Suffice to add at this stage, that several studies about Iran have established that idioms and norms such as blood, martyrdom (the so-called Kerbala paradigm), sacrifice, God or religion more generally have been employed by the Islamic Republic to simulate the idea of a national community with transnational appeal.Footnote 29 In this usage of grand concepts, some with a clear imperial ambition as I will argue in Chapter 2, the post-revolutionary Iranian state does not differ fundamentally from the ancien régime of the Shah. Both the monarchic sovereignty principle in Iranian history and the theocratic one claim a distinctly imperial and hegemonic prerogative to rule. In this way Iran's psycho-nationalism is steeped in a sense of imperial grandeur that makes this case comparable to other revolutionary countries of modernity, certainly Russia and China.Footnote 30
And yet at the same time, an analysis of psycho-nationalism driven by the state and its shadows within society has to include the element of resistance. In many ways psycho-nationalism in Iran has merely created what may be called a ‘quasi nation’. In this sense, psycho-nationalism can be singled out for what it does not do: integrate, ameliorate, harmonise, assimilate. The language of psycho-nationalism, we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, is littered with blind spots and marginalisations despite its overarching effort to discipline society and to create a functioning and ideal homo Islamicus. I will show in Chapter 5 how Iranian intellectuals and civil society activists questioned the tenets of that official discourse from the outset of the revolution. At the heart of the dialectics between state and society, it is argued in this chapter, lies the struggle for freedom in Iran, which is codified in a rather more cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal, secular and inclusive national narrative. Therefore, we are dealing with very sophisticated inventions that are meant to create the mirage of nationhood. Primarily, this book is about unravelling some of them in the Iranian context. I intend to show how this nation has been enacted cognitively, to discover some under-researched sites and sounds that make the Iranian narrative rhyme. Stripped off its layers of constructed meanings, Iran is as soulless, deserted and vacant a space as any other nation. The real meaning of the country cannot be found in discourse, institutions or national anthems. It is the everyday life of Iranians that is real; it is the trials and tribulations of our daily affairs that give any nation its real meaning and purpose. Everything else is concocted for the nefarious purpose of political power.
