The Foreign Policy Culture of Iran

We all have an idea about who we are. In turn, our sense of selfhood is heavily influenced by processes of socialisation, our family background, profession, sexuality (e.g. being homo- or transsexual), religion (e.g. being Catholic or a Sufi) or national narratives or a mixture of all of those. A comparable sense of selfhood, heightened and dramatised by a good dose of theatrical performance and fancy modes of symbolisation, is adopted by modern nation-states.Footnote ² Political elites conceive, invent, perform and dramatise the national narrative through anthems, stamps, parades, national holidays, the media and so on.Footnote ³ States are adamant to tell the world and their populace who they are and what they represent, not least in order to legitimate their claim to rule. So when the Supreme Guide of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, speaks of the ‘victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, under the able leadership of Imam Khomeini, a courageous and learned descendant of the prophet’; when he deems the revolution a ‘watershed event in Islamic awakening in the entire world, especially in the countries of our region’;Footnote ⁴ and when he proclaims all this at a major international conference on Palestine, he places Iran at the centre of the international politics of the region, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Muslim world (itself a problematic invention of course).

This centred perception of Iran's role in the world has become a part of the self-understanding of the Islamic Republic, much in the same way as the United States claims to be the leader of the free world and allocates immense material and ideational resources to perform this role. Iran as well has spent billions in order to be considered a regional superpower, the leader of the Islamic world or the pivot of the world-wide revolution of the ‘oppressed’, as Ayatollah Khomeini put it in 1979. To enact this role, the Iranian polity disseminates ideational and material resources throughout the state and its underbelly, in particular powerful foundations such as the Bonyad-e Mostafazan (the foundation of the oppressed), which are tied into a vast institutional network engaged in social and cultural projects throughout the world. After the revolution, and in particular in the last decade, Iran has also built a gigantic, state-sponsored media conglomerate which offers 24-hour news and other programmes in all major languages. Such processes of self-construction of nation-states are at the heart of contemporary politics and no one remains unaffected by them.

When Ayatollah Khamenei states that ‘since the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the colonial powers have been stepping up their attempts at fomenting discord and schism between the Shia and Sunni’ and when he immediately adds in the same paragraph that ‘over the past years, considering that the Islamic Republic of Iran has accomplished a noble objective and conquered a high summit, which is the awakening of the Islamic world, the arrogant powers have now a stronger motive for the creation of discord and division among Muslims’, he is narrating a role of Iran in world politics according to which the foreign policy elites of the country are meant to act.Footnote ⁵ The same political process underlay President Obama's speeches, for instance, when he reproduces the idea of ‘America’ as a beacon of freedom, justice and equality. These are not merely words, free-floating ideas without sturdy hinges. They are institutionalised; they permeate sophisticated ideational regimes of truth with a material base that carries the ideas forward and gives them objective ‘reality’. This is what I meant by the term ‘foreign policy culture’ when I first introduced it in 2005.Footnote ⁶

I have conceptualised foreign policy culture more in-depth in an article for Middle East Critique, a rather post-structural piece that presents methods and theories with reference to Iranian politics. Suffice it to say here, it is analytically important to acknowledge that the idea or a self-perception comes first, that it precedes the implementation of foreign policies and the interpretation of the ‘national interest’. In the Iranian case the idea of being the centre of the Islamic world, or indeed the Third World, was crafted during the revolution. Khomeini repeatedly spoke in momentous terms when he referred to the revolution in Iran and its desired impact beyond the country. Speaking in March 1980, he reiterated in typically cosmic fashion:

In a sophisticated process galvanising the construction of the post-revolutionary Iranian state identity, this self-perception became a salient norm, an institutionalised regime of truth, a discourse termed sudur-e enghelab (export of the revolution) in the first decade of the Islamic Republic, a constitutive part of Iran's foreign policy culture. It is in this way that foreign policy culture refers to the socially constructed perception of elites who are involved in the foreign policy- making process of a particular country. To put it in more formal terms: foreign policy culture refers to an integrated system of symbols (metaphors, analogies, imageries, languages, ideologies, norms, institutions, etc.) which act to define pervasive and embedded grand strategic preferences, based on the processing of indigenous and exogenous socialisation, affecting the mental disposition of agents vis-à-vis their environment and giving content to the interest to be pursued. The concept of foreign policy culture thus appreciates that different countries approach the key issue of war, peace and strategy from deeply embedded perspectives that are intrinsic to the distinct political cultures of the agent(s). And to put it simply: by determining the perception of decision-makers, a particular foreign policy culture shapes the broad contours of a country's foreign policy agenda, defined in terms of grand strategic preferences.Footnote ⁸

But the process of self-designation is not enough. If I would run around the SOAS campus and proclaim that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, I would have a hard time persuading anyone sane. At best, I would be the object of amusement; at worse I would be restrained. Self-designations as the leader of the free world or the pivot of Islam require external recognition in order to function efficiently. As I have argued elsewhere with regard to the international politics of the Persian Gulf, role identities neither are solitary inventions, nor can be enacted in isolation.Footnote ⁹ Any type of identity is dependent on processes of social engineering. In other words, if Iran wants to be acknowledged as the leader of the Islamic world, it has to be recognised as such by powerful elements of international society, which may explain why the Iranian state is spending so much money on public relations with the Muslim world in the first place. Yet as we will see in the next section, neither during the period of the shah, nor after the Islamic revolution of 1979, did Iran receive the external recognition of its self-proclaimed role as a regional/global power. Until today, the grandeur that Iranian leaders have sought (and the psycho-nationalist tropes that they have dedicated to that end) has been repeatedly frustrated.

Blind Spots in the Light of the Aryans

If foreign policy is about aspiring to global grandeur, contemporary Iranian leaders have had a vivid imagination about the place of Iran in the world. Whether before the revolution of 1979 under the regime of the Pahlavi Shahs or under the Islamic Republic, the idea of Iran as a regional, if not global power, has been central to the foreign policy discourse of the political elites in the country. Certainly, Iran carries the burden of history in that regard, an imperial complex informed by the ancient history associated with the territory that is today's Iran. This imperial complex was particularly pronounced in the ideational constructs that were meant to legitimate the policies of shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his father Reza Khan, as indicated in the past chapters. For the Pahlavi monarchs, the meaning of the country was primarily geared to the pre-Islamic Persian empires rather than to Islam, which they deemed alien to the ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ Iranian identity. I have called these forms of ideational manipulation psycho-nationalist because they target the very fabric of a nation's historical consciousness and sense of being. As such, they are weapons of mass deception.Footnote ¹⁰

Exemplifying the psycho-nationalist politics of modern Iran, the first monarch of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Khan, invested immense resources into reconstructing the meaning of Iran along racialised notions of Aryanism. Based on that mythology, the Iranian foreign ministry disseminated a memo in 1934 according to which the name Iran (land of the Aryans) would substitute Persia in all international correspondence. The term ‘Persia’ was deemed an invention of the ancient Greeks who had invaded Iran and raided what they called ‘Persepolis’ or the city of the Persians. Ironically, then, it was the ancient Greeks who were instrumental in the decision of the shah to rename the country Iran. According to the memo, ‘because Iran was the birthplace and origin of Aryans, it is natural that we should want to take advantage of this name, particularly since these days in the great nations of the world noise [sic] has gotten out regarding the Aryan race which indicates the greatness of the race and civilisation of ancient Iran’.Footnote ¹¹

This Aryan-centric discourse yielded and rationalised pro-Nazi policies which would eventually be used as a pretext to the invasion of Iran by allied forces in 1941. In the imagination of many Iranian writers during that period, the country was among the superior nations of the world. Reza Khan himself was presented as a charismatic leader comparable Mussolini and Hitler.Footnote ¹² Journals such as Nameh-ye Iran-e Bastan (The Journal of Ancient Iran) experimented with racist ideas adopted from the cod science of the Nazis. They were rather forthcoming in their infatuation with Hitler whom they deemed ‘a great scholarly man of the Aryan race’.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, the swastika was reinvented as an authentically Iranian symbol. ‘It is truly rejoicing to see’, it is noted in all sincerity, that the ‘symbol of Iran from 2000 years before Christ has today become a symbol of pride for the Germans, who are of one race and ethnicity with us.’Footnote ¹⁴ The myth of racial affinity with the supposedly ‘Aryan Germans’ was fortified by a Nazi decree in 1936 which identified Iranians as ‘pure blooded Aryans’ thus exempting them from the Nuremburg Race Laws. Inspired by phrenological ‘research’ in Europe, the newly created Society for National Heritage even went so far as to dig up bodies in Ferdows, the birthplace of Ferdowsi whose shahnameh has been hailed by Iranian psycho-nationalist as an emblem of the purity of the Iranian language as discussed, in order to measure their skulls which would ‘prove’ their Aryan origin.Footnote ¹⁵ As a part of this psycho-nationalist reconstitution of the meaning of Iran, there emerged a policy of cultural purification which was aimed at eliminating Arabic words, and their ‘Semitic’ origins, from the Persian language. Prominent writers such as Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946) were supportive of such measures, which were filtered through dedicated institutions such as the Farhangistan. In summary then, Reza Shah imagined grandeur exactly in psycho-nationalist terms: Iranian identity was racialised and Iranian superiority was thus inscribed in the syntax of the emerging Pahlavian national narrative which was meant to signify a new meaning of the country.

Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and last monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty, was equally inspired by the discourse of Aryanism and the pre-Islamic Persian empires. He adopted the title ‘light of the Aryans’ (Aryamehr) and in his speeches and writings he repeatedly invoked the symbols and imagery of ancient Persia, the memory of Darius, Cyrus and Xerxes. At the height of his megalomania, exemplified by his Napoleon-esque self-coronation in 1967 and the extravagant festivities at Persepolis in 1971, the shah changed the Islamic solar hegra calendar into an imperial one. At the ancient seat of the Persian monarchs he invoked the spirit of Cyrus and placed his dynasty in line with the Achaemenidian kings of antiquity. In the opening speech of the festivities at Persepolis on 12 October 1971 he declared: ‘O Cyrus, great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself and from my nation. Rest in peace, for we are awake, and we will always stay awake.’ The historical reengineering of the meaning of Iran is evident here. Suddenly, Iran was in the year 2535 based on the presumed date of the foundation of the Achaemenidian dynasty. In lieu with the effort to Iranianise the Persian language, which already had been pursued by his father Reza Khan, the Pahlavi state also sponsored systematic efforts to substitute Arabic terms with Persian ones.

The ideational architecture of ‘Pahlavism’ was crafted around the symbolism of monarchic rule and the metaphysics of modern (psycho)nationalism consisting of romantic myths about the authenticity of the ‘Persian’ language and the unique ‘Iranian civilisation’. Their impact on the making of a modern ‘identity’ of Iran devoid of an intrinsically ‘Islamic’ component comes out in an article which the shah placed in Life magazine in May 1963: ‘Geographically Iran is situated at the crossroads of the East and the West; it is where Asia and Europe meet,’ the shah asserts. ‘On one side thrived the old civilisations of China and India; on the other those of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and, later on, the modern Western World.’ His country was not a part of any civilisation per se, but ‘Iran welded her own civilisation from all those many sources.’ This distinctly Iranian civilisation holds a universal religion and universal art which ‘have left their traces all over the world’. But this universal religion that the shah refers to is not conceptualised as Islamic. Rather, he heralds the pre-Islamic era, ‘the old Iranian religion of Mithra’ and the ‘teachings of the mystic prophet Mani’.Footnote ¹⁶ So an Islam did not have much of a role in the making of an Iran during this period. A systematic discourse of Islam re-enters the re-imagination of what it means to be Iranian in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s and after the Islamicised revolution of 1979.

The subject that emerges out of the shah's psycho-nationalist discourse is the Aryan Persian, Indo-European, heir to a lost civilisation but willing to catch up along an imagined western temporality (or historical spectrum). The shah repeatedly stressed that the culture of Iran was ‘more akin to that of the West’. The country was deemed ‘an early home of the Aryans from whom most Americans and Europeans are descended’. Racially, Iranians were considered to be ‘quite separate from the Semitic stock of the Arabs’. As such, Iran was deemed to be the ‘oldest culture that was racially and linguistically linked to the West’. After all, Persian ‘belongs to the Indo-European family which includes English, German, and other major Western tongues [sic]’.Footnote ¹⁷ Elsewhere the shah stated that Iran was an ‘Asian Aryan power whose mentality and philosophy are close to those of the European states, above all France’.Footnote ¹⁸ Along with that emphasis on Iran's western heritage went an imperial narrative: ‘If you Europeans think yourselves superior, we have no complexes,’ the shah emphasised in an interview with the flamboyant Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci. ‘Don't ever forget that whatever you have, we [pre-Islamic, ‘Aryan’ Iran] taught you three thousand years ago.’Footnote ¹⁹

Signs of God, Islamist Dead Ends

It should by now have become clearer what I mean by psycho-nationalist fabrications. They target identity exactly. Moreover, they have been at the heart of modern politics because contemporary nation-states require some form of ideational content in order to sustain the rule of the sovereign: if Iran was Aryan, then the light of the Aryans is entitled to rule. If the meaning of Iran was encapsulated in the history of pre-Islamic Persia, then the shah-in-shah was the legitimate heir to Persia's ancient monarchies. If Iran had an imperial legacy, then the shah had the prerogative to pursue hegemonic foreign policies. Psycho-nationalism affords any state such causal power.

Before the revolution in 1979, a new discourse precipitated the psycho-nationalist reengineering of the meaning of Iran. In the most influential writings of Iran's prototypical revolutionary intellectuals, such as Jalal al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, Iranian history in particular and Islam in general were rewritten to function as building blocks for a viable revolutionary movement that was quite overtly and explicitly targeting the monarchy of the shah. So for al-e Ahmad, the rather laid back thirteenth century astronomer and philosopher Nasir ad-Din Tusi (1201–4) becomes the prototypical ‘aggressive intellectual’ (rowshanfekr-e mohajem), ‘who made history’ after obliterating the prevalent order seeking to ‘destroy the contemporary governmental institutions in order to erect something better in their place’.Footnote ²⁰ Whereas in Shariati, we find a comparable signification of revolutionary change which is likened to a ‘golden age of justice’, a classless society, social equality and the final victory of the ‘oppressed’ masses against their ‘oppressors’. Influenced by Marxist teleology, Shariati professed that there was no choice towards that end since the victory of the revolution was historically determined. This would make it mandatory for the vanguard to ‘object to the status quo and to negate the ruling systems and values’.Footnote ²¹ With al-e Ahmad and Shariati, an entirely new ontology for Iran is imagined and increasingly enacted.

This newly imagined Iran was not provincial, as some scholars have argued. This revolutionary subject in Iran was not confined to a nativist habitat, even if it indulged in the utopia of ‘authenticity’.Footnote ²² In the writings of intellectuals such as al-e Ahmad and Shariati we hear echoes of – and see direct reference to – Che Guevera, Marx, Sartre, Marcuse, Fanon and others. After all, this radical culture of resistance was also inscribed in the very linguistic infrastructure of Iran's capital Tehran after the revolution where major streets, boulevards and squares were named Bobby Sands, Gandhi, Africa and Palestine.Footnote ²³ Al-e Ahmad and Shariati may have promoted radical politics to battle with the dictatorship of the Shah, but they were not fanatics. Their utopia was based on a rather more inclusive and democratic order in Iran in contrast to the Khomeinists who would perfect psycho-nationalism as a tool to rule the country.

Despite the obvious tilt to Islam as a liberation theology, it is in Shariati especially where east meets west on an immensely innovative critical spectrum, and where the potentialities of a seemingly contradictory ‘Islamo-socialist’ discourse are exploited in order to channel what was considered to be the emancipating message of Islam and socialism to receptive constituencies within Iranian society. This internationalist cross-fertilisation was not limited only to the intellectual/theoretical realm. For instance, the nascent Iranian armed movements of the 1960s drew their inspiration from theories of guerrilla warfare developed in Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Palestine and China.

As indicated, the social engineering of Iran's post-revolutionary identity discourse was precipitated and seriously affected by the writings of activist intellectuals whose ideas were widely disseminated among the anti-shah intelligentsia, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s. Two narratives, gharbzadegi (or westtoxification) and bazgasht be khish (return to the self), were particularly hegemonic. The former was the title of a highly influential book authored by al-e Ahmad. In this book he likens the increasing dependence of Iran on western notions of modernity to a disease he terms gharbzadegi. He picked up the term from Ahmad Fardid, an ardent Heideggerian philosopher who supported the revolution of 1979.Footnote ²⁴ If left untreated gharbzadegi would lead to the demise of Iran's cultural, political and economic independence, because society was made susceptible to penetration by the West. ‘Today’, writes al-Ahmad, ‘the fate of those two old rivals is, as you see, this: one has become a lowly groundskeeper and the other the owner of the ballpark.’Footnote ²⁵ In order to escape this fate, al-e Ahmad argued, Iran had to be turned into the vanguard in the fight of the oppressed ‘east’ against the imperialist ‘west’, if necessary through revolutionary action.

Shariati was equally adamant to challenge the policies of the shah and his real and perceived dependence on the politics of the United States. The narrative of bazgasht be khish picked up al-e Ahmad's theme accentuating cultural authenticity, and the wider anti-colonial struggle at the head of which Iran should position itself, not least in order to find a way back to the country's ‘true’ self which Shariati defined in socialist and Islamic terms. In an intellectual tour de force, Shariati turned Jesus, Abraham, Mohammad and above all Imam Hussein (grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) and his mother Fatimah into revolutionary heroes who were positioned at the helm of a new movement for global justice and equality. In his many speeches and written tracts, Shariati emphasised that Islam in general and Shia Islam, in particular, demands revolting against unjust rulers. At the centre of Shariati's oeuvre we find Imam Hussein who is represented as the ultimate homo Islamicus, a martyr in the cause of justice who fought the ‘tyranny’ of the Ummayad caliph Yazid and who sacrificed his life and that of his family at the Battle of Karbala in 680 ad. ‘Look at Husayn!’ Shariati demands in 1970.

The narratives of gharbzadegi and bazgasht be khish simulate a bifurcated syntactical order: justice ↔ oppressed (mostazafan) ↔ Muslim ↔ Islam ↔ revolution ↔ resistance versus imperialism ↔ oppressors (mostakbaran) ↔ superpowers ↔ the West ↔ the United States. Yet while Shariati and al-e Ahmad introduced, reinforced and gave impetus to the politics of identity and emotions in Iran's contemporary political culture, they were not vicious revolutionaries who were interested in power. If anything they were melancholic armchair thinkers, who wanted revolution for the sake of a rather more democratic and pluralistic political system.

In the writings and speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini, the dichotomies that opened up after the revolution of 1978/79 find their explicit psycho-nationalist articulation because they are infused with the will to power that he expressed from the outset. In his first speech after his return from exile, Khomeini made it clear that he would not compromise with the remnants of the government of the shah who had departed the country:

The psycho-nationalist themes are apparent here: Khomeini puts particular emphasis on justice, national mobilisation against external and internal enemies and the politics of identity in the name of God and power. He is neatly delineating, quite from the outset, self and other, ally and enemy. Gone are the agonistic prescriptions in the name of freedom that were references in the writings and lectures of Shariati and al-e Ahmad who rejected any clerical leadership as reactionary and retroactive. Instead, Khomeini creates a new leviathan, the vali-e faqih, the supreme jurisprudent who would position himself at the helm of a global movement. Hence his emphasis on legitimacy, sovereignty and the will of god. Comparable to the other psycho-nationalist discourses studied in this book, Khomeini was first and foremost interested in fortifying the sovereignty and legitimacy of the (nation)-state which would have the prerogative to be a pan-Islamic example for the Muslim world – Iran came first. This was a truly modernist tactic. So while the shah proclaimed Iran's new civilisation based on the country's pre-Islamic heritage, a different meaning of Iran was being formulated – a discourse that produced another variant of psycho-nationalism in Iran, this time with a theocratic propeller. In this discourse, new ‘others’ emerge, certainly the ‘west’ in terms of the foreign relations of the country and a wide range of internal ‘threats’, for instance, religious and sexual minorities such as Bahais and homosexuals. Even in exile in Najaf, the discourse of Khomeini was infused with this will to power that was so symptomatic of his political tactics.

‘[T]he imperialists and the tyrannical self-seeking rulers have divided the Islamic homeland’, Khomeini lectured in Najaf (Iraq) in 1970.

In this way, psycho-nationalism in Iran was being populated by new symbols and signs. Suddenly, the same people who were represented as heirs to the pre-Islamic Persian empires, as Aryan, Indo-European, even French and largely non-Muslim by the Pahlavis, appeared as primarily Islamic, anti-imperialistic, revolutionary and supportive of the struggles of the ‘third worlds’. The occupation of the US embassy in 1979 was the practical epitome of this discourse. It was not merely planned in response to the admittance of the shah to the United States for medical treatment, which was interpreted as the beginning of yet another plot to reinstate his rule in Iran. The self-proclaimed ‘students following the line of Imam Khomeini’ were driven by ideas, coded by the powerful revolutionary narratives, some of which I have sketched above. As Masoumeh Ebtekar, one of the female students who was involved in the occupation of the US embassy, writes in her account of the events: ‘My sense of women's rights and responsibilities derived much from the Iranian context, from Dr. Shariati's book Fatima is Fatima, in which he describes the Muslim woman and her role in the world of today with a mixture of eloquence and penetrating insight.’Footnote ²⁹ Note that Fatima, conceptualised as the ultimate female vanguard of the new order, reappears here. She travelled from seventh century Arabia to claim a presence in the writings of Shariati (see above) and in the very consciousness of the revolutionaries. More strategically, the students deemed the occupation of the US embassy a necessary step towards achieving Iran's full independence from the international system, even if that meant that Iran would be labelled a pariah or rogue state by its most potent guardians. In other words, the choice to try to detach Iran from that system, which was deemed corrupt and geared towards the imperial interests of the superpowers, was self-consciously made by the more radical forces that gathered around Ayatollah Khomeini. As Ebtekar imagines: ‘the Islamic Revolution in Iran transformed a once devoted ally of the west into a “rogue state” that insisted on taking orders from none other than God’.Footnote ³⁰ The hubristic undertones should be evident here. Psycho-nationalism in Iran came full cycle with the triumph of the Khomeinist factions among the revolutionary forces.

Iranian Power between Hubris and Reality

The claims of political actors and their reception are different matters. Both before and after the revolution, Iran was never really accepted as a regional leader or a nodal point that could safeguard regional security and progress. The Iranian state failed to forge an identity for the state that would have been inclusive enough to appeal to the major stakeholders in the region and beyond. From the perspective of regional leaders, and even the United States, the shah's self-centred ideology was suspect to say the least. As a CIA report, dated May 1972, indicated with increasing worry for the stability of the regime: ‘Power in Iran remains, as it has been, in the hands of a small segment of society who enjoy the available rewards of money, status, and political influence … The shah sees himself in the role of a latter-day Cyrus the Great who will restore to Iran at least a portion of its old glory as a power to be reckoned with … A noncharismatic leader, he has taken on many of the trappings of totalitarianism.’Footnote ³¹

From the perspective of the United States, the shah was a convenient and largely subservient regional ally, but there was no suggestion, implicit or otherwise, that Iran would be accepted as a regional power in its own right. Moreover, translated into the external relations of Pahlavi Iran, the self-identification of the country as an ‘Aryan superpower’ was anathema to an accepted leadership role in the region. In line with the notion of Iranian superiority, there emerged an aggressive military build-up under the patronage of the United States and to a lesser extent Israel, claims to Bahrain that were dropped only after a plebiscite in the small sheikhdom voted against unification with Iran, the seizure of half of the Abu Musa island from Sharjah, the Greater and Lesser Tunbs from Ras al-Khaimah in 1971, the decisive involvement of the shah's imperial army in the suppression of the Dhofar Marxist rebellion in Oman between 1973 and 4 and the sponsorship of Kurdish separatist forces in Northern Iraq in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in collusion with Israel and the United States. This brand of psycho-nationalism espoused by the shah and the foreign policy narratives and actions that it informed were so Irano-specific that they could never have acted as ideational devices to legitimate the country's claim to regional leadership and global grandeur.

The identity politics of the Islamic Republic after the revolution of 1979 were comparably exclusionary and ambitious, exclaiming as they continue to do, a regional, if not global leadership role. If Iran was the pivot of revolutionary Islam, the logic goes, then the sign of god (Ayatollah) was obliged to lead the nation. If the country re-enacts the original glory of the ummah, then following the Imam was a duty for all Muslims. Psycho-nationalism in the Islamic Republic attempts to invent the country as the vanguard of Islam and the legitimate leader of the ‘Muslim nation’. As part of that effort and in order to avoid isolation of the revolution as a primarily Iranian event, the Islamic Republic has tried, largely unsuccessfully so far, to narrow the gap between the two areas of potential ideational contention, namely the Iranian-Arab and Sunni-Shia schisms. Such a decisive ‘ecumenical’ effort could not be implemented so far because psycho-nationalist tropes after the revolution in a Shia-Islamic garb continue to be promoted. There continues to be a feeling in Iran that the country is somehow entitled to grandeur. In short, Iran continues to suffer from psycho-nationalist narcissism.

Yet neither the aggressive realpolitik of the shah, nor the utopian, ideologised foreign policy of the Islamic Republic achieved the aim of global recognition. Neither state managed to systematically construct a politics of identity that would be more subtle and more universal/internationalist than the psycho-nationalism of the political elites at the heart of power allowed for. The meaning of Iran has to be imagined and enacted away from exclusively Persian- or (Shia) Islamo-centric notions, not least because the country's history is heavily laden with global narratives and permeated by world culture, which sit uneasily with hysterical calls for nativist ‘authenticity’.Footnote ³² Even three decades after the revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic has not been in the position to implement such an effort, because the indigenous salience of the country's invented Iranian and Shia ‘identity’ could not be escaped decisively. Both have been intrinsic to the idea of the Islamic Republic and were institutionalised accordingly, beginning with Khomeini's theory of the velayat-e faqih which was deeply rooted in Shia political thought, to the decision to retain Twelver Shi'ism (Ja'fari school) as Iran's official state religion and the requirement of Iranian origin to qualify for the office of Presidency.Footnote ³³ The new set of norms projected by the Islamic Republic was hence weaker than pre-existing shared knowledge, inhibiting both the domestic Iranian political culture itself and the regional system – both reproduced and represented the country first and foremost as an Iranian/Shia entity. Hojatoleslam Hassan Yusef Eshkevari, a theorist and proponent of ‘Islamic Democracy’ in Iran, describes the dilemma in following terms:

The discrepancy between self-perception as a representative pan-Islamic actor and the inherent Iranian/Shia identity of the movement has denied the Islamic Republic the sought after role as the avant-garde of an Islamic movement. Employing theoretical terminology we may observe that the Iranian role remained a subjective self-understanding of the revolutionary state and did not turn into an objective, collectively constituted position or an accepted role identity of international structure.Footnote ³⁵ The inhibiting norms and institutions of the international system have neither accommodated the idea of a transnational Islamic Republic nor identified Iran as the vanguard of Islamic revivalism. The orbit of Iranian activity abroad has remained confined to primarily Shia circles with established links to the clerical elite in Iran. It is in this way that until today, Iran's imagination of global grandeur has superseded the reality of the country's international power and influence.