Following the June 2009 elections, protesters march in central Tehran, Iran. Abedin Taherkenareh/epa/Corbis
June 28, 2015
Most of
the debate in the West on the Iran nuclear deal has focused on questions
related to Western security interests in the Middle East. Will a deal
ultimately prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon? Will it significantly
inhibit a nuclear arms race in the region? How will Israel and the Gulf
Cooperation Countries be affected, and to what extent will Iran be able to
expand its regional influence after the lifting of sanctions? Almost ignored in
this discussion, however, are the effects that a nuclear accord might have on
internal Iranian politics and society. Specifically, how might a final nuclear
agreement between Iran and the West influence the prospects for democracy and
democratization within the Islamic Republic?
June 2009
is a key reference point in the struggle for democracy within Iran. Fearing a
return of the reformists to power, the Iranian regime falsified the
presidential election results that would have removed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from
the presidency. As a result, a nonviolent mini-revolt known as the Green
Movement demanded a vote recount, greater political transparency, and more
broadly the democratization of Iran. Protests rocked the country for six months
before they were violently suppressed. According the Commander of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Green Movement posed a greater threat to the
internal stability of the Islamic Republic than the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
As a
result of this event, Iran’s post-revolutionary social contract lay in tatters.
Until this point, Iran’s clerical leaders were able to carefully manage public
demands for political change and factional rivalry via an electoral process
that though never “free” was perceived to be “fair,” in the sense that the
integrity of the ballot box was guaranteed. After the stolen election of 2009
and the ensuing crackdown, this consensus no longer existed. The base of
support of the Islamic Republic narrowed considerably as a deep crisis of
political legitimacy set in.
Six years
have passed, however, since this critical moment in Iran’s post-revolutionary
history. While the legacy of the Green Movement continues to haunt the Islamic
Republic, in recent years a set of political developments, at the
international, regional, and domestic levels, have coalesced to limit the
prospects for political change and to bolster authoritarianism in Iran.
Collectively, these developments have closed the door for democratization in
the short term. If the social and political conditions that produced them were
to change, however, these doors to democratization could be reopened.
At the
international level, Iran’s dispute with the Permanent Member of the United
Nations Security Council and Germany (P5+1) has negatively affected the
prospects for democracy in several ways. The broad sanctions placed on Iran
have had a greater impact on ordinary Iranians than they have had on the
regime. In particular, civil society and the middle class, which forms the core
support base for the democratic opposition, have borne the brunt of Iran’s
collapsing economy. Rather than focus on political organizing, a focus on
simple survival has taken priority. It is precisely for this reason that some
of the most vociferous defenders of a nuclear deal with the West are Iranian
civil society and human rights activists.
Secondly,
Iran’s ruling oligarchy has successfully deployed a nationalist narrative to
justify its nuclear policy internally. Tensions with the West are portrayed
through the long history of foreign invention in Iran. Iranians have been told
by their rulers that once again Western powers are bullying Iran, threatening
to bomb them, and applying a double standard in attempting to dictate Iran’s
internal energy policy. These arguments have resonated across the ideological
spectrum. Today many secular Iranians who wouldn’t ordinarily support the
Islamic Republic, make an exception when comes the nuclear impasse with the
West for reasons of national pride.
Thus, by
casting itself as the defender of national sovereignty, Iran’s leadership has
benefited from the nuclear standoff with the West. In the aftermath of a
nuclear agreement, the manipulation of this issue to boost the regime’s
legitimacy will be a far more difficult task. This point has been indirectly
acknowledged by the editor of Shargh,
a leading reformist newspaper, who has noted that if “there’s less tension
internationally, there’ll be more stability internally,” implying that a
nuclear deal would help create better social conditions for democratization.
A set of
regional events has also indirectly bolstered authoritarianism in Iran. The
post-Arab Spring regional chaos, marked by sectarianism, the rise of the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the spread of salafi-jihadism, and the
collapse of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and now Yemen, have scared Iranians away from
demanding political change. As one Iranian blogger has noted “people now think
twice about taking action to change the system because they know change might
result in a disaster.”
These
regional events have reinforced a preexisting Iranian disdain for violence and
revolutionary change. Iranian political culture has been deeply scarred by the
upheavals of the 1979 revolution, the bloody Iran-Iraq war and the post-September
11 chaos that engulfed neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the
American occupations. Prominent reformist journalist and Green Movement
supporter Saeed Leylaz, who was sentenced to prison after the 2009 events,
aptly summarizes how recent regional chaos has reduced demands for political
change. Reflecting the new temper among Iranian democrats, he now takes the
position that “if we want to emphasize our own points of view over those of our
competitors within the system, the result will be another Syria.”
All of
this has shaped domestic Iranian politics in negative ways for democratization.
In 2015, several trends are now discernible. The first trend is unrelenting
state repression. The crackdown that followed Green Movement protests has been
ongoing and arguably the level of suppression is greater today that it was in
2009. The hardline-controlled Iranian judiciary continues to hand out heavy
sentences to civil society activists, censorship and executions are at record
levels, and women and minorities are subject to ongoing harassment,
marginalization, and discrimination. In a recent press conference that
coincided with the second anniversary of his election, President Rowhani
admitted that since coming to power there has been “little opening” for
advancing his campaign promise to increase social and political freedoms. He
blamed right wing “pressure groups” for this, while reminding his supporters to
be patient because “changes cannot take place overnight.”
The second
trend pertains to the ongoing and deepening crisis of legitimacy facing the
Islamic Republic. This is the Iranian regime’s Achilles Heel. While foreign
crises help direct attention away from it, this dominant feature of Iranian
politics fundamentally shapes state-society relations today. Evidence of this
legitimation crisis is abundant. For example, in February, the Iranian
judiciary suddenly banned Iranian media from publishing comments by or images
of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami. Why a two-time president, who
occupied the second highest office in the country for eight years, suddenly
posed a threat to political order is a revealing question. Part of the answer
lies in the fact that as a reformist politician and Green Movement supporter, Khatami
remains a popular and influential figure. With parliamentary elections scheduled
for 2016, Iran’s clerical elite are starting to panic. There is great fear that
the control of the parliament could be lost to reformist parties. In fact, Ali
Saeedi, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s special representative to the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps, openly acknowledged this fear in a recent speech.
Likewise, the head of the powerful Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, went a step
further and announced that when it comes the ideological screening of
candidates for parliament “those who have a (ideological) background that is
unknown and after investigation this still remains unclear, the Guardian
Council does not have the right to approve them.” In other words, there is an
assumption that every Iranian citizen is guilty (of regime disloyalty) until
proven innocent.
At the
level of society, there is irrefutable evidence of Iranians displaying
behaviors and pursuing lifestyles that explicitly reject that values and norms
of the Islamic Republic. Widespread secularization exists, especially among
young people and among the sizeable urban and middle classes. This is most
visible in terms of avoiding the key Islamic rituals of prayer and fasting. The
Ministry of Health recently announced that 150 alcohol treatment centers would
be opening in Iran in response to a growing societal epidemic. This is
noteworthy because the Islamic Republic officially bans the production, sale
and consumption of alcohol. After the 1979 revolution, there was a major
attempt to construct a new Iranian Muslim citizen that rejected Western and
secular values. The colossal failure of this project is hard to miss.
Even the supreme
leader has publicly acknowledged that the Islamic Republic faces a crisis of
legitimacy. During the last presidential election, fearing a low voter turnout,
he appealed to Iranians to turn up at the ballot box including those who “for
whatever reason [do] not support the regime of the Islamic Republic.” He
instead appealed to their sense of (secular) nationalism arguing that a high
voter turnout would send a strong message to Iran’s enemies. In a more recent
speech on the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader
expressed a fear of liberal values penetrating Iran. He specifically chastised
those who were distorting Khomeini’s legacy by claiming he was “liberal-minded,
which under no conditions existed in his political, intellectual and cultural
behavior.”
A nuclear
deal could help put Iran back on the road to democratization. One of the most
controversial aspects of the tentative agreement is the sunset clause. This is
the provision that states that for fifteen years Iran will have a limited
nuclear program under strict international inspection but after this time
period, these restrictions will be lifted. Western critics have pointed to this
clause to argue that this “paves Iran’s path to the bomb”—all the country has
to do is wait out the clock. Ignored in this debate, however, is that in the coming
fifteen years, the Islamic Republic will face increasing challenges from within
society that will affect its future political stability and possibly its
political trajectory.
The
biggest challenge will be the likely death of the supreme leader, who turns 76
in July. Given the enormous power his office wields and the fact there is no
senior cleric with sufficient political and religious authority that can
replace him, the inevitable departure of Ali Khamenei will produce an enormous
internal crisis for Islamic Republic. When this will happen and how it might
play out is unknown, but Khamenei’s passing will create a unique crisis of
governance that democratic forces will be able to exploit.
Thus,
over the medium term, Iran’s democratic prospects seem brighter. Not only is
there a long tradition of democratic activism stretching back to over one
hundred years, but the preconditions for democracy that social scientists
generally agree upon, already exist in Iran. To wit: high levels of
socio-economic modernization (literacy, mass communications, and a modern
economy), a suitable class structure (the existence of a sizeable middle
class), and a proper political culture (norms, habits, and values that are
democracy-enhancing). Equally important are the demographic numbers that are
favorable to democratization. Specifically, young people now constitute the
majority of Iran’s population. They are highly educated, globally connected,
politically secular and deeply alienated from Islamist rule, and what’s more, they
desire substantive gradual, non-violent political change.
Nader Hashemi is
an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic politics and director of the
Center for Middle East Studies in the Josef Korbel School of International
Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic
Theory for Muslim Societies, and co-editor of The People Reloaded:
The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and, most
recently, The Syria Dilemma. On Twitter: @naderalihashemi.