Roham Alvandi - The Age of Aryamehr: Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements

A Gingko-St Andrews Series in Iran and Turan

Series Editor

Ali Ansari

The Age of Aryamehr

Late Pahlavi Iran and its Global Entanglements

Edited by Roham Alvandi

First published in 2018 by
Gingko Library
4 Molasses Row
London SW11 3UX

Copyright Roham Alvandi 2018
Copyright 2018 individual chapters, the contributors

The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have been

asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-909942-18-9
eISBN 978-1-909942-19-6

Typeset in Times by MacGuru Ltd
Printed in Spain

www.gingko.org.uk
@GingkoLibrary

Acknowledgements

An editors task, I was warned, is akin to herding cats. Luckily, it was my pleasure to work with an extraordinarily patient and dedicated group of colleagues to produce this volume. I am deeply grateful to each of them for their forbearance through multiple rounds of review and revision.

The chapters in this volume were initially presented at a workshop entitled, Pahlavi Iran, 19411978: A Global History Workshop, hosted by the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 19 May 2016. I thank the LSE Kuwait Programme and the British Institute of Persian Studies for generously sponsoring the workshop, and my colleagues at the LSE Middle East Centre, particularly Toby Dodge and Ian Sinclair, for their kind support.

My thanks also to our workshop commentators Ali Ansari, Houchang Chehabi, Stephanie Cronin, Louise Fawcett, and Cyrus Schayegh for providing invaluable feedback that greatly enriched the chapters in this volume.

Finally, I find myself even more indebted to Houchang Chehabi, in this instance for his invaluable help with the transliteration and copy editing of this volume.

R. Alvandi

London
May 2018

Introduction

Iran in the Age of Aryamehr

Roham Alvandi

The reign of the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 19411979), marked the high-point of Irans global interconnectedness. Never before had Iranians felt the impact of global political, social, economic, and cultural forces so intimately in their national and daily lives. Iranian artists, clerics, intellectuals, statesmen, students, technocrats, and workers found themselves entangled with global processes in which they participated and which in turn shaped and coloured the long and painful process of defining what it meant to be Iranian in an era of the Cold War and decolonisation.

The history of late Pahlavi Iran has traditionally been written as prologue to the 197879 Iranian Revolution. In doing so, this volume aims to write Iran into the global history of these three decades, while also writing the global into Irans history during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah.

In this chapter, I explore the impact of the Cold War and decolonisation on late Pahlavi Iran and the response of the Pahlavi state to those two major global processes. Both Mohammad Reza Shah and his opponents saw themselves as engaged in not only a local struggle for the future of Iran, but in a global struggle between communism and capitalism, between empire and independence. This chapter not only provides historical context for the chapters that follow, but also highlights the ways in which Iranians embraced, interpreted, and debated ideas such as modernisation, anti-imperialism, and Third Worldism, which had gained currency across the world in the 1960s and 1970s. I further examine how Iranians adopted the language and divisions of the global Cold War and decolonisation, developing contending narratives of Westoxification and the Great Civilisation, which in turn shaped global history with the shock of the Iranian Revolution.

The Cold War and Irans Modernisation

The global phenomena of the Cold War and decolonisation converged in Iran in August 1953 when Britain and the United States backed a royalist coup that toppled the popular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had championed the nationalisation of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The coup was neither the first, the last, nor indeed the most violent global shock that Iran suffered in the twentieth century. It marked, however, the end of a consensus that had prevailed since Irans Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the century, when the countrys political and intellectual elite had looked to the West as the loadstar of Irans path out of centuries of decline and into the sunlit uplands of what Ali Ansari has characterised as an Iranian Enlightenment.

The young Mohammad Reza Shah had fled the country in the midst of the political crisis of August 1953, only to be brought back and handed the reins of power thanks to a royalist coup backed by Britain and the United States. The perception that the shah had saved his throne by collaborating with foreign powers to subvert Irans national sovereignty severely undermined the monarchs claim to embody the Iranian nation. The shah had to somehow repair this breach with many of his subjects, who viewed him as having betrayed their long struggle for national sovereignty and a constitutional government. The bargain that the shah tried to strike took the form of what Cyrus Schayegh has called the politics of material promise, an alternative nationalist vision for Iran that rejected Mosaddeqs liberal constitutionalism in favour of an American model of modernisation that sought to inoculate the country against communism through economic development.

American economic and military assistance, combined with expansionary monetary and credit policies, fuelled modernisation in 1950s Iran. The shah hoped to satisfy Irans growing urban middle class with rising living standards and the comforts of a modern consumer society, while at the same time securing American support for his increasingly arbitrary rule by acting as a bulwark against communist penetration into the oil-rich Persian Gulf. In practice, his economic policies overheated the Iranian economy, leading to an economic crisis in the late 1950s, while his intolerance of dissent and his dependence on the United States radicalised Iranian politics. By 1961, the shah had been forced to annul the results of elections for parliament due to a public outcry over vote-rigging and he faced public protests by teachers against their declining real wages.

Kennedy, more so than any other American president during the Cold War, pushed the shah to implement social and economic reforms to pre-empt a popular revolution in Iran. With the support of the United States, authoritarian modernisation triumphed over liberalism in Iran under the banner of the White Revolution.

Between 1963 and 1977, Irans economy experienced the largest growth in GDP in the nations recorded history, averaging 10.5 percent per year in real terms, making Iran one of the fastest growing economies in the world. This remarkable growth was not simply a reflection of rising oil revenues, as non-oil GDP grew at a higher annual average rate (11.5 percent) than that of GDP including oil.