In 1997 former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mohammed Khatami presented the Dialogue of Civilizations initiative (DoC) as the flagship of his foreign policy. Some years later, in 2005, the Secretary General of the United Nations launched the Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) initiative upon the proposal raised by former Prime Minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and co-sponsored by Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The 9/11 attacks meaningfully separate two related but still differentiated initiatives that have enjoyed varying degrees of international recognition. Authorship, representativeness and the intersection of domestic and international agendas are some of the issues that have been brought to the fore when discussing these initiatives.
However, this paper is set out to critically explore the geopolitical implications underpinning both initiatives from a longue durée perspective. In this sense, this work will try to assess the origins, ontological assumptions and practical translations of both initiatives in the wider framework of an alleged confrontation between the West and Islam. My contention is that, despite trying to contest the clash of civilizations idea that events like the 9/11 were deemed to confirm, both initiatives are reproductive of what Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, in his A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilizations. Us and Them beyond Orientalism (2011), has called the ‘clash regime’ so as to refer to the regime of truth, i.e. the pervasive and solid ideological structure, wherein Islam and the West occupy the two poles of an extreme and violent confrontation.
This paper will first examine Khatami’s initiative and will try to assess the significance of his policy in the wider frame of Iran-West relations after the Islamic Revolution. Secondly, this work will attempt to measure to which extent the Spanish-Turkish more recent initiative represents a re-reading of Khatami’s and, more generally, how they relate to each other (the potential geopolitical importance of the three actors at play, Iran, Spain and Turkey should not be overlooked). In a bid to connect these particular instances of policy to a more all-encompassing ideological narrative, the ways and means by which these initiatives interact with the ‘clash regime’ will be reviewed. To conclude, this paper will offer some ideas on how to supersede the ‘clash mentality’ that underpins these initiatives.
