Power and National Identity in Modern Iran

Power and National Identity in Modern Iran
This presentation seeks to problematize the historical status and discursive unity of the concept of Iranian national identity, focusing on the constitutive role of political power in its construction and development in modern political and cultural discourse since the advent of the nation-state in the early twentieth century. In so doing it will put forward two inter-related arguments. First, Iranian national identity is not a historical antiquity but rather a modern political-cultural construct constituted by political power. Secondly, the discursive unity of Iranian national identity is not sustained by a mythical-transhistorical emotional/cultural bond among its constituent peoples but rather by centralising processes and practices of a coercive state. These arguments will thus be qualified theoretically by showing that the concept of Iranian national identity is an effect of the democratic doctrine of popular/national sovereignty grounded in the in the juridical-political framework of the nation-state. The doctrine, enshrined in the constitutional laws of 1906 and 1979, presupposes a legal-political linkage between the majority/dominant ethnicity and political power in the country. The linkage, established by the founding act of the state, sanctions not only the unity of the new sovereign, the Iranian nation, as the sole source of political authority and legitimacy, but also at the same time the suppression and denial of all non-sovereign/subordinate identities and their exclusion from the legal, political and cultural processes and practice of the state. The ethnic, linguistic and religious unity/uniformity of the Iranian identity as such rests on the suppression and exclusion of the non-sovereign identities. They are denied identities, stripped of political rights and excluded from the domain of legitimate political and cultural participation and representation in the nation-state. They are suppressed and silenced in the structure of sovereign domination the primary objective of which is to sustain the legal and political unity of a repressive centralising state geared to ensuring the discursive unity of the Iranian identity in the official and semi-official discourse. Sovereign domination exercised by centralising functions of a repressive state rather than an assumed commitment to a shared historical destiny and a shared national culture ensures the unity of Iranian national identity. Conversely, the unity and continuity of Iranian national identity depends strictly on the efficacy of sovereign violence to secure domination over non-sovereign subordinate identities and cultures. The analysis will draw on the contemporary histories of the Kurds, Arabs and the Baluchis and the fate of Sunni, Yarisan and Behaie communities in the Islamic Republic to illustrate the theoretical arguments used in the presentation.