‘To be or not to be’ (like the West): modernisation in Russia and Iran

Abstract

Having passed through a labyrinth of social contradictions, both Russia and Iran have reached a point on their historical timelines where they have transcended the logic of development of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, Russian and Iranian modernisation reflects the interaction of universal norms and practices and specific cultural traditions. As an epistemological category, modernity can no longer be enchained in the grip of a totalising narrative. Modernity has given rise to civilisational patterns that share some core characteristics, but which unfold differently. The Russian and Iranian historical experiences reveal the need to take a much broader view of the modernisation process by placing it in the context of cultural adaptation of civilisational particularities to the challenge of modernity. The era of fixed, Euro-centric and non-reflexive modernity has reached its end, and we have, in practical terms, the emergence of ‘multiple modernities’.

Keywords:

• Russia
• Iran
• modernisation
• modernity
• modernisation theory

Notes

1. Laruelle, Russian Nationalism and the National Reassertion of Russia, 4.

2. This is premised on Sergei Uvarov’s Triad, also known as the ‘Official Nationality’, which is comprised of orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality. Russian Slavophiles believed these uniquely Russian institutions would kick-start Russian modernity.

3. Baranovsky, “Russia: A Part of Europe,” 443–58.

4. Adib-Moghaddam, “Islamic Utopian Romanticism,” 274.

5. Atabaki and Zürcher, Men of Order, 2.

6. Tazmini, Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran, 206.

7. See Schmidt, Global Modernity: A Conceptual Sketch.

8. Blaney and Inayatollah, “Neo-Modernization? IR and the Inner Life,” 108.

9. Beck et al., Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics, 2.

10. Tiryakian, “Modernization: Exhumateur in Pace,” 173.

11. Blaney and Inayatollah, “Neo-Modernisation? IR and the Inner Life,” 109–10.

12. Tiryakian, “Modernization: Exhumateur in Pace,” 173.

13. Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism.

14. Ibid.

15. Blaney and Inayatullah, “Neo-Modernization? IR and the Inner Life,” 107.

16. Blaney and Inayatullah, “The Westphalian Deferral,”

17. Ibid., 103.

18. Sakwa, “Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-modernisation,” 73.

19. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 11. Jack Goody has presented a compelling argument questioning the axiom that modernity has its roots in the Enlightenment period. He critiques ethnocentric European historiography and historical memory by querying the uniqueness of a moment that many consider pivotal in the series of historical transitions which led to European supremacy in the early modern and modern world. See Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many.

20. For example: Kamali, Multiple Modernities, Civil Society and Islam; and Tharailath Koshy Oommen, “Multiple Modernities and the Rise.”

21. Arnason, “The Multiplication of Modernity,” 132–3.

22. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 1–29.

23. Ibid.

24. Sakwa, “Russia: From Stalemate to Equilibrium?”

25. Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations, 17–18, 85.

26. Eisenstadt, “Modernity and Modernization,” 12.

27. Dallmayr, Achieving Our World, 28–9.

28. Beck et al., “Theory of Reflexive Modernization,” 1–35.

29. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries.

30. Balzer, “Managed Pluralism.”

31. Putin introduced this term following the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004.

32. Quoted in Herspring, Putin’s Russia: Past Imperfect, 15.

33. This is not to deny that the state has been unable to successfully channel these aspirations to full fruition. The point we are making here is that this is a work in progress.

34. Dallmayr and Tingyang, Contemporary Chinese Political Thought.

35. Tu, “Multiple Modernities: A Preliminary Inquiry,” 104.

36. Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, x.

37. Tazmini, Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran, 44.

38. Ibid., 69.

39. Atabaki and Zürcher, Men of Order.

40. While the entire notion of modernity is ambivalent – the question of what is ‘modern’, what is ‘anti-modern’ and what is ‘traditional’, and indeed modernity takes many shapes and forms – for the sake of our analysis of pre-revolutionary modernisation, we are employing the limited, normative definition of ‘Western modernity’ to reflect a society whose defining features encompass liberal, democratic and secular institutions.

41. McDaniel, Autocracy, Modernization and Revolution, 7.

42. Tazmini, Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran, 2, 255.

43. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 2.

44. Adib-Moghadddam, A Critical Introduction to Khomeini, 15–6.

45. Sakwa, “Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-modernisation,” 75.

46. Amineh and Eisenstadt, “Theorizing of the Iranian Revolution,” 157.

47. Ibid., 162, 173. For an authoritative assessment of Khomeini’s political vision, see Adib-Moghaddam, A Critical Introduction to Khomeini.

48. Quoted in Moslem, Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran, 28.

49. Sakwa, “Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-modernisation,” 75.

50. Sakwa, “The Dual State in Russia,” 15–6, 94–9.

51. Bandelin, Return to the NEP, 63–4.

52. McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, 155.

53. Ibid.

54. McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea.

55. Danks, “Russia in Search of Itself,” 39.

56. Ibid.

57. Grier, “The Russian Idea and the West,” 33.

58. Brookfield, “Russian Nationalism,” 391.

59. Ibid.

60. Sakwa, “Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-modernisation,” 75.

61. Vahdat, God and Juggernaut, xi.

62. Vahdat, God and Juggernaut, xi.

63. Tazmini, Khatami’s Iran: The Islamic Republic, 5.

64. See Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953.

65. Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West, 68–9.

66. Martin, Creating an Islamic State, 126.

67. Tazmini, Khatami’s Iran, 5.

68. Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization, 101.

69. Kashani-Sabet, “Evolving Polemic of Iranian Nationalism,” 163–4.

70. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 102.

71. al-Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West.

‘West-toxification’ conveys both intoxication – the infatuation with the West – and infection – the poisoning of indigenous culture.

72. Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization, 3–4.

73. Ibid., 105.

74. Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 363.

75. Ibid.

76. Martin, Creating an Islamic State, 124. Pan-Islamism and the ‘export of the revolution’ were revolutionary principles that were largely abandoned after Khomeini’s death in 1989.

77. Adib-Moghaddam, International Politics of the Persian Gulf, 24.

78. Mirsepassi, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought, 33–4. As Ali Mirsepassi explains, Iranian intellectuals, even those calling for the rule of law and radical Western-inspired cultural reforms, were also inspired by spiritual ideas. Various religious reform movements in Iran’s history, beginning with Shaykhism and culminating in Babism in the nineteenth century, also called for apparently modern reforms while relying on traditional, mystical and literary/imaginative rhetoric. These movements articulated ‘secular reform in terms of a messianic calling’. This messianic, radical vein re-emerged in the late-twentieth-century politicisation of Iranian Islam and the ensuing 1979 Islamic Revolution.

79. McPartland, “Revolutions: Progress or Decline,” 32.

80. Sakwa, “Soviet Collapse: Contradictions and Neo-modernisation,” 75.

81. Vahdat, God and Juggernaut, xi.

82. Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran, 328.

83. Tazmini, Khatami’s Iran, 5–6.

84. See Tazmini, “Rouhani: Learning from Khatami’s Experience”; see also Tazmini, “Rouhani’s Iran: Striking the Balance.”

85. See Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice.

86. Sakwa, “Russia: From Stalemate to Equilibrium?”

87. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 1–29; Eisenstadt, “The Civilizational Dimension in Sociological Analysis,” 1–21.