Iran’s New Order: Domestic Developments and Foreign Policy Outcomes

Anoushiravan Ehteshami is professor of international relations and director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Durham.

A “sea-change” is how some commentators characterised developments in Iran after 1997. What has become known today as the Islamic Republic’s reformist movement acquired international prominence in the wake of Mohammad Khatami’s overwhelming victory in the May 1997 presidential poll. The election victory against all odds and expectations of this mild-mannered cleric promised to usher in a new era in revolutionary Iran. It is evident from his first term in office that the electoral commitments of this former cabinet minister and close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini to reform the system and open it up to public scrutiny and accountability were absolutely sincere. By the end of his first term, Khatami had managed not only to reshape Iran’s political agenda and open new and controversial dimensions in the national debate, but also to shift the location of the debate to the public arena, allowing the population to evaluate and make informed judgements about the very nature of the country’s Islamic system of governance. While his administration perhaps proved less successful in actually implementing the wide range of promised social and political reforms, his reformist agenda nonetheless set the benchmark by which the Islamic Republic was to be judged by Iranians themselves, as well as by an ever-attentive international community.

President Khatami unashamedly championed reform of the governing system in Iran, proposed comprehensive changes to the country’s civil–state relations and sought to make Islamic rule more in tune with the aspirations of the people. Observers of modern Iran cannot but be struck by the historical parallels between Khatami’s “revolutionary” agenda for reform and the two earlier occasions on which the desire for political change had become the country’s defining force. The first of these was the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution, which gave Iran its first taste of “modernity” and in the process brought to an unceremonious end the Qajar dynasty. The second was the 1979 revolution against the Pahlavi regime and its Westernised system of governance.

Despite its early successes the Constitutional Revolution did not manage to institutionalise the aspirations of Iran’s modernisers and early democrats. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, on the other hand, having given birth to an altogether new and unique political order, was said to be the embodiment of the Iranian people’s historic and spiritual aspirations. Yet today, barely twenty years after the Islamic Revolution, we again find Iran in the grip of another period of rapid and profound transformation, facing the same fundamental questions as in 1905. In this context, it is pertinent to ask how much socio-political progress Iran really made in the intervening years since the Constitutional Revolution. To answer this question adequately, one needs to trace the origins and nature of today’s reform process and consider some of its consequences.

Iran in the 1990s

The evolution of Iran’s political system in the 1990s was marked by some key constitutional reforms of 1989, which followed the end of the Iran–Iraq War and the death of the founder of the new republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. This era can be divided into two distinct periods: the pragmatist–reconstructionist Rafsanjani presidency (1989–97); and the pragmatist–pluralist Khatami presidency.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a seasoned politician, close ally of Ayatollah Khomeini and a central figure in the Islamic ruling elite since the revolution itself, became Iran’s first executive president in 1989, winning 13.5 million of the 14.2 million votes cast in that year’s presidential poll. Despite the customary level of horse-trading in appointments to senior posts, the make-up of Rafsanjani’s cabinet largely reflected his administration’s core objectives: reconstruction of the shattered country and reform of the economy and the bureaucracy. To this end, Rafsanjani assembled a team of largely Western-educated technocrats and social reformers. He set up what he himself dubbed “the cabinet for reconstruction”, with Khatami as one of its key social reformer members.

By any measure, then, Rafsanjani’s agenda was a reformist one, albeit largely limited to reform of the economy and creation of the right conditions for growth. His proposed changes, which won praise from the conservatives who later came to oppose President Khatami’s social and political programme, hinged on the introduction of sweeping market reforms, privatisation and structural adjustment. His economic reform strategy won the approval of the International Monetary Fund for its thoroughness and depth.

Social Reforms on Hold

But in order to succeed, Rafsanjani needed the support of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (which he got), as well as the backing of the Majlis (parliament). The Majlis was gradually won over as Rafsanjani slowly dropped his social reform agenda (and Khatami himself from his cabinet) in favour of practical measures to move the economy towards a free market system. Support from the Majlis, however, had to be engineered, and a majority in favour of economic reform found from the ranks of the conservative and right-wing forces. Thus, in the course of the early 1990s Rafsanjani led a successful campaign against the so-called statist and Islamic leftist and populist forces, resulting in their wholesale exclusion from the Fourth Majlis (which opened in 1992) at a particularly critical time in the reform process. Once in place, the conservatives supported most of Rafsanjani’s economic programme—despite their removal of the architect of the economic reforms, Mohsen Nourbakhsh, from the cabinet, continuing opposition to the liberalisation of foreign trade and unhindered foreign investment, and support for the maintenance of subsidies on certain foodstuffs and primary inputs. In this fashion, the conservative forces gained control of the Majlis and were to keep it until the elections for the Sixth Majlis in February 2000.

The price for the Rafsanjani–conservative understanding was the wholesale removal of political and social reforms from Rafsanjani’s agenda. To put in context the shift in Rafsanjani’s stance, suffice it to note that Rafsanjani himself entered the race for the Sixth Majlis with the conservative camp and against the Khatami reformers. This is testimony to the relationship he had struck with the conservative forces in the early and mid-1990s and to the gap which had now appeared between his reform agenda and President Khatami’s.

Even more telling was the very low electoral support that he and his family received. His daughter (who has been a close ally of the reformers) was not elected, neither was his brother, and he himself abandoned the chase after it was made clear that his presence in the Majlis would not be welcomed. This is the perhaps sorry end of the first phase of reform in Iran since the late 1980s.

Khatami’s Election

The second period began rather unexpectedly with Khatami’s stunning victory in the presidential poll of May 1997, the seventh such elections held in Iran since 1979. Khatami’s triumph shocked the conservative forces and pundits alike. The conservatives’ candidate, Majlis Speaker Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, enjoyed the support of a major media campaign and senior clerics from the Supreme Leader downwards. But Iran’s youthful electorate, female voters and most town-dwellers turned their backs on him and the conservatives. Khatami secured 69 per cent of the almost thirty million votes cast, compared to just 26 per cent for Nateq Nouri. The message from the Iranian people was loud and clear: “We want change!”, as many cried during the election campaign.

Khatami and his allies have become known as the “Second of Khordad” movement (the Persian calendar date of his May 23 election victory). They are characterised by their advocacy of pluralism, growth and the development of Iran’s civil society. More specifically, he and prominent members of his rainbow coalition—which includes the old Islamic leftist–populist forces edged out of the public arena by Rafsanjani in the early to mid-1990s, modernists, technocrats and Islamic liberals—have spoken of the need to introduce large-scale political and economic reforms and to empower the citizen. Detailed policy initiatives included the call for more personal freedoms, social justice, privacy, tolerance, public participation in the affairs of state, consolidation of the rule of law, a free and open press, the establishment of political parties, transparency in government, accountability and an end to corruption. A breathtaking agenda for any polity, not least for one still gripped by ideology and dogma.

A major achievement of the Second of Khordad movement was to modernise and liberalise the media. With over forty newspapers and magazines in circulation until the conservative backlash of the late 1990s, newspaper kiosks across the country were hubs of activity and debate after the May 1997 elections. The reformist press shouted the loudest, raised the most important issues in a challenging manner and dared to criticise authority. Through its sheer audacity, it managed to break many of the taboos in this largely patriarchal Muslim society. Iran’s cultural openings under Khatami owe much to the efforts of these newspapers. Despite the recent setbacks of the reformist press, therefore, we can conclude that the print media has established itself as perhaps the most important source of ideas, and as an unrestricted forum, for free and wide-ranging debate in Iran.

Ironically, the Second of Khordad movement in many ways marked the final de-ideologisation of the Islamic Republic’s policies and underlined the policymaking processes which President Rafsanjani had championed for much of his term in office. But as subsequent developments testify, Khatami’s key success from the outset was his ability to move the reform agenda forward and to associate himself with the deeply felt wishes and aspirations of the Iranian people. Khatami was not so much ever ahead of the people as alongside them. All the evidence suggests that it has been the majority of Iranians which has been pushing open the doors of debate, egging the reformers on and, by virtue of asking for a better future, demanding change at all levels of society, culture and government. To a large extent, it is this majority and its actions which have given substance, a sense of purpose, to Khatami’s reform agenda.

The Reformist Agenda

The goals of the Second of Khordad movement are clear: to overhaul the Islamic Republic, modernise its structures, rationalise its bureaucracy and put in place a more accountable and responsive system of government. In short, the movement aims to make Iran a more “normal” state, and a force for positive change in the international system. While there may have been differences in the priorities of various groups in the Second of Khordad coalition, on the whole they have been committed to the process of change championed by Khatami.

The team assembled by Khatami strikingly reinforced the reformist nature of his government. For instance, of the twenty-two cabinet members he presented to the Majlis for ratification in 1997, no fewer than seven had PhDs, eight were engineers and all three clerics had higher theological degrees. Moreover, one of the three clerics, Abdollah Nouri, was one of the most outspoken of the new team on social reform.

The Second of Khordad movement consolidated its May 1997 gains with victories in the February 1999 municipal elections, in the February 2000 elections for the Sixth Majlis, and in the June 2001 presidential elections. In the municipal elections, it secured control of virtually every major city and of most towns as well. The municipal elections were the first occasion on which Iranians had directly elected their mayors and other local representatives. As such, the municipal elections were the reformers’ first stab at the decentralisation of power in a highly centralised state. Through this election victory they took control of the country’s key constituencies.

In the February 2000 Majlis elections, the pro-Khatami list won over 60 per cent of the seats. The Second of Khordad candidates, representing some twenty parties, organisations and groups, took almost all thirty seats in Tehran—the most important constituency in the country—and most seats in a host of other towns and cities. As this was arguably the Islamic Republic’s most openly contested parliamentary election, some lessons may be drawn from it. First, despite the coalition nature of the reform movement, its candidates were disciplined, all following the same agenda in their campaigns. Second, reformist candidates scored highly across the country, sometimes replacing popular candidates who had allied themselves too closely with the centrist list which supported former president Rafsanjani. The problem for the technocratic centrist camp was the close association of one of its leaders, Rafsanjani, with the conservatives. Because of this association, the electorate punished the centrist front, even though many of its members had had close and long-standing links with the leaders of the Second of Khordad movement. The elections for the Sixth Majlis thus indicate that Iranians had, for the first time, discovered the meaning of tactical voting, taking great care to ensure that their true spokespersons were elected.

A final observation about the February 2000 elections is that remarkably few clerics actually entered the Sixth Majlis. After long enjoying monopoly control of parliament, the clerics have seen their numbers shrink from over 150 in the First and Second Majlises in the early and mid-1980s to fewer than half a dozen in the early twenty-first century. Whether this trend indicates a “declericalisation” of the Islamic Republic’s key elected offices, or the regime’s total, and therefore passive, control of the political system, remains to be seen. But the clerics’ growing absence from such important bodies as the legislature must be indicative of a still changing and evolving political topology in an avowedly Islamic state.

The reformist camp’s popular ascendancy was confirmed by the results of the June 2001 presidential elections, in which Khatami won a second four-year term with another landslide victory. He took 21.7 million votes, 76.9 per cent of the 28.2 million votes cast, surpassing the 20 million that he won in 1997. His nearest rival, Ahmad Tavakoli, the candidate favoured by the conservative clerical establishment, got 4.4 million votes.

Khatami’s Foreign Policy

During his first term, Khatami swiftly translated the changes inside Iran into new foreign policy initiatives. Again, while he maintained the pragmatist line set out by his predecessor, his first forays into the international arena heralded a new tone from Tehran. Within six months of taking office, he had hosted in Tehran a summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This effectively ended Iran’s regional and international isolation and went a long way towards repairing its relations with the Arab world. Khatami used this important summit to make new friends, and also to spell out his domestic and foreign policy agendas to the largest gathering of Muslim leaders in recent times.

Khatami’s success at this summit was soon followed by his remarkable interview with the US-based CNN television network in January 1998, in which he spoke of the dialogue of civilisations, called for US–Iranian cultural exchanges among scholars, artists, athletes and tourists, and declared his admiration for the successful mixture of religion and liberty in the United States. The mere fact of the interview, let alone its content, was remarkable enough, but to appreciate its true magnitude one has to bear in mind the domestic backdrop to his comments. This had been dominated by talk of a US “cultural invasion” of Iran and a “Zionist–Satanic onslaught” against the Islamic Republic. Yet here was the recently elected president of Iran addressing the world, and far from talking of such threats to his country he chose to speak of the need to improve Iran’s relations with the international community and to establish dialogue—even with the presumed enemy.

Khatami’s foreign policy initiatives may be viewed from the vantage point of the period since the end of the Iran–Iraq War. Broadly speaking, three phases may be identified in Iran’s international behaviour after 1989. Each is indicative of the changing priorities of the regime at home, reactions to internal developments and the balance of forces within the Iranian political elite.

By the late 1980s military and political developments in the region had forced a reassessment of Iran’s rejectionist strategy. The appointment in June 1988 of Majlis Speaker Rafsanjani as commander-in-chief of the armed forces illustrated the ascendancy in power of the pragmatists. Iran’s unconditional acceptance in July 1988 of UN Security Council Resolution 598, which called for an end to the Iran–Iraq War, owed much to this appointment: Rafsanjani wished to halt the fighting before a complete collapse of the Iranian military effort. The immediate post-war period was characterised by the transition from radicalism to accommodation. This phase in Iran’s foreign relations I term the “reorientation phase”. It began in earnest in June 1988 and lasted until August 1990, by which time one can identify the end of the transition to pragmatism and the establishment of the “pragmatist line” in Iran’s foreign policy, the second phase.

The third phase in Iran’s post-1980s foreign policy emerged with the rise of the Second of Khordad movement. Khatami reinforced the non-ideological aspects of Rafsanjani’s foreign policy, but also went further, preaching compromise, the rule of law and moderation. This phase may suitably be termed the drive for moderation—“détente”. It is symbolised by Khatami’s overtly non-confrontational approach to foreign policy, his declared aim of establishing a “dialogue of civilisations” and his attempts to reach an “understanding” with the West (including the United States).

In foreign policy terms, the Khatami administration tried hard to lay to rest the ghosts of the revolution. Thanks to the president’s efforts, Iran managed to make several new friends swiftly after his election victory and renewed many old acquaintances as well. During his first term in office Khatami made scores of overseas trips and visited over a dozen countries, more than any other Iranian leader since the revolution. His travels took him to such non-traditional Iranian destinations as Italy, France, Japan and Saudi Arabia, but also to a number of neighbouring countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus. His administration also attempted to narrow the diplomatic gap with Egypt, a country which Iran has come to see as a significant player in an increasingly fragmented Arab world. In return, Khatami received high-level visitors from Austria, Azerbaijan, Britain, China, the Central Asian countries, France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Yemen.

With regard to the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s pro–Gulf Co-operation Council strategy clearly bore some fruit, as evidenced by the successful courting of Saudi Arabia since 1996. The two countries’ defence ministers have met more than once and Iranian naval vessels have visited the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah, arguably the Kingdom’s most strategic maritime facility. But Iran and Saudi Arabia remain some distance from being close allies. Tehran still regards Saudi Arabia as an ideological rival in Central and West Asia, as well as a close ally of the United States. Riyadh in turn is conscious of the latent threat Iran poses to its interests in the Gulf and beyond, but at present is keen to develop the friendship with the pragmatic Iranian leadership and carve for itself the role of a mediator in Iran’s dialogue with neighbouring countries and the West. With its other large Arab neighbour, Iraq, Tehran has maintained correct relations and undertaken fairly high-level diplomatic exchanges and mutually advantageous economic contacts, but little more.

Looking at the broader context of Iranian foreign policy, the post-1990 changes in Iran’s geopolitical environment and systemic changes since the end of the Cold War have reinforced the primacy of oil and economics in Iranian strategic thinking. This, however, does not mean that ideology and strategic ambitions have been completely displaced. Iran’s leaders have always asserted that the republic’s strategic goals cannot be realised without the country’s economic renewal. Conversely, a weak economic base in the globalised economy has increasingly been viewed by Iranian leaders, including Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, as a recipe for further peripheralisation.

At the same time, largely thanks to the launch of Iran’s post-war, five-year economic plans and the country’s continuing economic crises, Iran’s foreign policy has come to tally with its economic priorities. Foreign policy has been influenced by the need for foreign capital and expertise, trade links, the importance of expatriate resources, the need to diversify the economy, and so forth. Thus, in recent years a symbiotic relationship seems to have evolved between economic necessity and foreign policy. The main feature of this symbiotic relationship is a behavioural change, observable in Tehran’s moderation and pragmatic stance towards its neighbours and the European powers, and in the abandonment, at the formal level at least, of the export of the Islamic Revolution.

But while it is true that in recent years Iran has been redefining its priorities and reconsidering its place in the world, it would be unrealistic to assume that it will abandon the system’s modus operandi or forego its Islamic profile purely for economic reasons. One has only to consider Iran’s successful involvement with the Islamic Conference Organisation since autumn 1997 to realise that Tehran will continue to capitalise on Islam in defining its international profile. Even so, although the orientation of the Islamic Republic nominally remains similar to that advocated by its founding fathers, in practice Rafsanjani and Khatami chose to give the resolution of domestic problems priority over long-term ideological foreign policy posturing.

As already noted, since the mid-1990s, and certainly since 1997, Iran has tried hard to mend its diplomatic and political fences in order to strengthen the economy and create the conditions for prosperity. Indeed, President Khatami’s first administration made a virtue of Iran’s economic ills to argue for more drastic political reforms and the opening up of all sectors of the economy to foreign investment. More time is needed before Khatami’s success in these areas can be assessed, but the available evidence indicates that he firmly established moderation and “dialogue”—i.e., détente—as the main principles of Iran’s foreign policy.

Conclusions

Towards the end of his first term in office, the relationship between supporters of President Khatami and the conservatives became more tense, occasionally even violent. The conservatives’ defeat in the May 1997 presidential poll was soon overshadowed by their virtual routing in the February 1999 municipal elections, when they failed to secure control of any significant urban centre, and in the February 2000 elections for the Sixth Majlis, in which the Khatami camp secured a significant portion of the 290 seats in the first round of the vote.

It was no surprise, then, that as the Khatami team got entrenched, so the conservatives were galvanised into action. They forced the departure from the political scene of several leading reformers and Khatami advisers (including Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri and Culture Minister Ataollah Mohajerani), the imprisonment of a number of key Khatami supporters, and the suspension of over a dozen pro-Khatami newspapers. While a backlash by conservatives was regarded as more or less inevitable, the extent of their fightback, and the nature of their methods, continued to cause concern. As Iran’s political system is based on the smooth working of a number of competing institutions—the Majlis, the presidency, the ministries, the judiciary, the Expediency Council, the Council of Guardians and ultimately the office of the Supreme Leader—it was feared that the continuing infighting would result in a general breakdown, destabilising the entire government machinery and creating fertile conditions for the direct involvement in the political process of the anti-reform factions and the military. There was also concern that the struggle for power would mortally weaken the reformist camp, increase the likelihood of further violent encounters between the various factions, and between pro-Khatami students and the security forces, and end in the collapse of the reformist front.

To add fuel to these fires, the highly factionalised environment in which the Iranian power elite now finds itself is sapping the country’s creative energies, compounding the potential political crisis facing President Khatami. In this highly charged situation, the inbuilt apparatus of checks and balances could do more harm than good to the workings of the system and the defence of Iran’s interests overseas. At heart, therefore, the reforms have not just challenged the conservatives’ grip on power, but more fundamentally have put to the test the flexibility and adaptability of Iran’s post-revolution political system. And this, in the process, has raised huge questions about Iran’s place in the wider world.

While in the foreign policy arena a broad consensus seems to have emerged around the détente project, the paradox at the core of Iran’s Islamic system remains unresolved: how can a country which values elections and the will of the people, and indeed allows, enables and digests the rise of such pro-democracy movements as the Second of Khordad—with all its liberal paraphernalia and aspirations—then use the state machinery to silence the reformist challenge by imprisoning foes, muzzling the popular media and perpetrating vengeful attacks?

Today, after Khatami’s overwhelming second presidential election victory, every Iranian is asking whether the bottle of reform is half full or half empty. Was the post-1997 agenda a new and promising beginning, or the beginning of the end of reform? As we enter the twenty-first century, it can be seen that Khatami and his team have been trying to end the paradox of strong state versus vibrant civil society which has dogged Iran for the best part of a hundred years. They tried, some would say unsuccessfully, to tip the scales of history towards civil society. With the jury still out as to their success, the question of whether or not the emerging civil society will have an explicitly Islamic face no longer seems relevant. The fact is that Iran is changing, and adapting to new global realities. The key question is, at what speed? Will it be before 2005 that the aspirations of 1905 can be realised? History is not in the habit of being rushed, but it can certainly be shaped, if not also changed.