Iran: 40 years after the Islamic revolution, schizophrenia of the regime deepens the debate

As Tehran leaders prepare to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Khomeinist revolution, a growing number of Iranian citizens are frustrated and frustrated they wonder if the time has come for their country to close the revolutionary chapter and resume its historic path as a nation-state.

The need for Iran to go beyond the Khomeinist revolution is the central theme of the debate raised by the reformist sectors seeking Iran's return to a nation-state model as an urgent need for regional peace and stability.

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, if we compare it and compare it to other revolutions of the twentieth century, the Khomeinist revolution can be considered a failure in all areas of importance for a nation-state.

Forty years after its creation, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia it turned a preindustrial backward country into one of the two superpowers of the world that sent the first man into space and who, after defeating Nazi Germany in the most devastating history of humanity. At the same time, the Soviet regime had succeeded in "exporting" its ideology and socio-political system to more than a dozen countries representing nearly a third of the human population.

In Chinathe Maoist revolution has also had great success during its first four decades. By 1990, China had once again become a major industrial power and had taken the path to make its economy the largest in the world by 2020. Meanwhile, the "Chinese model", a mix of nationalism and Marxism, found an echo in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Unlike the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the Khomeinist revolution in Iran has not been able to "export" its model to a single country., while making Iran poorer and more vulnerable than it had been under the Shah. The main reason is that the Khomeinist revolution has failed to create a new state structure with credible and effective institutions. As a result, unable to destroy the Iranian state as it had developed over five centuries, the new Khomeinist rulers attempted to reproduce it by creating parallel organs of power.

The objectives and interests of these parallel bodies, not to mention their modus operandi, differ considerably from the expectations and desires of Iranian citizens, resulting in an almost continuous tension between the state model and that of the Islamic Republic which established the regime. for those 40 years.

The element to understand the growing echo in Iran that the time has come to dismantle parallel bodies and allow the state apparatus to regain all its authority as a means of defending national interests and ambitions and not ideological was rejected by repression of the Khomeinist security forces who act on citizens who suppress blood and fire. Thus, the green revolution crashed in 2009, under the presidency of Ahmadinejad. Although the violence of the organs of the regime's security continues repression in the direction of the current President Rouhani.

Although Iran has parallel decision-making powers and technocratic cadres influenced by the idea of ​​a theocratic republic, the country can not succeed on the path of modernity.. This is the result of the actions of those who have the power, but who lack responsibility, while those who are held responsible have no power and are isolated by Khomeinists loyal to the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Thus, it is clearly observed that, under the Khomeinist regime, Iran suffers from "political schizophrenia", also recognized by the sector qualified "reformist" faction within the regime itself.

Saeed Hajjarian, one of the leading theorists of the regime's "reformist" action now preaches "civil disobedience" as a means of restoring the dignity and authority of state institutions through opposition to parallel revolutionary bodies. The method he announces for this purpose is almost identical to that advocated by Prince Reza Pahlevi, the exiled heir of the ancient Iranian monarchy.

Another figure in the "reformist" leadership, Abbas Abdi, warns his Khomeinist comrades that his regime is going through a deep crisis and could even be "on the verge of implosion". Once again, the solution proposed by Abdi is to close the chapter of the revolution and allow Iran to reorganize its life as a nation-state.

Clbadical Iranian historians identify themselves five phases in the emergence of a new state in a country that has experienced innumerable upheavals during its long history. The first step is conquest when a new force, often a warrior tribe, manages to seize all or part of the territory of the nation. Then comes a second stage called "domination", when the new conquering force manages to establish itself as primus inter pares. The third stage is called "control," when the new force is universally recognized as the final arbiter of any struggle for power. This leads to the fourth stage, known as "governance" in which the new force functions as the final arbiter of national life. From the fifth phase, the new force creates its own "state" with the institutions needed to secure its priority and promote its long-term interests and ambitions.

On the basis of this model of badysis, the Khomeinist revolution, as a new force, stopped at the fourth stage, which means that it failed to destroy the old state and to create a new model capable of developing a synthesis of national and revolutionary interests and ambitions. This is the result of the schizophrenia mentioned above, which gives the impression that one observes and deals with two Iran: "One Iran as a State and another as a Revolution".

Iranian political schizophrenia also affects opponents of the Khomeini regime. Consciously or unconsciously, most of them also behave like revolutionary forces against the regime, instead of feeding and strengthening themselves as a movement or political group capable of managing a normal nation-state and resolving the complex issues facing a society trying to get out of it. four decades of political and economic crisis emerging from the Islamic Revolution.

The good news is that, perhaps out of necessity, a new political culture is forming in Iranwhich instinctively links politics to concrete problems of real life instead of abstract notions related to revolutionary utopias pushed by religion as an ideological element.

In the past two years, Iran has been shaken by two national uprisings that have mobilized millions of protesters. The important point here is that all these popular demonstrations and the two uprisings were motivated by demands that only a normal nation state and not a revolutionary group can understand and satisfy. Therefore, at least implicitly, what millions of Iranians demand is a restoration of the authority of their state, which, in turn, requires the closure of the revolutionary chapter.

"Other countries are also facing the kind of problems that Iran faces," said Ali-Reza Shoja's Zand, an badyst in Tehran. "But this does not delegitimize the established order nor lead to its implosion."

What Zand expresses is that "other countries" do not suffer from political schizophrenia. These are national states and, as such, they can always mobilize the resources needed to solve the problems of politics, the economy and all the problems of a state's normal life, while that in Iran, the Islamic Republic continues its phantasmagorical ambition of world conquest. in the name of a strange ideology that, influenced by religion, travels at the same time in many places, although it has taken the Iranians nowhere if we speak of modernity and progress for 40 years.