COMMENTARY Nuclear modernity and identity in
Iran By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The battle lines are being
drawn, with Europe canceling scheduled nuclear
talks with Tehran, Washington pressuring for
United Nations action and Iran remaining adamant
about its new willingness to defy the West and
press ahead with its nuclear program.
But
as we await the next chapter in this unfolding
drama – and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) chief's report on Iran, due September 3,
will likely prove critical – it is important to
take stock of the intersubjective dimension
touching on the identities of the key players
involved.
Identity is a rather murky
concept that is often invoked to question given
realities, particularly on the individual level,
touching on such questions as "who am I?" and
"what are my loyalties and allegiances?" Identity,
in its contemporary form, is a product of
modernity, and as philosopher Charles Taylor has
correctly pointed out, modernity has produced a
"revolution of self-expression". But it would be a
theoretical error to limit identity to individuals
and to overlook or to simplify its connection to
the larger units, namely, communities, groups,
nations and nation-states, all of which are bound
up in one way or another with normative dimensions
in the (international) public sphere, or to use a
popular German word, Volksgeist (popular
spirit).
The intention here is not to
engage in an academic discourse and to rehash the
burgeoning literature on identity, rather to
utilize insights from literature as a guide to
analyze the present and clear danger to world
peace of the looming confrontation between the
West and Iran over nuclear issues. It is a
confrontation already played out in the press
interviews of presidents and their policy-makers,
media experts and chanting crowds in the streets
of Tehran, many of them carrying placards that
read "nuclear fuel is our right."
Earlier
this month, the European Union (EU)offered a
wide-ranging package to Iran, including economic,
political and technological incentives, in return
for the complete suspension of activities related
to nuclear fuel production. But Iran, which
insists it has the right to a civilian atomic
energy program, rejected the offer. As a result,
the EU-3 (Germany, Britain and France) called off
talks with Iran scheduled for August 31 as Tehran
has resumed uranium conversion.
Certainly,
the Iranian hardliners are aptly playing the
nationalist card with the nuclear issue, with the
new man in charge of nuclear negotiations with the
EU-3, Ali Larijani, comparing it to Iran's
struggle to nationalize its oil industry during
the 1950s. This is, indeed, a tid-bit removed from
Larijani's earlier discourse on theory of the
Islamic revolution of 1979, aiming to make Iran
into the "motherland" (umm-al ghara) of the
abode of Islam, yet there is ample evidence of a
"return to authenticity" zeal and crusade on the
part of the new politicians in charge, playing up
the themes of recognition and exaltation of the
original ethos of the Islamic revolution.
The new "ethics of authenticity" in Iran
is indisputably a modern phenomenon, directed to
the subjectivity of the Iranian Muslim population,
yearning for the acceptance of their nuclear
rights by the world community. And if there has
been hardening of the Iranian position on this
issue recently, it is precisely because more and
more, or to put it differently, deeper and deeper,
the nuclear matter has been bound up with national
identity. This is in light of its
prestige-enhancing effect in empowering ordinary
citizens with a new sense of pride – and the fact
that Iran is only one of 10 countries in the world
in possession of nuclear fuel technology.
"The world has to accept that Iran has
joined the nuclear club," said Iran's Foreign
Minister Kemal Kharrazi in New York last May, and
other high officials of the Iranian government
have similarly prided Iran for having turned into
a "nuclear fuel technology holder". Indeed, a
matter of pride not just for Iran but also for the
whole Muslim World and the Third World,
notwithstanding the growing North-South technology
gap. It is where the ideology of progress meets
nuclear populism.
Simultaneously, this
technological modernization is connected to an
explicit moral judgment about nuclear weapons,
with Iranian leaders going out of their way to
denounce as un-Islamic and immoral, and that Iran
has complied with intrusive inspections by the
UN's atomic agency, the IAEA.
Of course,
this is not to jump to the conclusion that all
Iranians are on one mind over the nuclear
question, and some environmentalists have
expressed serious concerns about nuclear waste
management and other similar issues. Also, there
are dissident groups, some abroad, who oppose
Iran's nuclear "ambition" as a tissue of theocracy
not in line with Iran's national interests.
Yet, consistently, these groups overlook
that Iran's nuclear program preceded the Islamic
regime and that, in fact, during the 1970s the US
Department of State itself concluded that Iran's
growing population and energy needs called for
alternative, non-oil, energy sources, thus giving
the green light to Iran's planned purchase of
several nuclear plants from the US. There is
little doubt in this author's mind that most
Iranians do not approve of any dissident group
acting as the US's fifth column exposing Iran's
"nuclear secrets", and by so doing these groups
only augment their own legitimacy deficits.
Presently, the issue of Iran's right to
exercise its "inalienable right" to nuclear
technology, per Article IV of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, merges with the notion
of national autonomy and freedom. As philosopher
Georg Hegel once put it, human essence lies in
self-consciousness, and in his 1844 manuscripts,
Karl Marx observed that any alienation of human
consciousness is alienation of self-consciousness.
In the Iranian context, this is just another way
of saying that the current Western attempt to
alienate Iran from its nuclear rights affects
Iranian identity and, if successful, would throw
this identity into a crisis, in the light of the
valorization of nuclear identity in every-day
Iranian life. There is, after all, an Iranian
public sphere where the issue of Iran's nuclear
rights is intimately tied to the recognition of
the indistinction of rights on the world scale,
instead of the present bifurcation between the
nuclear haves and have-nots.
In Iran's new
ideological climate, featuring a political
restructuring going hand-in-hand with a certain
re-radicalization of the state, nuclear identity
is consistent with both the internal and external
identification of Iran's right of passage from
technological adolescence, gaining symbolic value
and significance built partly around the on-going
bout with the West, the "hostile other".
Doubtless, this is a dangerous
proposition, or rather development, as well since
the crisis could well get out of hand and set back
Iran's economy and technology by light years. An
over-identification of public "collective
consciousness", to borrow a term from sociologist
Emile Durkheim, with nuclear autonomy is rife with
unwanted side effects, such as holding the
policy-makers to the exigencies of a neo-populism
from below and above. What is required is an
Augustinian "reflexive consciousness" that does
not turn the popular nuclear identity into a
policy trap, boxing officials at the negotiation
table to predetermined positions partly dictated
by the crowds in the streets. Said otherwise, the
limits of nuclear populism, if not recognized
early, can easily turn into a monumental headache
later.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism",
The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11,
issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu.
