Political Elite of Iran

by Marvin Zonis

Overview

In interviews with 170 politically active Iranians, the author reveals that politics in Iran are based on interpersonal relationships marked by insecurity, cynicism, and mistrust. He then assesses the significance of these characteristics for Iran's future development.

Originally published in 1971.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691617015
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Studies on the Near East , #1849
Pages:	406
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Political Elite of Iran

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By Marvin Zonis

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03083-8

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Iran has been called the oldest of the new nations, a distinction accurately reflecting not only its lengthy history and venerable culture, but also its impressive successes in avoiding the status of a European colony. In recent years, Iran has augmented this reputation as her remarkable political continuity has set the stage for rapid economic growth and social development.

Iran's ruling monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, acceded to the throne in 1941 amidst foreign occupation, economic disintegration, and savage attacks on the twenty-year rule of his father, Reza Shah. Since those chaotic days, the present shah has made a series of attempts to establish solid bases of political support. During the years following his accession, his relatively insecure throne depended primarily on the graces of the British and Russians who had deposed his father. Supported by these foreign powers and many of the elite who had served the ex-monarch, the shah reconstructed his defeated army. With his civil and military elites, the shah continued to maintain a tenuous grip on the throne after the withdrawal of the British and American troops, who had joined the occupiers in 1942, and the ultimate withdrawal of the Soviets and the collapse of their ill-fated "autonomous" People's Republics of Azarbaijan and Kurdistan.

An abortive assassination attempt in 1949 and the near overthrow of the shah by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (1951–1953) gave testimony to the ethereal nature of this coalition of civil and military elites. But following Mossadegh's overthrow and the shah's return to the throne after a hasty exile to Italy in 1953, kingly power was regained by an almost solitary reliance on the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces. For despite the efforts of Mossadegh and the Iranian Communist party, the Tudeh, the shah had never totally lost control over the military, a control that was then augmented by a burgeoning program of United States technical and military assistance.

Using the power of the military, the king extirpated Tudeh supporters within the ranks of the officer corps of his army. He then turned to eliminating the Tudeh throughout Iran and subduing the most ardent partisans of Mossadegh. After the most threatening of his opponents had been neutralized, the shah began to experiment with new forms of control. From 1957 to 1960, a royally chartered and directed two-party system was created. But its "tweedledum-tweedledee" character failed to provide a meaningful channel for political expression. The debacle of the two elections for the twentieth session of the Parliament in 1960–1961 — a debacle that resulted in the dissolution of the Majles until new elections were held in the fall of 1963 — testified to the bankruptcy of the two political parties.

The monarch's response to the political turmoil following the closing of the Parliament, while unexpected, was not atypical. He answered his increasingly vocal opposition by liberalizing political life. A new prime minister known to be suspicious of the royal prerogatives, independent ministers, and an easing of censorship all followed. By 1963, the shah launched a new experiment. He appealed for support directly to the masses through his Six-Point Reform Program and a national referendum. With the almost universal popular support that these moves generated, the shah once again turned to narrowing the limits of acceptable political behavior. In 1964, he gave official support to a single political party encompassing all of the elite he classed as progressive.

Building on his increased control over the political life of his nation, the shah then began to lessen and, finally, virtually to eliminate his reliance on the United States. What had initially been an absolutely necessary basis for maintaining control, had by mid-1960 become a burden with its implications of neoimperialism and foreign subservience. New commercial and aid treaties with Communist states were contracted, and these new diplomatic and economic relations were capped by a military aid pact with the Soviet Union in 1967.

Now, at last, the throne appears secure. Organized internal opposition has been decimated, while even the expression of antiregime sentiment is absent. International support for the shah's rule has been broadened to include not only the United States and its Western allies, but also the USSR and other Communist nations as well. With a firm grasp over the political process, the shah has devoted himself and Iran's continually increasing oil income to internal development. A mounting gross national product, social reforms, educational development, land distribution, and even a massive program of heavy industries have been the rewards.

But in the face of these widely admired triumphs, it is generally agreed that Mohammad Reza Shah has not located the majoritarian political base he has so ardently sought. The general support of the masses exists, but such support is an intangible base for royal strength. The single party remains an artificially nourished collectivity of office seekers. Thus, the shah maintains and continues to operate the Iranian political system only by incurring substantial political costs — costs that are largely determined by the relationship of the shahanshah to his political elite.

The basic assumption on which this study is based is that the attitudes and behavior of powerful individuals in societies whose political processes are less institutionalized within the formal structures of government are valid guides to political change. Operating on such an assumption, we have examined the course of recent political development in Iran by analyzing its political elite.

The concept of the political elite, as used in this study, is an empirical, behavioral one. No attempt was made on a priori grounds to equate the political elite with holders of official positions in Iran's government or social structure. Rather, the political elite were defined as those members of Iranian society, i.e., Iranian nationals, who exercised and possessed political power to a greater degree than other members of Iranian society. By power we mean an interpersonal relationship such that the behavior of one (or more) actor(s) alters the behavior of another (other) actor(s). By behavior is meant any change in the state of an individual from a given time to a later time. As Frey indicates, several subordinate concepts relating to "power" must be introduced. Two such concepts that are vital in this study may be mentioned. The scope of a power relationship may be considered "the set of behaviors of the influencee altered by the influencer." The domain refers to "the set of persons whose behavior [the influencer] alters within a given scope." The powerful, then, are those individuals whose behavior alters the widest scope of the largest domain, that is, the widest range of behavior of the largest set of persons within that society.

This definition of power does not yet sufficiently narrow our interests, for with it the investigator would find himself studying thespians, athletes, and others, who by being thespians and athletes do manage to alter the behavior of significant numbers of people. Rather we are interested in political power, that is, power exercised within the political system.

The meaning and nature of the political system continues to be a matter of debate even for political scientists whose legitimate concern it is considered to be. For purposes of research in Iran, the political system was defined as that pattern of interactions among actors seeking to exercise power over the allocation of values at the most comprehensive level — the national, social system level.

Another problem that confronts the wary investigator seeking to identify the politically powerful in Iran relates to the persistence or longevity of patterns of power interactions. An individual may be considered to exercise substantial power in the society-wide political system. But the power which that individual exercises may be a highly transitory phenomenon. A second individual may exercise power to a lesser extent, i.e., his power may be of a narrower scope or smaller domain or he may exercise that power over less-valued resources. But the lesser power of the latter individual may have existed over a longer time period than the greater power of the former actor. Or the lesser power of the latter may be widely perceived as likely to be efficacious for a longer period in the future than that of the former. In such a case, the less immediately powerful but politically longer lived individual may be considered more powerful for our purposes. The phenomenon of lasting political power tends to be especially relevant for the behind-the-scenes political manipulator or the archetypal civil servant. Never attaining to high or visible position, he nonetheless manages to exercise power continually.

The political elite of Iran, then, consists of those Iranians who more or less persistently exercise power over significant behaviors of large numbers of people with regard to the allocation of highly prized values in the national political system.

But how to locate these men? Initially, an attempt was made to identify the politically powerful by seeking out decision makers, those Iranians who had participated in the making of crucial political decisions in recent times. Information was sought about the land reform, oil negotiations, military pacts and aid, and the like. But such inquiry in the secretive Iranian system, which strives to disperse and mask responsibility, proved fruitless. A new approach was initiated, an approach that sought to identify the powerful by locating those with reputations for exercising such power.

First, the holders of formal position within the government were identified. Then the occupants of key social roles — doctors, tribal leaders, members of the royal family, opposition leaders — were identified and a list of three thousand "general elite" was constructed. A panel of ten persons knowledgeable about Iranian politics then attributed various levels of political power to the three thousand, and a rank ordering of these general elite was made. The 10 per cent of those who boasted the greatest reputations for political power were specified as the political elite. (See Appendix ? for a detailed account of this procedure.)

But why 10 per cent, why three hundred men? There is no especially telling answer for this question. All three thousand could have been referred to as the political elite. Equally arbitrarily we could have limited the political elite to four persons: His Imperial Majesty, the Shahanshah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; his twin sister, Her Royal Highness, the Princess Ashraf; the boyhood companion of the shah and virtually his only trusted Iranian confidant, an ex-prime minister and now minister of the Imperial Court, Assadollah Alam; and the then chief of the State Security and Intelligence Organization, General Hassan Pakravan. Of all three thousand members of the general elite, only these four were reputed to be politically very powerful by all ten of the rankers.

Three hundred were specified, not so much because a convenient cutting point fell there, but because we wished a universe large enough to allow for statements about the elite that could be considered statistically valid. Just as Tocqueville noted that the "moral authority of the majority [in America] is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual," so we sought to be able to make relevant statements about the Iranian political process on the basis of a majority of the political elite.

Coincidentally, this same figure of three hundred has been recognized before. Prior to the rule of Reza Shah, a perceptive foreign observer noted that "Persia is ruled by Tehran and Tehran is ruled by perhaps three hundred men, including the ins and outs."

In the process of identifying the most politically powerful individuals in Iran, it became clear that to speak of a single political elite is, in fact, a misreading of the realities of Iranian politics. For the power attributed to one member of the general elite was sufficient to merit assigning that individual to a category distinct from and above his fellow members of the political elite. We refer, of course, to His Imperial Majesty, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The extraordinary power that the shah is able to wield vis-à-vis any other member of the elite suggests that Iranian politics can most fruitfully be analyzed through separate but complementary investigations of the shah on the one hand and the remainder of the elite on the other.

The Iranian political process, then, constitutes a system in which the two principal actors may be considered as the shah and his political elite. The decisions of the king, the dominant political actor, directly affect the political elite. But, although unanticipated and frequently undesired by the shah, the behavior of the political elite operates as an important influence on him. There is a feedback system at work in which the shah and the elite, whose makeup he has largely determined, interact and together elaborate Iranian politics.

Once this universe of the elite was identified, the goal became to study that universe in the most productive fashion, defined as an analysis fruitful for explaining the present course of politics and for predicting the likely immediate future of politics in Iran, i.e., to analyze and explain the interactions of the shah and the elite. Plutarch long ago gave one clue as to how this might best be done:

... the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore, as portrait painters are most exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give more attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

Just as great and momentous events may be less useful indications of the souls of men, so may they be less useful than those "souls" for the kind of analysis contemplated for the elite in Iran. In a political system where institutions are not paramount but where individuals in their interactions constitute the essence of the political process, the souls of men, or their personalities, to use a more contemporary formulation, are of primary importance. So it was that in Iran insights to the personalities of the most powerful political actors and the interactions of these actors with each other were sought. As Talcott Parsons has cogently argued:

On the one hand, Freud and his followers, by concentrating on the single personality, have failed to consider adequately the implications of the individual's interactions with other personalities to form a system. On the other hand, Durkheim and the other sociologists have failed in their concentration on the social system as a system to consider systematically the implications of the fact that it is the interactions of personalities which constitutes the social system. ... Therefore, adequate analysis of motivational process in such a system must reckon with the problem of personality.

As description and explanation were the ultimate ends, an analysis that would consider both aspects of the actors' personalities as well as their interactions was contemplated. In short, we sought the "code" of the Iranian political elite.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Political Elite of Iran by Marvin Zonis. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• CONTENTS, pg. xi
• TABLES, pg. xii
• FIGURES, pg. xvi
• 1. Introduction, pg. 1
• 2. The Shahanshah of Iran and the Composition of the Political Elite, pg. 18
• 3. The Shahanshah of Iran and the Counterelite, pg. 39
• 4. The Shahanshah of Iran and the Elite, pg. 80
• 5. A Historical Perspective on the Elite Nature of Iranian Society, pg. 118
• 6. An Analysis of the Social Backgrounds of the Contemporary Political Elite, pg. 134
• 7. The Orientations of the Political Elite, I, pg. 199
• 8. The Orientations of the Political Elite, II, pg. 251
• 9. The Consequences of Elite Orientations, pg. 299
• 10. The Costs of Politics in Iran, pg. 330
• APPENDICES. BIBLIOGRAPHY. INDEX, pg. 343