Why the Iranian middle class is the key to regime change–and how we can help them
February 14, 2007 by Will
A recent article on Slate provided an apt metaphor for the crisis facing nations and individuals opposed to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The article’s author, Jacob Weisberg describes two clocks, one representing the time before Iran obtains nuclear weapons, the other counting the time before a revolution overthrows Ahmadinejad and the clerics supporting him. The dilemma for the international community is figuring out how to speed up the second clock while slowing down the first.
It’s an apt metaphor, and one to keep in mind as Iran’s nuclear pursuit intensifies. What Weisberg neglects to mention in his talk of revolutions, though, is the crucial role the Iranian middle class must play in ending the Iran’s religious oligarchy. Only a brief look at history demonstrates that revolutions based on bourgeois discontent are most successful, and suggests how this newest Iranian revolution might come about.
The French Revolution is the prototypical example of bourgeois discontent converting itself into violent insurrection. Angered by the king and the nobility’s corrupt policies and expensive foreign wars, the representatives of the Third Estate seceded from the clergy’s and nobility’s chambers, setting the stage for a transformation that shook Europe.
The revolution turned gruesome when the extremist factions, backed by the peasants, began to take more active roles. The French Revolution suggests that, whatever course a new Iranian revolution eventually takes, its legitimacy and leadership will spring from the country’s extensive, educated middle class.
Across the Atlantic ocean, another revolution was occuring on French territory. The colonists of Saint-Domingue, angered by the new revolutionary government’s vacillations regarding racial equality and overseas autonomy, began a rebellion that would eventually create Haiti, only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. While the rebellion was soon taken over by slaves, it began when Creole colonists in Saint-Domingue began demanding rights equal to their white counterparts.
As Laurent Dubois documents in Avenges of the New World, the Creoles made up a freed middle class between the slaves and white colonists. Placed between the grossly disadvantaged and hideously corrupt, the Creoles were best able to see that the promises of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man extended to all races. In the same way, Iran’s middle classes are best placed to extend human rights to all Iranians, because they enjoy more material and intangible advantages than less-privileged Iranians, but they are not committed to the current system like the clerical aparatchiks.
The final revolution I think bears a resemblance to the current situation in Iran is, appropriately, the last Iranian revolution. While images from the revolution that appeared in the West conveyed angry masses activated by radical Islam and led by, among others, a young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The reality of the revolution is more nuanced. While many Islamist factions did participate, the Iranian bourgeois were also a powerful force in pressuring the Shah’s dictatorship. Marjane Satrapi’s landmark graphic novel series Persepolis depicts a middle class family’s pain at watching the revolution’s promise squandered in religious decrees and the Iran-Iraq War. In the last regime change, the Iranian middle class were content to allow the fundamentalists to take the risks and lose their sons and daughters to repression, hoping that they would be able to marginalize the clerics once the fighting ended. This time, they won’t be so naive.
If the clock of bourgeois revolution must eventually run down, the international community and like-minded individuals should focus their efforts on bringing that day about. While the Security Council struggles to decide on “smart” sanctions that won’t inadvertently strengthen Ahmadinejad, a variety of actions are available to all people no matter how far they live from Tehran or New York. The Iranian blog community continues to expose the clerical regime’s excesses and oppression, despite repeated, sometimes violent interference from the government. Reading and sharing their information encourages the Iranian majority, demonstrating that they have allies abroad.
Perhaps the best weapon against the clerical regime is one that worked so successively against apartheid South Africa and is weakening the will of Sudan’s genocidal leadership: divestment. A targeted divestment campaign that encourages companies to stop investing in companies owned or run by officials in the Iranian government. Ahmadinejad lives like an ascetic, but his supporters certainly don’t.
Whatever methods are used to hasten the downfall of Ahmadinejad and his allies, the inevitable revolution will be brought about by an alliance between Iran’s middle and lower classes and international supporters. It’s comforting to know Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won’t be in power for hour, but remember: the first clocking is ticking, too.
