Post-Vote Iran: Giving Engagement a Chance by Paolo Magri & Annalisa Perteghella

Author:Paolo Magri & Annalisa Perteghella [Magri, Paolo & Perteghella, Annalisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Geopolitics, Political Science
ISBN: 9788867056538
Google: Reg4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ledizioni
Published: 2017-01-15T12:41:57+00:00

5. EU-Iran Relations: Building Bridges in Stormy Waters

Rouzbeh Parsi

Europe and Iran have a long history of interaction, enmities, and alliances. In the last two hundred years, Europe as the preeminent continent of imperial powers has played a significant part in the construction and constitution of modern Iran. In the post-1945 world, Europe was in some ways replaced by the United States and Iranian bureaucrats, professionals, and students turned their attention across the Atlantic. The relationship between Washington and Tehran, the United States and Iran, is both competitive and co-dependent insofar that they use each other as a foil to project their fears and prejudices. This is much less true of the EU-Iran relationship, which lacks the melodramatic fair of that between Washington and Tehran, but has proven to be quite resilient and significant for both parties. Thus, exactly because the relationship between European capitals and Tehran has been less binary, whenever the latter has reached out to the world it has more often than not started with Europe. Conversely, the European approach to the Islamic Republic has always been influenced by the transatlantic relationship and, as that has varied and is currently changing significantly, Europe needs to ask itself what kind of relationship it wants to have with a close regional power like Iran.

Background: History of Iran-EU relations

Most Western European countries had a good relationship with the Pahlavi monarchy. This was both due to the general alliance with the United States and against the Soviet Union, but also because of the Shah’s eager purchase of European goods and technology. The Revolution changed all of this, and the shock and disappointment with the Islamic Republic were as much about the cruelty of “revolutionary justice” as it was about the ostensible contradiction of a religious Revolution. Iran went from being a model example of modernization and Westernization to what seemed to be a paradoxical experiment in medieval political thought wrought on a society undergoing progress as understood in the West. On the other side of this expanding divide, the revolutionaries also liked to define themselves as the very opposite of the West (primarily the US but also European countries). For some, this stance was primarily informed by the Islamist ideology, for others it was about anti-imperialism. Both strands were welded together by the group around Khomeini that took the reins of power after having eliminated their former comrade in arms on the left. Khomeini’s motto “neither East nor West” came out of a quasi-colonial experience stretching back a century but was also a harbinger of a defiant positioning that increasingly was about the outside world not wanting to go near Iran more than the other way around. Thus, the revolutionaries may have used this banner to signal their willingness to upend all the rules of international order and behavior but they soon discovered the immense cost of such disruptive politics and rhetoric. The war initiated by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in September 1980 lasted for eight years, and the willingness of the world to look on sanguinely left a deep mark of suspicion and resentment among decision makers in Tehran.

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