Three-stage periodization of the history of nationalism of Miroslav Hroch as an "ideal model" and the prospects for its application to Iranian historical studies

Kyrchanoff Maksym Waler'evich ORCID: 0000-0003-3819-3103 Doctor of History Voronezh State University, Associate Professor of the Department of Regional Studies and Economics of Foreign Countries, Faculty of International Relations; Associate Professor of the Department of History of Foreign Countries and Oriental Studies, Faculty of History; ResearcherID: B-8694-2017; Scopus Author ID: 57193934324 394077, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, Pushkinskaya str., 16, office 236 maksymkyrchanoff@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction. The historiography of nationalism at the present stage of its development belongs to the dynamically developing areas of historical knowledge, which is ensured both by interdisciplinarity and by the active use of the historiographical heritage represented by classical texts that form the modernist trend in the study of nationalism. ^{[1; 2; 3; 4]}. One of the strengths of modernist historiography is a detailed analysis of the processes of social, cultural and political transformation of modernizing communities that became nations. Ideal models widely applied to the modernist historiography of nationalism have become an important tool in this type of analysis.  Among such ideal historiographical constructs, a special place is occupied by the model of the Czech historian M. Hroh ^{[5; 6]}, who proposed a three-stage periodization of the history of nationalism, claiming universality.

The purpose of the article is to analyze nationalist modernization as a political and cultural imagination of the Iranian elites in the context of the ideal model of social transformations described by M. Khrokh, within the framework of his three-stage periodization of nationalism. The objectives of the article are limited to studying the genesis of Iranian nationalism in the Qajar period as part of the main attempts to transplant the principles of Western nationalism into the political imperial project of Iran of the XIX century, and also analyzing the unsuccessful nationalist modernization of Pahlavi in the context of three stages in the history of nationalism formulated by M. Khrokh.

The historiography of Iranian nationalism is significant and has a number of features. At the present stage, the Western historiography of nationalism in Iran is dominated by modernism, which explains nationalism as a consequence of political and cultural modernization ^{[7; 8]}. Similar trends determine the main directions of the analysis of nationalism in the studies of Western authors of Iranian origin ^{[9; 10; 11]}. The Russian historiography is dominated by an integrated approach, which studies both the history and the current state of Iranian nationalism, including its various manifestations in the field of ideology, politics and culture ^{[12; 13]}. Unfortunately, a significant part of Russian authors avoid turning to methodological aspects in the framework of the study of Iranian nationalism. The peculiarities of the adaptation of the modernist canon and its transformation in Iranian historical contexts in historiography are among the practically unexplored problems ^{[14; 15; 16]}. Modern modernism, claiming the status of a universal methodological language for the study of nationalism, can give "an opportunity for researchers not to limit themselves to a false alternative between a monocausal-oriented scientific scheme and an aestheticizing deviation from it" [17. C. 27], although a significant part of the works on the problems of the history of Iranian nationalism still tend to reproduce monocausal forms of early historiography.

Proceeding from the fundamental ideas of the modernist historiography of nationalism, the author in the presented article defines the attempt of the nationalist project in Iran as unsuccessful due to the influence of two factors – the Islamic Revolution, which established the Islamist regime and the subsequent marginalization of nationalism by the new elites, for whom the values of the Ummah were more important than the principles of the nation, which is manifested in the official political discourse of Iran, presented in the texts of the leader of the revolution, Imam Khomeini, who put the solidarity of the Muslim Ummah at the international level above the principles of previous Iranian nationalism, arguing that "the Muslims of the world should realize their plight and its origins, free themselves from the shackles of colonialism through comprehensive unity and reliance on Islam under its glorious banner ... eliminating their intellectual dependence on the West, finding their culture and identity, recognizing the progressive culture of Islam… We accept the nation only in the shadow of the teachings of Islam" ^[18], in fact questioning and rejecting the universals of nationalism based on the primacy of the idea of the nation. 

Three-stage periodization of the history of M. Khrokh's nationalism in Iranian contexts. According to M. Khrokh, every nationalism in its history goes through three stages. Stage A is marked by the active development of national culture, which entails more active use of the local language and attempts to standardize it, introduce it into education and management – at this stage, interest in the nation is marked not by political, but mainly cultural and folklore interest. Analyzing the model of M. Khrokh, it should be recognized that the possibilities of its transplantation into Iranian contexts seem more doubtful than the prospects of applying the modernist historiography of nationalism as a whole, even despite the latter's tendency to construct history with the help of ideal types.

M. Khrokh's attempts to link the history of nationalism, limiting its European experience to Central and Eastern Europe, are generally based on ignoring non-Western nationalisms, which is in principle normal for M. Khrokh, who was not a professional orientalist. This factor reinforces the controversial application of M. Khrokh's concept to study the history of Iranian nationalism. Ali Morshedizad believes that the development of nationalism in Iran proceeded discretely, which makes Western modernism as a whole, based on a comprehensive analysis of political, social, cultural and economic factors, more applicable than chronologically determined attempts to periodize M. Khrokh. In this situation, it is quite understandable why a significant part of the works of Western historians of Iranian origin analyzing the problems of the history of nationalism in Iran belongs to modernist historiography ^{[19; 20]}. M. Khrokh's scheme does not integrate well into the historiographical realities of Iran due to the fact that the question of the time of the emergence of a nation-state in Iran does not have a single answer, and in historiography there are attempts to abandon the perception of nationalism as a product of modernity, while Iranian historians in exile prefer to work within the framework of that modernist paradigm ^{[21; 22]}, to which belong the texts of the classics of the interdisciplinary study of nationalism, including M. Khrokh himself.

According to Adib Borumand, the dating of the emergence of nationalism in Iran is due to the fact that nationalism is perceived by him as a political ideology of a democratic orientation. Manifestations of nationalism according to A. Borumand in Iranian history can be detected simultaneously with manifestations of what he refers to as democracy. A. Borumand believes that nationalism is incompatible with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, insisting that "the weakening of Iranian nationalism began under the late Sassanids" ^[23]. Within the framework of this interpretation of nationalism, the Qajar and Pahlavi eras are automatically excluded from its history, since the regimes of that time, according to A. Borumand, were not democratic, which actualizes the complex relations of Iranian historiography with Western nationalism studies, since most European and American historians tend to reduce the history of nationalism to two or three centuries [which is characteristic, including for M. Khrokh], and Iranian intellectuals seek to exclude the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties from the history of nationalism, since the moderate and radical modernization projects carried out by them do not correlate with the ideological preferences of the regime. 

Another Iranian historian, Ali Morshedizad, believes that "if you ask when a national state was formed in Iran, that is, a state built on a national basis, there are two points of view on this question. Some believe that it originated in the Safavid era, whose most important task was to distinguish between Iranian and Ottoman identities… The Safavids created the very idea of national unity in the country. According to the second point of view, the Safavid state lacked the characteristics of a national state. From this point of view, the nation-state was generated by the idea of nationalism, and real nationalism arose in Iran with the beginning of the post-constitutional era. If we consider the problem based on the modern form of nationalism, we must remember that the nation–state in Iran is a late phenomenon and Reza Shah should be considered one of the architects of the nation-state in Iran. The idea of nationalism arose as a result of the interaction with Iran from Europe and the presence of Iranian students there" ^[24]. In these reflections on the specifics of the genesis of nationalism in Iran, Ali Morshedizad is actually trying to assimilate the ideas of Western historiographical modernism and integrate them into Iranian historical and cultural contexts.

The model of the Czech historian is characterized by a tendency to excessive idealization of the studied problem. M. Khrokh's version of the history of nationalism, which claims to conceptualize the problem, is to a certain extent flawed, since it deals with the transformation of individual groups from minority communities into nations, which ignores the factor of the multi-component imperial model of statehood. The starting conditions of the nationalist transformation described by M. Khrokh are also applicable to the early history of Iranian nationalism, if, of course, we recognize that they proceeded simultaneously and in parallel among various groups of a multi-component society ^[25].

The transplantation of M. Khrokh's concept into the Iranian context is doubtful, since the Czech historian described the processes of the development of nationalism of minority unequal groups of multi-component societies in the process of their evolution from empire to nation-state. In the Iranian case, M. Khrokh's model can only be applied to analyze, for example, Azerbaijani nationalism. Stage B is associated with the politicization of intellectual groups and communities that arose in the previous period – therefore, more active nationalists appear, not only propagandizing their ideas among the population, but also the struggle for political rights begins, which actualizes the slogans of territorial autonomy, and later sovereignty in the form of a national state, which was perceived by Iranian intellectuals as part of the following interpretation model: if under the Qajars the very idea of a nation-state was synonymous with constitutionalism, then under the Pahlavi civil nationalism was largely supplanted by ethnic nationalism due to the fact that "in the process of nation-building, they Muhammad Reza Pahlavi prevented the realization of the concept of nationalism among social and political forces" ^[26], that is, reduced the idea of a nation-before the idea of ethnicity, which was legitimized not by society and democratic procedures, but by the dynasty itself and loyalty to it on the part of Iranians.

The events that M. Khrokh associates with the course of stage B in the history of Iranian nationalism are largely correlated with those processes that took place in the structure of Iranian elites in the XIX century ^[27], since the political class not only became both an object and an agent of modernization, but also underwent a certain nationalization within the framework of the early modernity project which, in the case of Persia, consisted in attempts at national and state consolidation of a country with an Iranian majority ruled by a dynasty of Turkic origin ^[28].  In the Persian case of the development of nationalism in the XIX century, the politicization of the elites was an attempt to integrate them into the national canon of identity, which at the same time did not exclude the simultaneous and parallel coexistence of two ethnicities – Iranian and Turkic – among the representatives of the elites.

The processes that M. Khrokh dated to stage B in Iran did not end with the political departure of the Qajars, but continued under Pahlavi. Iranian nationalism actualizes both the problems of discreteness, prolongation of the stages described by M. Khrokh, as well as certain chronologically shifts that manifested themselves in the course of similar modernization processes associated, for example, with changes in the identity of elites and their political culture over several stages. The nationalist mission of certain cultural institutions in Iran, for example, literature ^[29], could also not be limited only to Stage A and B, being more prolonged in chronological perspective.

Stage C is marked by the creation and subsequent development of relatively complete social structures that acquire a universal character relative to a certain society, the universal form of organization of which becomes a nation, including not only intellectual communities, but social classes, to varying degrees affected by nationalism as a mass movement, the ultimate goal of which is the creation of an independent state. The success of nationalism at the last stage described by M. Khrokh is associated with the modernization and universalization of the nation-state as a product of modernity, but the Iranian situation is complicated by the fact that elements of modernization are noticeable in the social, cultural and economic realities of Iran throughout all three stages proposed by M. Khrokh, which was a consequence of the fact that Iran in the XIX century the century turned into a "dependent non-colonial" country, the main form of social change in which was the authoritarian model of modernization, which, according to Jamshid Behnam ^[30], could become "a prelude to modernization, but this did not happen ... at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century, Iran's dependence on the West was based on concessions loans, the presence of foreign advisers ... but Iranians, unlike the inhabitants of other similar countries, have never felt worse than the inhabitants of Western states and were not afraid of losing their cultural identity" ^[31].

Analyzing the peculiarities of Iranian nationalism, one should take into account the difficulties of assimilation of the three-stage concept of M. Khrokh and the tendency of Iranian historians to operate with interpretations of nationalism that are more correlated with his English-language historiography ^{[32; 33]}. Ali Morshedizad's attempt to localize in the intellectual history of nationalism to a greater extent not chronological stages, but various political forms of the nationalist idea (the ethnic nationalism of Reza Shah and Mahmoud Afshar, the political nationalism of Seyed Hassan Taghizadeh and the civil nationalism of Mohammad Mosaddegh ^[24]) indicates that historians of Iran are more attracted to non-specific chronological "bindings", but the processes associated with transplants of cultural and social institutions in the context of modernization. Nationalism in Iranian historiography is interpreted as broadly as possible as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon along with "humanities and social sciences that have a prescriptive nature, being created to prescribe values to society and treat its pains" ^[34], which reduces possible explanations of nationalism, cutting off politically and ideologically motivated issues related to its crisis and the victory of the Islamic revolutions.

Iranian nationalism was forced to maneuver between "Iranian, Islamic and Western history and culture", which made it possible at an early stage of modernization and institutionalization of the "nationalist identity" ^[35] initiated by Pahlavi, various forms of manifestation of "Iranism of intellectuals such as Mirza Fatah Ali Akhundzade and Mirza Aga Khan Kermani, who exaggerating antiquity" which actualized the "predominantly anti-Arab and even anti-Islamic character and coloring" of nationalism, while other intellectuals "sought to adapt their nationalist, liberal and modernist tendencies to the principles and laws of Islamic religious law," which allowed them to preserve "nationalist and modernist ideas, distancing themselves from extreme fascination with antiquity and Westernism" ^[36]. 

The experience of social and economic transformations ^[37] of the Qajar and Pahlavi period, if we perceive them in the categories of the three stages of the periodization of M. Khrokh, were unlikely without the social changes that traditional institutions ^[38] underwent earlier, forcibly integrated into the conditions of a new modernizing society, where the nation becomes the main form of political organization. Iranian historians, analyzing the phenomenon of nationalism, use Western interpretative models ^{[39; 40]}, but question the universality of the principles of nationalism, explaining this by the significant specifics of Iran, which nationalism, introduced from Europe, was unable to assimilate. Among the main social and cultural barriers that prevented the establishment of the principles of nationalism in Iran, the conflict between supporters of radical nationalist modernization and Shiite theologians is mentioned ^{[41; 42]}, the imitative nature of nationalism, the inability of the formally national government, created for the first time under Pahlavi, to really protect the sovereignty of Iran.

The anti-modern orientation of the Iranian historical narrative should not be absolutized, since some Iranian historians still recognize the universality of nationalism as "the ideology of a nation that emphasizes the sovereignty of a nation over its destiny," pointing out that "Iranian nationalism with its two-century history has turned into an inevitable double of Iranian modernity" ^[43]. In this political situation, Iranian nationalism has become a hostage and victim of accelerated social and cultural modernization, the blame for the beginning of which is laid on Reza Shah ^[43]. Maryam Parvin emphasizes that such nationalism was a de facto dichotomy, which, on the one hand, was based on nostalgia "about Iran's past, especially its pre-Islamic past," and, on the other, "the democratic concept of the rule of law and the power of citizens" ^[36].

The genesis of Iranian nationalism proceeded under the conditions of the genesis of constitutionalism ^[44], which in Iranian conditions became an early attempt to institutionalize the project of modernity ^[45], on the one hand, and the crisis of the imperial model of development, on the other, "caused by the confrontation of traditional Iran with modernity, which crystallized among the elites, among Iranian statesmen and intellectuals in the form of modernist politics" ^[45]. Another manifestation of the duality of nationalism was expressed in its early anti-colonial orientation, which gradually mutated into an internal political protest against tyranny. This duality in the history of nationalism, which in Iranian cultural realities was at the center of discussions between traditionalists and modernists, led to the fact that "during the reign of Reza Shah, the nationalist approach turned into a deplorable archaism based on the contempt of Arabs and Turks, which gradually overshadowed the democratic concept of nationalism, which is based at least partially on the idea of civil rights lies" ^[36].

In Iranian historiography, it is assumed that "arrogance and xenophobia were the product of Iranian nationalism, and yet intellectuals are still fascinated by this nationalism... the further we go, the more Iranian nationalism distances itself from modernity ... sick nationalism continues to fascinate Iranian intellectuals with its imaginary charm" ^[46]. The three-stage model of M. Khrokh is more applicable to the history of minority groups in Iran. If we abandon the rigid chronological binding in the allocation of the stages described by M. Khrokh, then certain elements of the nationalist political, cultural and intellectual practices recorded by him may well be found in the history of Iranian nationalism both during the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, which indicates an accelerated repetition by non-European nationalisms of the stages that could have passed European.

While some Iranian historians associate the emergence of nationalism with attempts at early modernization initiated by the Qajars, others, on the contrary, tend to reduce the genealogy of Iranian nationalism to the Pahlavi period, believing that Reza Shah actually became "a practicing translator of nationalism that intellectuals wanted" ^[46], using European, primarily German, cultural and social models of the construction of national identity. Such "long" and "short" genealogies of the history of nationalism in the modern historiography of Iran indicate that Iranian historians have succeeded in assimilating the classical theories of nationalism of Western historiography, which are transplanted into studies focused on Iranian issues ^{[47; 48]}. If we transplant the three stages described by M. Khrokh into Iranian contexts, then these stages actualize their state of discreteness and inconsistency, as well as the repetition of the same nationalist modernization practices by different political regimes.

Conclusions. Analyzing the history of Iranian nationalism through the prism of M. Khrokh's theoretical model, it is necessary to take into account the limitations of its possible intellectual intervention in Iranian cultural contexts due to two factors. M. Khrokh describes relatively successful nationalisms that were not only able to launch the mechanisms of nationalist modernization, but also to build a nation-state as a civil category. The possibility of using the concept of the Czech historian to analyze nationalism post factum seems doubtful, since M. Hroh operated mainly with concrete examples of the development of nationalism, but not with later cultural and intellectual reflections and politically motivated speculations about this or that nationalism, as well as the consequences of the institutionalization of the nationalist project.

The possible transplantation of M. Khrokh's model of ideal chronology into Iranian historical contexts seems productive in the context of explaining the failure of the nationalist project in Iran, since the differences between the three stages from the Czech historian's concept lie in the plane of the social history of simultaneous coexistence and parallel co-functioning of extremely powerful institutions that actualized both the project of modernity and the values and principles of tradition. The three-stage model of M. Khrokh actualizes both continuity and discreteness in the history of Iranian nationalism, making more visible the role of such a traditional institution as the Ummah, which turned out to be more successful in contrast to the political nation in its Western civil sense.

It is necessary to recognize the limitations of classical modernist theories of nationalism, starting from the fact that modernism as a paradigm, although it claims to be universal, the attempts to periodize the history of nationalism proposed by M. Khrokh have much in common with the social and economic history of Iran, analyzing which we can use a wide range of sources, without limiting ourselves to the extremes of imaginative and inventoristic turns in historiography. In this context, the three-stage periodization of the history of nationalism by M. Khrokh seems to be more scientific in comparison with the concepts used by the postmodern historiography of nationalism.

Our analysis of the success of Iranian nationalism in the context of social, cultural and historical dynamics, thus, indicates that further study of the history of nationalist modernization in Iran is not only necessary and relevant, but promising in terms of integration into the number of approaches used in Iranian studies, methodological languages of Western modernist historiography at the subject to their integration into broad contexts of interdisciplinarity.

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