“Neither Eastern nor Western, Iranian”: How the Quest for Self-Sufficiency Helped Shape Iran’s Modern Nationalism

Abstract

This essay identifies an historically-enduring Iranian insistence on self-sufficiency—which can be summed up, in a superordinate manner, as the idea that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. Economically, this insistence is reflected in a (rhetorical) quest for self-reliance in production; politically, it tends to be articulated in an instinctive anti-(neo)colonial, often defiant stance vis-à-vis the world; and culturally, it is often expressed as a claim to civilizational grandeur, indeed uniqueness. The origins of this conceit have to be sought in antecedents combining economic perceptions with cultural assumptions that long precede Western imperialism and modern nationalism. These, in turn, are grounded in patterns of thought that reflect specific pre-modern physical and geopolitical conditions which go back to pre-Islamic notions of paradisiacal abundance as much as to economic realities encapsulated by Aristotle’s idea(l) of the self-sufficient household. I also argue that the notion evolved over time even as it retained its moral core. What was an instinctive dismissal of the outside world as dispensable, after 1800 became a self-conscious stance against foreign encroachment, real or imagined. In the course of the twentieth century, a quest for material autarky coupled with an insistence on cultural exceptionalism became an integral part of modern Iranian nationalism.