Unity or Discord
Unity or Discord
Six months after the inauguration of the president who chose the name ‘National Unity’ for his government, we are witnessing a comprehensive imbalance in various political, social, and economic fields.
The defeated faction in the presidential election, which due to various reasons still holds more decisive power than the elected government, presents itself as a claimant and a demander, in a way that is not satisfied with anything less than a full return to the pure position of purification.
The Emergence of National Unity
The unsuccessful and crisis-inducing experience of uniform politics imposed a crisis of efficiency and legitimacy, and consequently, conflict and hostility on the public sphere of domestic and foreign politics, to the extent that the gap between the nation and the government, as evidenced by the participation rate in the pre-fourteenth presidential election, reached its highest level in the history of the Islamic Republic.
In the absence of the possibility of reformative and national politicking, the domestic extreme right in the position of power and the monarchist extreme right in the opposition imposed a radical contest over the country’s political situation. The totalitarianism of the extreme right gave hope to the overthrow-seeking faction for radical and revolutionary actions.
The reformists, however, amid the conflict and the tug-of-war between uniformity and overthrow-seeking, supported Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian as a hinge between the nation and the government, under the idea of reform from within, and made the stalemate and crisis in uniformity, and the impossibility and undesirability of overthrow-seeking, the prelude to their new reformative politicking.
Unity After Establishment
After the fourteenth government came to power and unveiled the concept of National Unity, the political sphere of the country witnessed diverse representations and narratives of it. This concept, like other concepts, is heavily influenced by the political context, motives, and the political psychology of those using the discourses and political factions present in the political arena, theorists, and affects everything that has been involved in shaping politics and the political matter in Iran.
Understanding the concept of National Unity without considering the context and the discourse that produced it is an incomplete, misleading, and paradoxical understanding. It wasn’t long before National Unity in the political arena shifted from issue-focused agreement and efforts to solve the country’s problems to agreement and coalition with the rival and forming a shared cabinet.
The author considers two interpretations of National Unity presented by two prominent political science professors, Dr. Mohammad Mehdi Mojahedi and Dr. Abolfazl Dalavari, as definitions arising from the requirements and needs of normalizing politics in the country. Mojahedi writes in defining National Unity that it is the same strategic socio-political program that, by synergizing exhausting conflicts among divergent forces and converging forces within society and government and linking between government and society, provides the condition for solving Iran’s problems at a strategic level.
Dalavari defines Dr. Pezeshkian’s victory as the result of the conscious action of all political forces, including decision-makers in the governance system, civil society actors, and the people, and considers a return to politics and adherence to the discourse of reconciliation and reform as the requirement of the current conditions. However, what appeared in the political arena was something else.
Unity Against Politics and the Political Matter
Retreating from a narrative that defined National Unity as issue-focused agreement for solving national issues to a narrative that prioritized overcoming political disputes emptied National Unity of its political content, namely reconciliation and reform, and pushed it towards transformation and retreat. The concession of significant parts of the executive power to the rival faction not only did not create a place and field for issue-focused agreement but also allowed opponents of the reconciliation and reform-seeking narrative to dominate the unity.
Using Chantal Mouffe’s agonistics, it can be said that the narrative not oriented towards politics and the political matter from National Unity is an anti-political, unrealistic, transformative narrative that, ironically, will add to the bile of blockage, anti-development crises, and dangers.
In another language, perhaps reconciliation efforts to overcome agonism and not recognizing the system of difference and competition under the title ‘we are not quarrelsome’ is erasing the political issue, and in Agamben’s language, it may lead to a kind of eliminative integration or integrative elimination, emboldening the uniformists to push back the advocates of unity, as they know no limit to the destruction and elimination and transformation of unity, as the great Saadi says:
If the sweet doll does not sit sour, her claimants will covet the sweet.
Turning a blind eye to the agonistic, competitive, and contentious nature of politics not only does not lead to overcoming disputes but also guides politics from competition to antagonism, conflict, and blind radicalism.
Generalizing society will neither be achieved through uniformity nor through anti-political unity. Both these anti-political paths will put a big lock on the door of politics, as Stanisław Jerzy Lec, the Polish physicist and diplomat, says there are words so big that they are so empty that entire nations can be enslaved in them. This one-dimensional narrative of politics, on the one hand, overlooks the Janus face of politics, which considers conflict and compromise as two sides of the face of the god of politics.
Strong Society and Strong Government
When the rule of political knowledge and its various experiences is that division, difference, agonism, multiplicity, variability, and diversity are unrootable, efforts for purification, homogenization, and eliminating the space of competition and politics will lead nowhere. However, unity politics can, while accepting and recognizing these dynamic social traits, pursue issue-focused problem-solving.
Unity at the top, for managing the increasing adversities and dangers of politics, as long as it is on the path of normalization and overcoming the consequences of exceptionalism, can be part of the normalization process, provided that eliminating the dynamics of politics is not on the agenda.
Artificial, imposed, and one-dimensional unity, inattentive to what is happening beneath the surface of politics below and in society, as it responds to the desires and wills oriented towards the power of political poles and factions that have brought the country to this state instead of responding to political demands, will lead nowhere.
Passive unity to eliminate what is called a dispute not only does not eliminate the dispute and conflict but ironically causes the anti-national current to become bolder, eliminating agonism and the grounds for political competition, securitizing politics, and sliding politics from agonism to antagonism and conflict.
Transition to National Politicking
Max Weber, in a passage from his profound writing titled ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ considers politics a hard and slow passage through coarse and difficult obstacles, a passionate and simultaneously measured transition.
He defines these traits of politics not for becoming hopeless and giving up on politics but for becoming hopeful for the future and through the passage of political action, and writes, ‘It is entirely correct, and all historical experience confirms it, that if there had not been someone who previously dreamed of achieving the impossible and pursued it with determination in the world, what is possible today would never have become possible.’
But for this task, an individual must be a leader and pioneer, and not only a leader and pioneer but also, in the very precise sense of the word, a hero, and even those who are neither leaders nor pioneers nor heroes must be so brave and daring that their hearts do not tremble even at the collapse of all hopes.
These traits are necessary even today, otherwise, even what is possible and within reach today will not be achieved. Only someone has the mettle for politicking who is sure that if the world ever seems too foolish and petty for what he has in mind, he will still not give up.
Only someone has the mettle for politicking who, despite all this, can still say on such a day, ‘Despite all this.’ Translation by Professor Mohammad Mehdi Mojahedi of a passage from Max Weber’s article.
Our country’s political sphere, despite all this, includes deep transformations compared to the past, a new arrangement in global and regional arenas, and the needs and requirements of the context and time demand national and courageous statesmen who, instead of ignoring politics, take responsible politicking centered on dear Iran’s national interests and matters. This path is neither, as some supporters of Pezeshkian say, resignation and withdrawal, which is a joint project of the domestic and foreign extreme right, nor the imposition of a transformative narrative, but the revival of national and reformative politics and effective action based on practical interests.
The atmosphere is pregnant with various events, and overcoming the dangers requires big and grand decisions.
However, the political atmosphere is very ambiguous and distorted.
As Lichtenberg, one of the shining figures of the Enlightenment in Germany, brought in a metaphor of what was happening in France, ‘In France, the barrels are boiling; whether the result will be wine or vinegar is unknown.’
