The Role of Nationalism in Arab-Iranian Relations: Historical and Ideological Dimensions

Abstract

For the last decades Iran has been playing significant role in Middle Eastern politics. Tehran’s rooted involvement in Arab’s political environments provokes tensions and hostilities in Arab-Iranian relations. The author believes that historical legacy of Arab-Iranian interactions has been still determined some important characteristics of Arab-Iranian relations. In this article the author investigates the role of nationalism and national building process in Arab countries and Iran. He shows that the rise of national movement and emergence of new nation-states based on different ideological principals and theoretical models politicized historical Arab-Iranian ethnic and sectarian differences and cultural rivalries. The author studies how developments of various forms of nationalism in Arab countries and Iran, their approaches to national state building affected their relations. The author considers that both Arabs and Iran have been challenged the internal political dynamics and regional transformations were forced to instrumentalized nationalism as a protective tool to secure and legitimize their state suzerainty, establish their presence and provide their interests in the region. In practice, regards their historical territorial, ethnic, religious disputes, both Arabs and Iran frequently exaggerated Iranian threats to Arabism and overestimated Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism as Arab’s ambitions for regional leadership. These fears converted into real politic have spoiled Arab Iranian relations. The author stresses that emphasizing on Islamic feelings at the expense of particular nationalism in Iran after Islamic revolution in 1979 and giving up secular ideas in favor of Islamism in Arab countries after the “Arab Spring” brought neither reconciliation, nor normalization in the Arab-Iranian relations. The author pays special attention to the dynamic of Iranian nationalism in view of the developments in power mechanism of Tehran’s politics in the Middle East.