THE GREEN MOVEMENT: HARBINGER OF A NEW DEMOCRACY

Abstract

In its tormented history of modernization, Iran has undergone three distinct types of social movement: the proto-democratic, the anti-democratic, and the democratic movements. The Constitutional Revolution is the paragon of the proto-democratic movement in which the democratic ideas had lost their luster in a mist of traditional or fundamentalist notions of governance. The Nationalist Movement of 1950s under the leadership of Mohammad Mossadegh can safely be considered the same type. An anti-democratic social movement emerged with the 1961 bloody demonstrations in Qom and Tehran against Shah’s “white revolution,” particularly its land reform and women’s rights projects. Nearly two decades later, the movement morphed into the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Slightly more than a decade later, the era of democratic movements is ushered in first by university   students’ bloody agitation against the Islamic republic and then by the Green Movement of 2009. These movements opposed the Islamic radicalism that emerged in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s during the authoritarian Pahlavi rule.