The "Utopic" State: Iran, America, and the White Revolution

On January 26, 1963, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi announced the commencement of the "White Revolution.” The government spoke about it, in English, as a far-reaching series of reforms aggressively engaging modernization projects to transform Iran into a global economic and industrial power. In Persian, the government lauded the White Revolution and its projects as the means to "resurrect" ancient Persian empires in a contemporary form.

Most extant research tends to hold a binary position on this project. On the one hand, proponents of development and modernizations theories credit the Kennedy Administration and Rostow for advancing "underdeveloped" parts of the world. In Iran, they cite the program's economic growth rates, investments in infrastructure, rise in per capita wealth and literacy rates. On the other hand, critics note the problem of applying a general theory to specific locales and cite the negative results in Iran, where a great redistribution of wealth, explosive economic growth, rapid urbanization, and deconstruction of feudalist customs, among other things, enabled the Shah to monopolize power and build up the military.

This talk will look at development and modernization theories as means of achieving a developed or "utopic" state, an image the U.S. advocated in the world and in opposition to the Soviet Union's version of itself as the post-WWII ideal state. Rather than see Pahlavi engaged in phantasmal projections, this analysis assesses him through discourses of development and modernization theories. These programs were components of the Cold War and each side's "soft power" push. The argument relies not only on the Shah's speeches and writings, some dating as far back as 1936 when he was only 17 years old, but also the speeches and conversations of central bankers, like Ebtehaj, and other pivotal figures who advanced notions of taking care of Iranians "from the cradle to the grave."