Introduction

With just a few weeks to the Presidential elections in June in Iran, it is appropriate time to both re-examine the approaches to democracy and provide a theoretical-empirical survey of the process of democratization in today’s Iran.  The proponents of democracy in Iran are well-served to consider the nuances and complexities of “democratic rule” as well as the various internal, regional, and international factors which serve to promote or hamper the democratization process in Iran. What is certain, however, is the theoretical imperative to shun simple-minded generalizations often substituting themselves for an insightful understanding of the problems of Iranian democracy.

Part One: Deliberative Democracy: A Theoretical Survey

It goes without saying that a democratic movement seeking to establish its raison d'etre, rule of people, should be theoretically equipped, and sophisticated enough, to map out its vision of the "good society" and proper form of government in advance, for otherwise it will be helplessly caught in the concrete exigencies of its historical movement.  The advantage of a (meta)theoretical perspective with respect to the burning questions of tactics and strategy should not be overlooked either.  All in all, democratic praxis is intimately bound with a constant theoretical endeavor aimed at not just theoretically framing action but also to make sure that theory does not remain ossified as a passive background and that, instead, receives proper nourishment from action.  In other words, the dialectics of this praxis requires keeping open and critical eyes toward theory. 

            If the above cautionary word applies to all social and political movements, it is even more so with respect to democratic movements such as the one under study here, not the least as a result of the unfinished business of democratic theory (ies).  For, despite a rich and highly sophisticated literature dating back to Plato and Aristotle, fundamental disagreements regarding democracy reflecting alternative conceptualizations and democratic modelings remain.  Is democracy a purely political or comprehensive politico-economic phenomenon? Is it possible without meaningful equality? Is democracy, particularly the modern version(s), compatible with a non-market economy?  And what are the prerequisite institutions of a democratic system?

            For the sake of brevity, I will dispense with providing yet another summary of the established theories or paradigms of democracy and their disagreements with each other, focusing instead on selected issues deemed helpful for our main purpose here, namely, to shed lights on the questions of democracy in Iran by clarifying some fundamental ambiguities concerning democracy.

            A group of theorists have correctly emphasized the link between economy and political democracy.  Lipset and Touraine have pointed at the correlation between economic and political "modernization," similarly arguing that the market economy is a necessary, though not sufficient, precondition for democracy.[1]  Between the two, Touraine's writings seem more relevant to the Iranian milieu, particularly his views that absolutist thoughts pose the most serious threats to democracy, and that "it is always difficult to distinguish between the democratic spirit and revolutionary action because within every social movement there slumbers a social countermovement."[2] To add to his latter insight, the distinction between the two can be measured ideologically, that is, the extent to which revolutionary action is informed and led by democratic or anti-democratic view points or, to put it more grandiosely, weltanschauung.  Indeed, Touraine himself leads us to this insight by focusing on dangers to democracy posed by what he calls "extreme images of the social order" causing "belief antagonism" and "conflicting values and democracy." 

            Implicit in Touraine is a debunking of the notion, holding sway among many political theorists, that democracy and liberalism are distinct and should not be conflated.  Alexis de Tocqueville's keen insight on the authoritarian streak of American democracy (of early Nineteenth Century)  is a formidable support of this notion -- the latter  nowadays finds expression in such distinctions as between "liberal" and "populist" democracies,  or "strong" and "weak" democracies.[3]  Yet, theoretically speaking, these distinctions can be deceiving, insofar as they operate on liberal normative assumptions about democracy underlying the arguments they generate on the "imperfect" examples, e.g., Brazilian 'undemocratic means" to democracy.[4] 

            This does not mean jumping to the conclusion, as Francis Fukuyama has, regarding the universalization of liberal-democratic paradigm in today's post-Cold War context.[5]  In fact, Fukuyama can be faulted for underestimating or ignoring the significant disparities of democratic experiences world-wide while, simultaneously, deducing a telos or common disembarking station, for the discourses on democracy, at the door of liberalism.[6]  The wall between discourses, particularly the utopian or idealistic discourses, and practices or experiences of democracy can indeed be a tall one and any attempt to deduce one from the other is helplessly bound to the  history’s graveyard.  From a Habermasian point of view, such an attempt is suspect for its ignorance of the relatively autonomous movement of thought processes and their "internal history." 

            Still, while the final verdict on the universal applicability of liberal model of democracy, based on its notions of political pluralism, civil liberties and a system of checks and balances, is yet to be issued, both theoretical and empirical investigations of the modalities of democracy in the modern world suggest that there is a trend toward "global democracy." [7]   This points at the popularization of the democratic sentiment globally, put otherwise, the globalization of democracy making fashionable what Held has coined "cosmopolitan democracy." As with Fukuyama, Held's insights are held back by the inability to deal with the various non-conforming experiences, the so-called aberrations, or, for the lack of better word, "provincial" or parochial democracies based on local traditions and local-specific "transitions" to democracy.  Concerning the latter, Offe has recently turned our attention to the rich varieties of transition, guarding against simplistic attempts to pigeon hole the democratic transition in a select few processes.[8]  Offe is sensitive to the "special paths" of transition, as well as of political reform-geared-to democracy. According to Offe, political reform consists primarily of two measures: constitutional guarantee of civil rights and the accountability of state power through checks and balances.  A key preoccupation of theorists such as Offe and Przeworski is with "sustainable" reform particularly in the "new" democracies in the East and the South.

            Thus, Przeworski writes about the complex political configuration  and the peculiar problems of legitimacy in these "new" democracies, i.e., policies aimed at producing legitimacy at one level tend to undermine it at another level: "Many new democracies face simultaneously multiple challenges of providing an effective citizenship under economic and institutional conditions that undermine the viability of state institutions."[9]  Przeworski, Lijphart, Waisman, and others have studied the institutional design of "new democracies;" in Lijphart's and Waisman' case, it is the timing sequence of institutional development, economic and political, that receives special attention, e.g.,  the peculiarities of the Argentine scenario in which economic liberalization and the institutional "consolidation" of democracy have taken place more or less simultaneously.[10]  As we shall see momentarily, the Iranian scenario is strikingly similar to the Argentine scenario.  In both scenarios, the questions of democracy are channeled first and foremost in terms of the transitional path, i.e., democratization.

Theories of Democratization

            As subsets of democratic theories, works on democratization are primarily "process-driven" explanations.[11]  They usually combine elements of action-driven and structure-driven approaches; the former refers to the role of individuals, leaders, groups and social movements, and the latter stresses the economic and politico-systemic dynamics creating structural opportunities for democratization.  Relatedly, the literature on democratization can be divided into two groups, those that emphasize "top-down" approach and those stressing the importance of "bottom-up" dynamics of democratic change and transition.

            The "top-down" approach focuses on the role of political elites and the decision-making processes of incumbent elites in favor of or opposed to democracy.  It emphasizes the importance of short-term dynamics during the democratic transitions which are often subject to unintended consequences.[12]  A general theory of democratization is thus disfavored as compromising the variegated nature of the political process in different countries where "different set of actors with different followings, preference, calculations, resources, and time horizons come to the forefront."[13]

            In contrast, some authors have sought to narrow down the democratization experiences into specific ideal-types. Case in point, Karl and Schmitter have suggested that democratic transitions fall into one of the following categories: Revolution involving mass violence to oust the authoritarian rulers;  peaceful reform based on popular mobilization to establish democracy in  a non-violent way; pact, whereby elites promote democratization as a result of a compromise among themselves; and imposition whereby elites use coercion to dethrone incumbents.[14]  A problem with this typology is that only in the revolutionary scenario is the force of democratization "from below" fully integrated into the theory, and in the other three scenarios these authors overlook the importance of the strategic interaction of elites and masses and, instead, one-sidedly attribute the democratization process to a willful product of elites' political engineering the transition.  Also, these ideal-types are based on specific experiences of transitions from authoritarian to full and durable democracies; left out of consideration are a whole group of "semi-democracies" caught in the middle process between the two poles, e.g., Iran. 

            The outcome of democratization in many third world societies has been less than ideal, often acting as a fountain-head in a sea of authoritarianism, instead of turning into "a lake" as Charles Tilly would have us believe.[15]  If by democratization we understand any significant movement toward a democratic regime, then we must concentrate on the interaction of this movement with the counter-democratic sources, actors and structures, and the exploration of the possible causal connections for the re-authoritarianization of a polity generated by a feeble democratization.[16]  That democratization can be a contradictory process, engendering the forces antithetical to the democratic form of regime is, of course, a staple of both ancient and modern discourses on democracy, illustrated most vividly in the traumatic experience of Weimar Republic in Germany.  This is a delicate yet important point often overlooked in the literature on democratization, namely, that the democratization's output of a vibrant political pluralism, i.e., a civil society, may lead to the introduction or strengthening of authoritarian tendencies, e.g., fascism, taking advantage of civil liberties rendered by democratization.[17]  In such a scenario, democratization turns into a double transition, first toward and then subsequently away from, democracy.[18]  Taking cognizance of the complexities of transition to democracy means precisely adopting a longitudinal point of view which would allow explanation of the counter-momentum generated by a process of political democratization, e.g., disorder.[19]  Our inquiry should ask the pertinent question of whether or not a democratizing polity eventually settles for consolidated democracy?

Consolidating Democracy: Theoretical Issues

            Democratic consolidation is a key term in the literature on democratization, referring to the eventual outcome of the process with respect to the setting up of formal mechanisms of a democratic system, i.e., routine, free elections, political pluralism, establishment of civil liberties, above all the right to assemble, debate, and so on.  This is the view adopted by Huntington when he adopts a proceduralist model of democracy which "implies the existence of those civil and political freedoms to speak, publish, assemble, and organize that are necessary to political debate and the conduct of electoral campaigns."[20]  Implicit in Huntington is the rejection of the sharp distinction between "liberalization" and "democratization" frequently found among "transiologists" such as O'Donnell and Schmitter.  The latter fail to recognize that a "sustainable democracy" cannot possibly operate in the absence of a genuine process of "liberalization" entailing a vibrant civil society featuring a pluralistic political culture and a significant introduction or implantation of civil liberties.

            Democratic consolidation is not a one-shot deal and, rather, covers the entire process of routinization of democratic procedures (e.g., elections, parliamentary politics), which may take several years, depending on the internal institutional make-up of the political regime targeted for democratization, i.e., "authoritarian," "totalitarian," "sultanistic," etc., each demanding a specific strategy of democratization crafted by their democratic opponents.[21]  Such a strategy must be tailored by taking into consideration not only the domestic scene but also the regional and international milieu.[22]  This, in turn, leads us to the thorny question of "in" versus "out" sources of democratization, which has gripped the recent literature of "globalizing democracy" and "waves of democracy."[23]  One way to describe this "problematic" is to ask whether or not a democratization process is initiated internally in a country or is a "spin-off" movement from without?[24] 

            Unfortunately, there is a tendency to interpret democratic consolidation by focusing solely on the internal mechanisms of democratic rule without fully accounting for the external, above all regional, context of democratization.  A wave of democratic reversals, as in Iran's neighboring states, is bound to have a negative impact on the consolidation process, or phase, of democratization in a country, either by creating negative "reference societies" or, at the least, causing negative "spillover" effects in strengthening the hands of anti-democratic rulers or policy-makers.  What is certain, however, is that the "political opportunity structure" for democratization is tied to the regional and global context and is not immune from it.[25]  It is also connected, as Barrington Moore, Tilly, Therborn, and others have shown, to the social and class context of a socio-political order.[26]  One of the salient features of democratization movements, particularly in third world societies, is their ability, or lack thereof, to challenge not just the boundaries of institutional politics but also the class boundaries.  In terms of those particular authoritarian states, such as the so-called "rentier" states in the Middle East, this means a certain overloading of the democratic transition with a "social revolution" inasmuch as the ruling authoritarian elites represent a state bourgeoisie whose interests are threatened by democratization. 

            Thus the special uniqueness, or rather difficulties, of democratizing Middle Eastern "rentire states" run by non-democratic elite:  the limited agenda of political opening carries the potential to exceed its purview by engulfing the entire class structure of society into turmoil, thus limiting the opportunity structure for democratization.  The compound agenda, or need structure, of democratization in these societies represents, in a sense, a curse for democracy, insofar as its fulfillment inexorably passes through thorny social questions and cannot be limited to a mere political process.  Even a partial democratization contains the risk of dislodging the state oligarchy who, to safeguard their possessions derived from their monopoly of political power, in turn, mount a spirited counteroffensive to either demolish, contain, or coopt, the democratization movement(s) at the base of society.

Part Two: Problems of Democracy in Iran

            The immediate impetus for this article was the elections for Iran's Sixth Islamic Assembly, i.e., Majlis, in February and April 2000, the third parliamentary elections  since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.  It was also the twentieth electoral contest in the Islamic regime's twenty one year history, not mentioning the 1979 plebiscite determining "Islamic Republic" over an alternative "democratic Islamic Republic" favored by modernist Islamists.  The 2000 elections was, by many standards, an unprecedented display of political pluralism, albeit within set limits imposed by the Islamic polity, and a historic watershed: for the first time, the hegemonic sway of Islamic hard-liners in the unicameral legislature was clobbered by voters, whose electoral insurgency caused a major elite turn-over in Majlis in favor of a loose coalition of self-declared reformists aligning themselves with the moderate president, Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, whose landslide victory on Second Khordad (i.e., May twenty third) 1997 was so widely regarded as a critical turning point in the country's political process as to precipitate the reformists' adoption of his date of victory as their hallmark of identity.

            Any suspicion that Khatami's victory may have been a fluke due mainly to the weaknesses of his (unexciting) conservative opponent, Majlis Speaker, Nategh Nuri, was rudely cast aside by the February 1999 elections for local councils resulting in impressive sweep of eighty five percent of votes by Second Khordad candidates.  Though stipulated in the Islamic Constitution, these were the first elections for the local councils, a clear testimony to the genuineness and viability of Khatami's mantelpiece -- to promote political participation and government accountability by means of a political discourse centered on such terms as tolerance, rule of law, civility and an "Islamic civil society."

            Thus, for three consecutive years, the winds of change had altered the sailing map of post-revolutionary state, charting a new direction stubbornly resisted by the ruling Islamists still in control of key institutions as well as the military, i.e., the Office of Leader, the clientlistic foundations, the vetting Council of Guardians, the quasi-legislative Expediency Council, the main judicial branches, official media, the powerful and highly politicized Revolutionary Guards, and so on.  A new dialectic of inter-elite rivalry, featuring a tension-filled evisceration of consensus by escalating factionalisms, had set in.  The fragmentation at the top, partly as a response to pressures from below, risked the integrative capacity of the state and weakened its ability to respond coherently to the various domestic and external agenda and priorities.[27]  

            The dissolution of historically founded consensus, sustained from without for many years by the impositions of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), found as its countermovement the protean value of institutionalizing conflict through regular and periodic elections.  In fact, in light of its revolutionary heritage as the destructor of a monarchical dictatorship, the Islamic state has always presupposed a political society.  This much is clear in the regime's discursive self-grounding in a constitutional foundation bespeaking of popular sovereignty, albeit as a secondary sovereignty after His Deity.  The regime's public use of teleological reason masked its discursive commitment to the rule of people and, as a result, was responsible for numerous false interpretations of its elan or raison d'etre as antagonistic toward the notions of popular sovereignty and democratic norms.  

            With their singular focus on theocratic leadership, these interpretations erred by underestimating the changing calculus of power, and governability, and the dynamic political process set into motion by the revolutionary rupture of a new political society no longer reducible to the state.  By leaps and bounds, the revolution reworked the ties of state and society, creating a complex repertoire marked by a peculiar entwinement of theocracy and republicanism which, in turn, signified an uneasy coexistence of rival political traditions each with its own standards of reasoning.  Inside this repertoire lived the perpetual mechanism of a balancing act addressing the steering problems of system-maintenance and political integration.  Notwithstanding the system's twin pillar of theocracy and democracy, the political process had to constantly bridge the unbridgeable. The result was, and has been, a democracy under theocratic tutelage, wherein the presumption that elections will serve as legitimating means to perpetuate the theocratic rampart is cemented in a whole 'regime' of limitations defining the Islamic parameters of electoral politics and mass participation.

            Thus the exigencies of elections under the Islamic Republic: a multilayered candidate selection process under the aegis of a clergy-dominated Council of Guardians whose vetting power served as a built-in system stabilizing mechanism, an election law mandating the candidates' proof of their "practical allegiance to the Islamic Republic" and, simultaneously, imposing a series of prohibitions, such as disallowing negative campaigning and limiting it to one week, and going as far as determining the minute details such as the size and form of posters and the like.  All this was complemented by a prowling official media, including the Friday prayers, disseminating a restrictive political discourse that xenophibically distinguished between friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders.[28]

            And yet, the bellicose, bifurcated discourse, by virtue of its inherent polemicization of the decision over the identities and boundaries of us/them, itself became a site of contention and pluralism.  Subsumed within an Islamist political theology, the official discourse was never frozen in its monological negativity, whereby the relations with the enemy, the hostile other, posited its self-identity.  Rather,  its dialectic of negation had a productive side as well, by virtue of its active and perpetual polemicization of the space of commonality binding its adherents.  This, in turn, forced on the state the conditional necessity of a public sphere which, as it happened, became the site of a growing multiplicity of political affiliations and discourses.

            The defining feature of this public sphere was, and continues to be, a "national-popular" regime, to borrow a term from Germani,[29] increasingly caught between the poles of authoritarianism and liberalism; the very gestures that moved it toward one pole veered it back toward the other.  Hence, inclusionary and exclusionary politics went hand in hand, culminating in a semi-democratic public sphere caught in a double bind: the process of democratization was deepened under theocratic tutelage, which sustained itself by the legitimacy dividends of elections and open debates, and yet, was simultaneously undermined by the transgressivist impulse manifesting itself in, among others, a growing anti-clericalism.  The latter was reflected in the 1996 and 2000 elections for Majlis, showing a progressive assault on clergy's direct involvement. 

            However, the process of clerical devolution of the state, reflected in fewer and fewer official positions in the hands of clergy, while hailed by certain Iranian reformists as a definite sign of "rationalization" of Iranian politics, was hardly a straightforward or linear process.  For one thing, it opened the door to more "politics through the back door" by the clergy groups intent on maintaining their hegemonic hold on state power indirectly, by promoting brokerage politics and informalization of politics based on their internal nets of solidarity.  Regardless, in light of the rapid developmental and demographic changes affecting the country's youth-dominated population, and a relatively stable external environment marked by a decade of peace following the two Persian Gulf wars, the ruling clergy's "survival strategy" was pockmarked with the alarming signs of a hegemonic crisis.[30] Attempts to offset a steady transition to a post-clerical status quo, prompted in part as a corollary of economic modernization fueling political modernization, translated in a constant shuffling the political deck, whereby the re-marketization of political clergy as anchors of stability and national unity occurred.  This development defied the extreme images of the political order as a rigid system of absolute domination, overlooking the sedimentation of reform at the politico-theoretical and even symbolic levels,[31] that even the symbol of regime's Islamicness, namely, leadership of jurist (Velayat-e Faghih) had itself become a site of conflicting interpretations.  

            Furthermore, these extreme views lend their lenses to binary conceptualization of political camps inside Iran, basically as a zone of conflict between reformists and conservatives, implying the non-reformist identity of the latter and often attaching across the board positive values to the agenda of the former.  Yet, both interpretations need serious qualification. First, the so-called conservatives, or "rightists," to use a more popular vernacular in the Iranian political vocabulary, bear the record of fomenting revolutionary reform of the monarchical status quo.  Under their aegis, an enormous increase in the administrative functions of the state took place, involving the creation of stronger institutional foundations with the help of new bureaucracies and para-statal organizations.  These reforms were complemented by another set of reforms, in terms of the redistribute functions reflected in, though by no means limited to, a haphazard welfare state irrevocably committing itself to providing expensive subsidies to its mass and corporate clientele. 

            Reforms of this character undoubtedly contributed to the regime's longevity.  Nor were they uniformly geared to state intervention and were averse to serious measures of market and economic reform.  Thanks to its forward-looking cadre of administrators, such as a tax-and-spend mayor of Tehran,  the Islamic system experienced a plethora of economic policy reforms during the 1980s and 1990s that, on the whole, helped consolidate it and set the stage for the current phase of reformist politics.  Unfortunately, it has become common among the proponents of Second Khordad Movement to neglect this historical legacy and to take for granted their radical break with the supposedly "anti-reformist" ruling elite. But, perhaps, this has more to do with the exigencies of Iran's competitive politics, as well as the massive failure of Islamic revolutionaries both in terms of creating sustainable growth and political reform.  Concerning the former, many important elements of economic reform (particularly interventionist and redistribute ones) backfired by the influence of inefficiency, nepotism and corruption,   overinstitutionalization, and welfarist allocations.  Well-functioning economic reform requires a state capable of enforcing laws and, yet, the legal climate for business confidence turned out to be desperately lacking.  In addition, the Islamic leftists' policy prescription for a statist economy, dominating the war era, was shown to be wanting in light of the postwar economic downturn and the accumulated bottlenecks of the war years. 

            In the post-war reconstruction era that dominated the Iran of the 1990s,  the need to complement economic reform with incremental political reforms as well as foreign policy reforms was felt at the policy levels.  A wholesale re-orientation of war mobilization for reconstruction purposes was not without political preconditions and, as a result, a slow yet steady process of political metamorphosis, of body politics, began to emerge, laying the foundations for "political reform" with the help of a new national discourse on "political and economic development." 

            In this new milieu, the founding reformers of the post-revolutionary state, faced with the vacuum of Khomeini's charisma underwriting political stability in the previous decade, opted for an intermediate position that de-prioritized political reform and limited economic reform to the level of policies and shied away from meaningful institutional reform.  Inevitably,  similar to the experience of other major world revolutions, these initial (self-declared revolutionary) reforms increasingly took on conservative garbs, notwithstanding their infliction as a new state bourgeoisie accumulating wealth by virtue of their monopoly of political power.  As defenders of a new status quo, they thus became complicit with political conservatism and a "rightist" nomenclature somewhat at odds with their self-identity as revolutionaries.[32]   Their attempt to salvage this identity was inextricably bound with the foreign policy of the state, and the whole external image of the state as a bastion of Islamic revolution.  Their promotion of revolution beyond Iran's borders, justified by their fundamentalist pan-Islamist ideology, was attuned to their survival strategy at home, i.e., served as a powerful venue to perpetuate the exclusion of secularists and nationalists as tools of external "public enemies," above all "the Great Satan," the United States. This (clergy dominated) elite's script for power was, however, subsequently challenged on many fronts, including from within its own ranks.

            From the outset, part of the problem with the post-revolutionary ruling elite stemmed from its permeability, the fact that it operated based on weak criteria of membership and was permeated by a technocratic echelon that promulgated and implemented all types of policies. A careful study of the political-institutional realm shows the Iranian state's takeover not by a homogenous clergy but rather a heterogeneous coalition of groups whose common denominator was professed loyalty to the Khomeinist brand of revolutionary Islam.  Yet, this common identity masked the proliferation of an underlying political pluralism at the top permeating the institutional framework of the (expanded) state. 

            In addition to the variegated domestic sources of this limited pluralism, attention must be given to Iran's foreign policy failures, its failure to defeat Iraq, to hatch its revolution in foreign soil, and to minimize the isolation-inducing impact of world powers' reaction to its subversive behavior.  The sense of isolation augmented the pent up frustrations among the Iranians, particularly the educated middle strata, expanding in ranks and yet beset with the rising unemployment and other ills of a moribund economy, and this, in turn, became the fuel for the ascendancy of a powerful reform movement engulfing the governing elite as much as the masses below. 

            This was precisely the reason why the seventh presidential election in the Islamic Republic, bringing a clerical old hand to power, became such a significant turning point in the annals of the state.  At first glance, Khatami's 1997 elections, occurring in a restrictive context banning opposition candidates and limiting the contest between two official candidates, seems undeserving of most if not all the hoopla associated with it, giving rise among some observers to suspect yet another foul play by the clergy to install one of their own as an outsider with the help of slick electoral strategy.  This view, dominating the radical opposition to the regime, fails to explain the depth of elite fracturing that has followed Khatami's victory, and the reason why Khatami has remained so venerable with the Iranian public after several years? 

            The answer to the above question seems to be located in the dialectic of state-society interaction, and the fact that the Second Khordad Movement has ruptured by the structure of political opportunities that remained dormant particularly during the emergency war environment lingering unchanged for some time after the war's termination and, yet, were steadily unclogged by the pressing demands of a restless population.  At bottom, these opportunities, for a new political opening, did not need to be created ex nihilo; rather, they existed in potentia within the legal and constitutional fabric of the state.[33] The actualization of this potential, already under way, must be attributed to the role played by the weakening of structural constraints that buried these opportunities; such weakening was directly related to the rise of a new 'repertoire of contention" denoting the surfacing on the political scene a new breed of political leaders spousing an ideology of change. 

            These "real change leaders" were not spearheaded by Khatami; rather, it turns out that the "Khatami phenomenon" was to some extent a response to the call for reforms by a powerful segment of the governing elite, as well as by a dynamic reconstruction of Islamic worldview in the direction of theological modernism and political relativism connected to the works of a group of Shiite thinkers headed by philosopher, Abdul Karim Soroush.  Putting philosophy in the service of political reform, Soroush and Khatami represented a new pragmatist intellectual movement intent on introducing radical reform in the status quo without necessarily overthrowing it.  Their political imaginary of a new tolerant and liberal Islam was at least partly redemptive,[34] prioritizing the dismantling of official disclaimers of the Islamic regime's democratic pre-foundation.  And if their quest was relatively, and so far spectacularly, successful, this is attributable to an ideological clearing associated with the collapse of Russian communism and the subsequent onset of post-communism.  No longer hostaged to anti-communist official xenophobia, Iran's ideological reform movement vastly benefited from a sudden and unexpected hiatus left by the derailing of Iranian leftism which, for much of the twentieth century, had affected the political process both directly and indirectly (i.e., in terms of anti-leftist anticipatory leftist policies as in Shah's White Revolution and various social policies of the "First" Islamic Republic).

            Yet, it turns out that the death knell for Iran's left had sounded rather prematurely, much as in the disorienting years following the Soviet collapse, there was a new breathing space for an Iranian repertoire unencumbered by the traditional rivalry of Marxism and communism.  A political re-entry of the left, albeit mostly new left, marked the Second Khordad Movement and, this alone indicated that the movement's redemptive aspect ran in different directions.  The future of this movement, and the larger movement for democratization, was thus cast under the spell of a new ideological rivalry in numerous ways more complex and unpredictable than ever in the past.  What was certain, however, was that this was a future bound to be written in the thick ink of human will, that the invisible hands of economic and institutional forces were to play a complementary role along with the infusions of human agency.  Would this be a future of full democracy or the present state of semi-democracy, or would it be a back to the past future dominated by unmediated dictatorship?   The difficulty of answering this question rests in part on the incoherence of the present situation, the fact that it seems pregnant with all these possibilities.  The path of democracy in Iran has always been a dangerous minefield requiring a great deal of forethought to the questions of tactics and strategy, both short term and long term, astute understanding of the complex political process and all its nuances and idiosyncrasies, as well as the formidable obstacles in the political culture that inhibit a full-scale democratic blossoming.  Also, it requires an empirical-theoretical sophistication  providing a framework for political analysis and mapping action.  Hopefully, the foregoing discussion has shed some lights on these issues.