For decades, much Western commentary has interpreted Iranian protests as calls for reform within the Islamic Republic. This interpretation is increasingly detached from reality. What has gradually emerged inside Iran over the past decade is something far deeper: a movement that increasingly understands itself as a struggle to reclaim the sovereignty of the Iranian nation-state that was effectively annulled in 1979.
This transformation is not merely political. It is discursive and civilisational. The protests that have erupted across Iran since the mid-2010s reflect a reawakening of Iranian national consciousness that reaches far beyond the ideological framework imposed by the Islamic Republic. In essence, what we are witnessing is the early phase of what may be described as an Iranian National Revolution.
From Constitutional Nation to Ideological State
The intellectual and political foundations of the modern Iranian state were established during the Persian Constitutional Revolution. With the constitution of 1906, Iran formally embraced the principle of constitutional governance and the rule of law. For the first time, the Iranian nation asserted that sovereignty derived from the nation itself rather than from dynastic absolutism.
This constitutional project matured during the twentieth century, particularly under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi and later Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. During this period Iran constructed many of the institutions of a modern state: a national army, modern universities, an industrial economy, expanded infrastructure, and a centralised civil administration. Land reforms, the expansion of education, and the development of an urban middle class transformed Iranian society.
The Pahlavi state was far from perfect and often authoritarian in practice. Yet it represented the effective consolidation of the modern Iranian nation-state envisioned by the constitutionalists of the early twentieth century. Iran was becoming what political philosophy would recognise as a national Rechtsstaat - a state grounded in law, sovereignty, and civic continuity.
This trajectory was abruptly shattered by the Iranian Revolution. What is commonly described in the West as a “revolution” was, in reality, a popular uprising that produced the establishment of a radically ideological state. Under the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, formulated by Ruhollah Khomeini, sovereignty was transferred from the nation to a clerical authority claiming guardianship over society. The state’s legitimacy was no longer rooted in the Iranian nation but in the purported aspirations of the broader Islamic ummah.
In effect, the Iranian nation-state entered a form of ideological captivity. The new constitutional order subordinated national sovereignty to a transnational religious mission. Concepts central to modern political life - nation, citizen, state, homeland - were systematically redefined or emptied of their previous meaning. The Iranian state became not the political expression of the Iranian nation but the institutional vehicle of a revolutionary theological project.
The Collapse of the Reformist Illusion
For three decades after 1979, this ideological transformation was rarely confronted at the conceptual level. Much of Iran’s intellectual elite remained trapped within the discursive framework established by the revolution itself. Political opposition often focused on reforming the Islamic Republic rather than challenging the ideological foundations of the regime.
Western intellectual circles reinforced this dynamic. Large segments of Western academia and media, shaped by the post-1968 culture of post-colonial and third-worldist thought, continued to interpret the Islamic Republic through narratives that portrayed it as an authentic anti-imperialist expression of the Global South. Criticism of the regime was frequently reframed as a form of “Orientalist” prejudice.
This intellectual climate also facilitated the rise of the regime’s so-called reformist faction during the 1990s and 2000s. Figures associated with reformism were promoted in Western political and media circles as the potential architects of democratic change within the Islamic Republic.
In practice, the reformist project never challenged the ideological foundations of the state. It functioned largely as a safety valve, a softer façade that allowed the regime to maintain international legitimacy while preserving the underlying structure of clerical power.
The illusion finally collapsed during the protests surrounding the contested 2009 presidential election, known as the Iranian Green Movement. When the movement was suppressed, many younger Iranians realised that meaningful change was impossible within the ideological framework of the Islamic Republic. A new generation began to rethink the entire political narrative of the past half-century.
The Return of the Iranian Nation
Beginning in the mid-2010s, protests across Iran began to reveal a striking transformation in political language. Rather than invoking the ideals of the 1979 revolution, demonstrators increasingly appealed to Iran’s deeper national history. Three slogans illustrate this shift.
In October 2016, thousands gathered at the tomb of Cyrus the Great in Pasargadae. One chant echoed through the crowd: “Iran is our homeland; Cyrus is our father.” The slogan openly invoked Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage, a civilisational memory that the Islamic Republic has often attempted to marginalise.
During protests in December 2017 across dozens of cities, demonstrators shouted another phrase: “Reza Shah, may your soul be blessed.” The chant referred to the founder of modern Iran’s twentieth-century statehood, a figure demonised for decades by the regime’s official historiography.
Finally, during the nationwide protests following the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, another slogan captured the emerging spirit of the movement. At the funeral of a young victim of the unrest, a grieving mother declared: “We are a great nation. We will take Iran back.”
These slogans represent far more than rhetorical flourishes. They signal the emergence of a new political imagination in which the Iranian people increasingly see themselves not as subjects of a revolutionary ideology but as members of a historic nation seeking to recover its sovereignty. In this context, references to monarchy often carry a symbolic rather than strictly institutional meaning. Figures such as Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi are invoked less as proposals for a specific political system than as symbols of the pre-1979 national state and its legal continuity.
Western observers frequently misunderstand this phenomenon. Protesters who invoke national symbols are often dismissed as reactionary nationalists or monarchist nostalgics. Some commentators even label them “fascists”, a striking irony given that the movement they seek to delegitimise is directed against one of the most rigid ideological regimes in the contemporary world. In reality, the emerging patriotic discourse in Iran is fundamentally antifascist in character. It represents a revolt against the ideological usurpation of the nation by a totalising theocratic system.
After nearly half a century of clerical rule, many Iranians are rediscovering the political language of nationhood, constitutionalism, and sovereignty that shaped their earlier modern history. Understanding this shift is essential for anyone seeking to grasp the deeper dynamics of Iran’s unfolding political transformation. For the first time in decades, the Iranian nation is beginning to articulate a coherent answer to the ideological rupture of 1979, and to the long captivity that followed it.
