The weakness of the Qajars attracted growing foreign intervention. And in the years preceding World War I, large areas of Iran were under direct foreign influence and occupation. Britain coming from India in the south. And Russia coming from the north. So what was the situation in Iran after the war? The Russians were now preoccupied with their own revolution, so Britain was the dominant power. And Britain had no rivals for her influence in Iran, but Britain herself had other issues to deal with in the Middle East and in India, and in Iran itself. Her power was in decline. Iran was the country least experienced in modernization in the region. And in 1921, there was a Coup d'etat, staged by Riza Khan, an Iranian military officer, and he filled the power vacuum. Although not with help from Britain, but certainly not against Britain's role. And this is a factor worth remembering, and we will come back to this later. In 1925 he managed to pressure the Majlis, the Parliament to abolish Qajar rule, and Riza crowned himself as the Shah of Iran in April 1926. And established the Pahlavi Dynasty, taking its name from pre-Islamic Iran. But the Pahlavi Dynasty had an issue of image from the very beginning. And that is an image of a regime that rested somehow on foreign influence and intervention. And this was an image that the regime did not succeed ridding itself of, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Riza was deeply influenced and inspired by Ataturk, and saw himself as some kind of Iranian example of the Ataturk model in Turkey. But one should make a comparison between Turkey and Iran first, before we can see how similar these two really were. First of all, the length of exposure of Ottoman Turkey to the west, versus that of Iran. The Ottomans were exposed to western style modernization, from the very end of the 18th century, long before that of Iran. And Turkey was exposed, therefore to western influences long before and for a much longer period than Iran. Turkey after all, was known as the sick man of Europe. That meant that it was seen by itself and by its rivals, as part of Europe. Iran, on the other hand, was very much a closed country to European influences. And its topographic structure. The mountains and the deserts, and the weakness of central government. Were not conducive to the introduction of a great deal of foreign influence, and were not conducive to the creation of a kind of central government that existed in Turkey. It was much less of a westernizing elite, to serve as the standard bearers of modernization. And in Turkey from the Tanzimat onwards, there was this westernizing elite that could serve as the backbone of a modernization that could be accelerated when Ataturk came to power. This was not in place for Riza, when he assumed power in Iran of the 1920s. In Iran there was also the far greater relative strength of the religious institution, as we have seen in comparison between the Sunni Ulama and the Shiite Ulama. In Turkey, Atatürk had the prestige and the legitimacy of the Ghazi, the great conqueror in the name of Islam, compared to the Pahlavis in Iran, who had this problematic image of people who ruled with foreign influence. The demographic composition of Iran was very different to that of Turkey. As we have already seen, Iran has these minorities which straddle the boundaries of Iran with other countries, creating a great fear in Iran, constant and forever present of foreign interference. Ethnically, Iran was far less uniform, then Turkey. It had minorities that were Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic and Baloch speaking. Turkey did not have a similar problem. And in Persia we also have various Persian dialects. True speakers of Persian were only just half of the population of Iran. The politic elite, however, was overwhelmingly Persian in culture. So some concluding remarks, on the creation of the new states. It was common to speak of the nationalist movements in Egypt, Iraq and Turkey, which forced upon the great powers a change in their policies. But was it nationalism? Or the more traditional identities, such as ethnicity and tribe, that drove the political movements in these countries? There was a nationalist leadership in Egypt, and in Turkey, as well as in countries like Syria and Iraq. But those involved in the revolutionary movements often fought for traditional, religious, or tribal values rather than secular nationalism. So why did nationalism win? The British historian, Malcolm Yapp answers this question as follows. He speaks about the great powers, and says the following. The Europeans made errors in their identification of the opposition and greatly overestimated the role of nationalism in it. To some extent, they were the victims of their own propaganda of the last years of the war which had depicted an enemy world full of nations, ready to emerge under the banner of self-determination. But perhaps more importantly, the Europeans wanted nationalism to be the most prominent element. Nationalism they understood. It was a modern, European doctrine, and those who professed it talked the language of debating chambers. Islam and tribalism, on the other hand, seemed dark and dangerous factors, elemental passions rather than doctrines. And their leaders, if they could be discovered, were hard, uncompromising men, uncorrupted by reason. So, the words of Malcolm Yapp. But to sum up this story of the creation of the new states in the Middle East, what one should emphasize, that if we look through the various countries of the region, in Turkey and in the Arab states, and even in Iran, it is the modernizers who are in power.
