The Position of Iranian Nationalism in the Semantic Network of the Modernist Nationalism Discourse of the Pahlavi Era

In 19th century Iran, through the publication of travelogues, the expansion of capitalism, and familiarity with the governance methods of Western countries, a system of knowledge or grand discourse emerged that represented Iran s backwardness and illness. Within this system of knowledge (episteme), various discourses aimed at remedying this illness were formed, one of the vital being the discourse of modernist nationalism which served as a counter-discourse to the Anti-autocratic Constitutionalist discourse and sought to justify its propositions in response to it, was extensively exploited by the Pahlavi court and managed to become the dominant discourse of the court for a long time. The present study employs the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, focusing on the question of ‘What the semantic network of modernist nationalism discourse was and what function it aimed to achieve?’ The semantic coordinates of this discourse are examined. The results indicated that the most significant signifier of the modernist nationalism discourse was Iranian nationalism, which, by outlining a semantic network composed of various elements such as superficial and top-down modernization, centralization (establishment of a dominant state), the necessity of reviving the monarchy and kingship, secularism and opposition to Islamism, and the strengthening of militarism, aimed to consolidate the power of the Pahlavi regime by providing a solution for Iran s backwardness.