RIP: the outdated export of revolution in the Middle East

The newly established Office of National Liberation Movements in Tehran became the nerve centre of Iran's global revolutionary outreach. Its ideology centred on a war against "global arrogance," a phrase encompassing not only Western capitalism but all forms of tyranny, from both East and West.

Fall into disarray

There were lessons to learn from the Comintern—the international body established by the Bolsheviks to promote global communist revolution. The Comintern eventually deteriorated into a bureaucratic extension of Soviet state interests, often to the detriment of local revolutionary movements. after years of internal disarray, Joseph Stalin finally dissolved it.

Iran's experience followed a similar arc. Its revolution exported friction and fragmentation, sowed internal division, and exacerbated regional tensions, particularly with neighbouring Arab states. Like the Comintern, the Office of National Liberation Movements was ultimately dismantled, and its director executed in one of the Islamic Republic's more brutal internal purges.

This shift marked Iran's pivot from a transnational revolutionary agenda towards a more state-centric nationalism. It seemed that Lenin's The State and Revolution had finally found a receptive audience among former Islamic Leftists within the Iranian leadership. Yet Iran's (and the Soviet Union's) efforts were not the only revolutionary exports in history.

Other idealogues

As historian Philip Mansel recounts in Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, monarchist loyalists of the deposed French crown feverishly worked to prevent revolutionary ideas from reaching the Ottoman court. Chief among their warnings was the regicide of 1789—widely viewed as a grave sin and political sacrilege.

What, then, does it mean today to declare the end of the age of exporting revolutions, with Iran's model perhaps the final experiment of its kind? Does it reflect a deeper transformation in the political and social fabric of the Muslim world that no longer accommodates the dream of unity around a common enemy or ideological cause?

Almost from the outset, Iran's revolution failed to unite Muslims, not just because of sectarian fault lines, but because of Tehran's insistence on monopolising both religious and political leadership (the Guardian Jurist system).

A changed world

At the same time, the jihadist Salafi current fared no better in its attempt to spark an "Islamic awakening", burdened by destructive, nihilistic tendencies that ran counter to the spirit of the age and stood in stark contrast to the modest aspirations of most Muslims: peace, dignity, and social justice.

Viewed in this light, neither Iran nor its regional allies should mourn the end of the revolutionary export project. The world is changing hugely, driven not by ideology but by Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and the digital technologies reshaping human existence.

Compared with this unfolding upheaval, the great revolutions of the 20th century—with all their lofty manifestos and ideological fervour—appear not merely unrepeatable, but perhaps irrelevant, or even incomprehensible.