Conceiving Political Modernity Sample Clauses

Conceiving Political Modernity. From the early 1990s, political reform was presented as the political corollary to economic modernisation. In order to carry out its economic reform, the Islamic State needed to adjust its organisation and policies. The change in state economic policies brought about important changes in organisational and policy matters, which particularly affected the structure of state managerial institutions. Political reform was to provide the concrete policies to realise this aim. According to Hakimian and Karshenass (2000, pp.29-30) after more than a decade of revolutionary turmoil and external war (with Iraq), in the late 1980s the Iranian government embarked on an extensive economic reform and adjustment programme. The First Five-Year Development Plan, introduced in 1989, provided a framework for liberalising the economy and dismantling the centrally-administered model of resource allocation that had evolved during the war years. The market reforms in this phase were intertwined with a broader, state-led, reconstruction drive to resuscitate the economy. After a short success phase in the early 1990s, the liberalisation effort stalled in the face of heightened macroeconomic instability and a severe foreign exchange crisis that came to a head in 1993. As emergency measures were adopted to deal with the debt crisis, the reformers were scaled back and the familiar spectre of stagflation – the malaise of the 1980s – came back to haunt the Iranian economy. Approaching the late 1990s, a combination of economic populism and another severe slump in international oil prices during 1997-99, has again blurred the prospects for economic reform in the country. Therefore, political reform had to start from within (Djalaaee-pur, 2003, pp. 94-96). The very first problem that confronted officials and elite engaging in political reform was the question of what political reform really was and how they should conceive political modernisation. The different ways in which political reform in the IRI was conceived of were typical of President Khatami’s style of governing (Alavitabar, 2003, p.44). First, the conception of political reform was not decreed from the top, as had increasingly been the practice for political affairs during the Ayatollah Khomeini years. Instead, general guidelines were laid down at the lower levels of the state management and administration, which were to be elaborated upon progressively by establishment elite, Pan-Islamist intellectuals, and Islamic scholars. A...