Reza Khan And The Political Modernization Of Iran

In the early 20^th century, Iran faced great hardship derived from both inside and outside: the country was disintegrated, the order of politics and economy was in chaos , the society was heavily roiled, and meanwhile the western powers led by Great Britain and Russia intruded step by step, wantonly grabbed Iran's resource and wealth, which gravely damaged its independence of sovereignty. The Constitutional Revolution from 1905 to 1911 made great achievements, but didn't save the country from crisis. The course of modernization of Iran which began in the middle of the 19th century was plunged in dilemma.At this critical moment, Reza Khan, a nationalist from the army, launched a military coup in 1921 which made him control the regime. Later he overthrew the waning Qajar Dynasty and created the last feudal dynasty—the Pahlavi Dynasty. During his reign, Reza carried out a series of modernizing reforms, which were characterized of nationalization, westernization and secularization, and covered many fields including politics, economy, society, culture and so on. Since these reforms were broken off by World War II and the external powers, and they had many limitations inevitably, Reza didn't completely achieve the expectant goals. However, Iranians did make historical achievements: not only the country's destiny of perdition was avoided, but also the society advanced and the country developed—the modernization was carried forward.During this period, some major achievements of Iran's modernization were in the political field. Reza Khan built the first unified state army in Iran's history in the military reform, ended the country's disruption and consolidated its centralization of power in the campaign against the secessionists representative by the tribes and in the administrative reform, realized the detachment of politics and religion, prompt the secularization of country by attacking and restricting the Shiite force, and protected national independence by reclaiming sovereignty and excluding the foreign powers. By the end of the 1930s, an integrated, centralized and independent nation-state had been elementarily founded in Iran.From the beginning, the rule of Reza was connected with autocracy. With other forces being undermined and his power being strengthened, his dictatorship was developing year by year. The traits of a dictator—atrocity, suspicion and arbitrariness-emerged gradually; new democratic force was pressed; the society was full of terror. All of these caused people's discontentment and resistance. However, undeniably, the early centralization of his personal power at the cost of democracy and nomocracy had positive effects on getting rid of the crises and achieving stabilization and development of Iran.This paper is to introduce the background of the political modernization of this time, elaborate on its content in the aspects of the reforms and Reza's dictatorship, and discuss their relationship on the basis of expounding their origins, processes and results. In the end, it will try to make a proper conclusion of the political modernization of this period and the merit of Reza Khan in this field.