“Ruritania” and “Megalomania” as "ideal models" in Ernest Gellner’s concept of nationalism and the prospects for its application to analysis of Iranian history

Kyrchanoff Maksym Waler'evich ORCID: 0000-0003-3819-3103 Doctor of History Voronezh State University, Associate Professor of the Department of Regional Studies and Economics of Foreign Countries, Faculty of International Relations; Associate Professor of the Department of History of Foreign Countries and Oriental Studies, Faculty of History; ResearcherID: B-8694-2017; Scopus Author ID: 57193934324 394077, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, Pushkinskaya str., 16, office 236 maksymkyrchanoff@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction. The study of nationalism is one of the important areas of historiography. The key to the progress of nationalism research is the interdisciplinarity and attitude of the modern research community to the texts of the classical canon of works on nationalism. Among such studies we can include the works of authors whose efforts have led to the formation of a modernist school of the study of nationalism, whose contribution is well described in historiography, but, as a rule, is limited to the history of Western nationalisms. In the Western historiography of nationalism, its historians have proposed ideal models that more or less claimed to be universal, offering strategies for analyzing nationalist movements at various stages of their history.

Among such ideal historiographical constructs, Ernest Gellner's model of Ruritania and Megalomania occupies a special place ^[1], which includes an analysis of the model of the development of nationalism in a multi-component society consisting of segments designated as Ruritania and Megalomania. The main provisions of the modernist canon in the historiography of nationalism, including in Muslim regions ^{[2; 3]}, are well known and sufficiently described in the scientific literature ^{[4; 5; 6]}. A common place was the recognition of the universality of nationalism, the recognition of the possibility of transferring nationalist institutions from some societies with developed social structures to others that were based on the dominance of more traditional or even archaic institutions. The latter reproduced the system of social and cultural relations, as well as formal or informal statuses and roles.

The historiography of Iranian nationalism has a number of features. Modernism dominates Western historiography, explaining nationalism as a consequence of political modernization and cultural construction of identities by elites ^{[7; 8; 9; 10]}. Even such a representative of the primordialist trend in the study of nationalism as E. Smith has to admit that modern historiography is predominantly modernist ^[11]. A comprehensive approach based on the study of the history and current state of Iranian nationalism, including its various ideological, political and cultural manifestations, is influential in Russian historiography ^{[12; 13]}. A significant part of Russian authors avoid turning to methodological aspects, although a certain amount of methodology is present in modern domestic studies of nationalism, but the authors' commitment to certain principles may not be openly declared. In Russian historiographical conditions, all studies focused on nationalism can be conditionally divided into modernist and primordial. This dichotomy is present not only in the study of Western nationalisms, but also Eastern ones, the application of Western theories to which may seem somewhat artificial. Therefore, there is a situation of dominance of modernist versions of the nation "by default" in the analysis of Oriental material, which actualizes not only the features of the modernist canon, but also its significant adaptive potential for the analysis of Iranian historical contexts. Iranian nationalism in Russian historiography is one of the unexplored problems ^{[14; 15; 16]}, if we read "nationalist" as Western modernism does in its classical versions. This historiographical situation can be perceived in the categories proposed by M. Krom as a consequence of the "deconstruction of the basic concepts on which the whole concept of history and historiography was built", which put historians "in a very difficult position: they can still develop private plots using the language of sources to construct a narrative," but "they clearly lack the conceptual apparatus for serious generalizations" ^[17]. This logic of historiography development encourages historians to study more specific problems of the history of Iranian nationalism, avoiding large-scale generalizations. This is probably why in Russian Iranian studies the modernist mode of description is perceived as something alien. 

Based on the fundamental ideas of modernist historiography, the author in the presented article defines the attempt of the nationalist project in Iran as unsuccessful due to the influence of two factors – the Islamic Revolution, which established a non-secular regime and the subsequent marginalization of nationalism by new elites, for whom the values of the Ummah were more important than the principles of the nation. This position is characteristic of the political discourse of Iran, presented in the texts of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005 – 2013), who argued that "God did not need a person in the context of tribe, ethnicity and race, because human nature and truth are beyond race and tribe. A person can reach a point where he will become a complete reflection of God on earth ... Iranians have never been nationalists and have always thought about peace, since Iran is a human, divine civilization of thought and culture" ^[18], in fact rejecting the universals of nationalism.

Historiography is hardly guided only by this principle, and the processes of academic globalization integrate Iranian historians into international contexts, convincing them of the universality of the modernist mode of analysis, since "today it is necessary to continue deconstructing – criticizing and redefining those meanings that we lose as a result of the depoliticization of the political world, through the deculturalization of culture and the nihilization of thinking in the modern society" ^[19], which actualizes the need for assimilation of Gellner models, which will be discussed below.

The purpose of the article is to analyze nationalist modernization as a set of forms of political and cultural imagination of the Iranian elites in the context of the ideal model of social transformations described by E. Gellner, within the framework of his dichotomy represented by Ruritania and Megalomania. Within the framework of the theory of the English historian, these two ideal types described the processes that culminated in the emergence of nations perceived as "imaginary communities" ^[20], although the transfer of such terminology to Iranian contexts may raise objections. The objectives of the article are limited to studying the features of the genesis of Iranian nationalism during the Qajar period within the framework of the main attempts to use and apply the principles of Western nationalism in the political imperial project of Iran of the XIX century, and analyzing the unsuccessful variant of the Pahlavi dynasty's political modernization under nationalist slogans in the context of the ideal model of Ruritania and Megalomania, with which E. Gellner illustrated the history of the development of nationalism in Europe.

Modernist historiography of nationalism and attempts to use it in Oriental studies. The modern historiography of nationalism in various regions is thematically diverse, but most of the research belongs to the modernist paradigm.

Modernism was established in historiography in the 1980s, thanks to the activities of B. Anderson ^[20], E. Gellner ^[21] and E. Hobsbawm ^[22]. The modernist model is based on several positions: 1) nations are constructs proposed as part of the process of political, economic and cultural modernization; 2) the construction of a nation has a secondary character, so nationalism constructs nations; 3) nations are constructs based on artificially unified attributes (languages, national traditions, national histories) that form identity; 4) identity – a conditional, consensual category that manifests itself through nationalistic imagination and inventions of traditions.

These statements of the supporters of the modernist approach managed to become "commonplaces", turning into the so-called "big narratives", which are reproduced in most studies on the history of nationalism ^[23]. The modernist approach was used to study a limited number of nationalisms, which was due to the scientific interests of the historians who proposed this method. Within the framework of this paradigm, nationalism as a phenomenon of social and cultural modernization was actively studied ^[24], as well as general issues of the history of nationalist imagination and the invention of traditions ^[25]. Since the 1990s, there have been tendencies in historiography to expand the geography of the application of modernism, which was manifested in works focused on the interpretation of nationalism as a consequence of socio-cultural modernization in a broad European ^[26] and American perspectives ^[27].

Modernism during the 1990s – 2000s became one of the universal methodologies for explaining various nationalisms at the regional level. In the 2000s, attempts were made in historiography to expand the geography of nationalism studies carried out within the framework of modernist methodology. The history of nationalism in Asia ^[28], Africa ^[29], and the East ^[30] began to be described outside the paradigm of positivist history, which was replaced by its multiple interpretations as one of the consequences of modernization, analyzed in the categories of social history ^[31], cultural history ^[32], intellectual history ^[33].

One of the countries to which the modernist methodology was applied was Iran. The analysis of the history of Iranian nationalism within the framework of the principles focused by modernist historians reflects the birth traumas of this trend, represented by excessive attention to social history, the absolutization of the role of modernization processes ^[34], imaginative and inventoristic activities of intellectuals in the institutionalization of the nation as an imaginary community ^[35] and its acquisition of identity represented by invented traditions ^[36], the spectrum of which is diverse, ranging from the codified language to the canon of national historical memory ^[37].

In the studies devoted to Iranian nationalism, its event history is reduced, becoming an element of the analysis of modernization as a process of nation-building. These generic features have had a significant impact on how the theoretical model based on his analysis within the framework of ideal images of Ruritania and Megalomania is applied to the study of Iranian nationalism. 

E. Gellner's "Ruritania" / "Megalomania" dichotomy in Iranian contexts. E. Gellner is the author of an original theory of nationalism based on its perception as a component of cultural and social modernization. His texts are characterized by geographical breadth, a tendency to analyze the social component, which was illustrated by numerous examples, as well as by the ideal models used by him, making visible differences in the development of nationalism. The most famous such models in Gellner's theory were Ruritania and Megalomania – two "ideal" societies designed to reflect general trends in the history of nationalism. Proposed by E. Gellner in 1983 ^[38], these models were later used by other historians ^{[39; 40; 41]}, who sought to emphasize the common and special in the development of nationalisms. 

Applying the "ideal" types of nationalism development, E. Gellner showed that its evolution can be described as follows. On the territory of an unnamed pre–modern state, two large ethnic groups lived - Ruritans, who were rural people who used related dialects in everyday life, and Megalomaniacs, who were residents of the central regions, who spoke their own language, which was different from Ruritanian, belonging to another group. If we integrate the Gellner ideal model into Iranian contexts, then we should actualize the factor of heterogeneity of pre-modern societies at an early stage of the development of emerging nationalism, an example of which is Persia in the XIX century as a multi-component society. The Gellner model was based, if not on denial, then on a radical reduction of the historical pre-modern component in the history of nationalism.

E. Gellner's concept is built around the description of nationalism as a form of modernization. The analysis of this component in the genesis of nationalism is burdened, according to Turaj Atabaki, "not by the strict opposition of tradition and modernity" under the late Qajars and Pahlavis, but by the fact that "many traditionalists had sympathies for modernity, and many modernists for tradition" ^[42]. This feature confirms the thesis of the Bulgarian researcher A. Alipieva that "the national idea is perceived as primordial, and modernism as a cultural discourse is perceived as a derivative" ^[43]. A compromise has been established in Iranian historiography, illustrated by the above assumption. Ethnicity is constructed by intellectuals as an originally existing category, while attempts by elites to make adjustments to it through modernization are evaluated negatively, which is not due to the development of historical science as such, but to its dependence on official ideological discourse. 

Iranian historiography reproduces classical modernist narratives of Western historians of nationalism, as well as intellectuals of Iranian origin ^{[44; 45]}, who became pioneers in the assimilation of modernist language to describe nationalism and its adaptation to Iranian cultural realities. Historians are characterized by this perception of nationalism as "a modern concept that did not exist in Europe before the creation of nation-states. The concept of nationalism makes sense along with the formation of integrated markets, since it is with the integration of markets that the need for national identity arises" ^[46]. In the Iranian historiography of nationalism, its constructivist interpretation prevails, which does not exclude various dates of its appearance, and the spectrum of possible dates of birth of nationalism is reduced by the Qajar or Pahlavi periods.

If we turn to E. Gellner's model, it follows that a significant part of the Ruritan peasants belonged to a church where the service was conducted in the language of another group – accordingly, many priests spoke a language that was not understandable to the Ruritan peasants. Other ethnic groups engaged in trade were also present in the territories of compact residence of Ruritanians and Megalomaniacs. Gellner's assumption successfully illustrates the social and economic realities of Iran during the Qajar period, when a significant part of the bourgeoisie belonged to national and religious minorities, an example of which is the Tumanyants Brothers company ^[47], which became a fairly effective economic institution operating in the field of trade and industry, which actualizes the imperial character of the Qajar statehood as a multi-component society. There is a noticeable tradition in historiography to link the processes of nationalization of society with social changes, within which "the petty bourgeoisie is assigned a decisive role in the development of post-constitutional Iran," since it was she who, together with the Shiite clergy, "created anti-liberal fundamentalism" ^[48], which significantly influenced the main trajectories of Iran's development and replaced nationalism in the Western sense.

Transferring these assumptions of E. Gellner to Iranian contexts, we find an example of a multi-component society ^[49]. If at the beginning of the XIX century, the features and patterns in the development of those regions whose population used the Azerbaijani version of Turkic and Farsi from a social point of view were largely close, since they represented traditional and pre-modern groups that were forced to get involved in the modernization processes. The history of Iran in the XIX century is a history of several nationalisms. Nationalisms developed in parallel, stimulating each other, although the structure of the Qajar political elite was more diverse, including Azerbaijani and Armenian elements influenced by the ideology of civil Iranian nationalism, as evidenced, for example, by the experience of Mohammad Taghi Khan Pesyan ^[50] – one of the leaders of the last uprisings of the Qajar era. Mohammad Taghi Khan Pesyan was of mixed ethnic origin, belonging to the military and political elite of Iran. His ancestors came from Karabakh, and the officer himself associated himself more with the Turks, becoming famous for his commitment to Iranian nationalism and the words attributed to him by subsequent generations of nationalists: "I not only love Iranians, but also worship them... If you kill me, my drops of blood will draw the word Iran, and if you burn me, I will become his ashes, writing the name of my homeland with them" ^[51]. Conceptually, Iran was probably his homeland as an emerging political and civil nation. The personal trajectories of this Iranian nationalist illustrate the social and cultural mutations allowed by E. Gellner, within the framework of his collective images of Ruritania and Megalomania, which actualized the general trends in the development of nationalism in modernizing multi-component societies. Therefore, if we consider the growth of Turkic Azerbaijani nationalism, it is necessary to take into account that it has become an incentive for the consolidation of Azerbaijani ^[52] and Iranian self-consciousness, since in such multi-component societies of the imperial type, the conditional minority needs external and internal threats to the self in order to actualize and visualize its own identity more.

By transferring the Gellner model to Iranian contexts, we can probably define Iran as Ruritania in relation to which the West, represented by the British and Russian Empires, acted as a Megalomania due to the fact that "Western civilization ... sought to sacrifice Iran's independence for the sake of its colonial interests with its colonial and hegemonic aspirations... The West forced Iranian intellectuals to formulate the idea of Iranian nationalism ... and write history in a new narrative, which allowed exaggerating past successes by arming the nation"^[53] with nationalism directed, among other things, against Europe itself, from where Iran borrowed nationalist principles.

E. Gellner's ideal model, if we use it to analyze Iranian nationalism, clearly reduces the role of external factors to secondary ones, although in the case of nineteenth-century Persia, the external factor could be perceived by Iranian intellectuals as decisive, since "despite the long-standing relations between Iran and the West, the Qajar era can be considered a new chapter in the history of the development of these relations… Iranian society in the Qajar era, when authoritarian dictatorships prevailed, and political, social and economic backwardness contributed to a clash with the new face of the West. The growing progress of the West in various political, social, economic and cultural fields, which had a dazzling appeal for the elites, created the danger of Western colonial hegemony, which seriously threatened Iran and Iranians in the Qajar era, but the Iranian society could not close its eyes to the reality of Western modernity and progress, as well as understood the danger of the threat of Western colonial domination." ^[54].

Analyzing Iranian nationalism from a comparative historical perspective, it should also be remembered that in historiography its image has developed as an unsuccessful and secondary nationalism, reproduced from other and alternative nationalist projects of communities that were minorities during the Qajar and Pahlavi period. The unrest in Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century ^[55] fits perfectly into the Gellner model, reflecting the social and economic changes associated with the processes of industrialization and urbanization. The city became an arena of social contradictions and class struggle, national confrontation, which often took place under external influence, as third states (in the Iranian case, the Russian Empire and the British Empire) acted as incentives for institutionalization, imagination and invention, alternative national projects in Iran ^[56]. Visualization of the civil component was especially important and relevant for nationalists in the XIX century, when they declared the slogans of constitutionalism, pointing to the need to fight despotism. As for the alternative version of nationalism represented by the ideas of ethnicity ^[57], the latter were implemented to a greater extent already under Pahlavi, since the political regime of Iran until 1979 was able to develop its own mechanisms for implementing the idea of a civil nation, which in some cases was imitative.

These forms of nationalist imagination in Iran had a secondary character, being local derivatives of attempts to assimilate Western academic discourse represented by orientalism and Iranian studies ^[58], which is recognized by Iranian authors in the USA and Europe due to their integration into the Western academic environment ^{[59; 60]}. Both orientalism and Iranian studies, as part of their integration into the political, cultural and intellectual contexts of Persia, stimulated the development of ethnic and civic nationalism, since Iranian nationalists in the interpretation of the past differed little from European like-minded people, finding, "imagining" and "inventing" evidence in their own historical experience as in favor of the need for a nation in Iran in political (civil) and ethnic dimensions.

The latter characteristics became dominant in the Iranian model of historical imagination, which led to the transformation of the category "Ir?n?ahr" into an invented historiographical tradition, defined by Javad Tabatabai not just as "the name by which the Sassanids called the territory they controlled ... and a name known already in the first centuries of the Islamic period and repeatedly repeated in historical writings", but as a special category that visualizes "the differences between this country and other countries, allowing the historian to describe its characteristics and distinguishing it from other countries" ^[61]. Applying the model of E. Gellner, Iranian intellectuals synthesized his ideas with R. Shporlyuk's attempts ^[62] to localize nationalism among other ideologies of modernity, which operated with social ^[63], and not ethnic categories. Gellner's "Ruritania" and "Megalomania" in historiography turned into "collective singulars", defined by N. Koposov as "individual collective names" ^[64], which are able to describe collective social (bourgeoisie, nobility) categories and common processes, including revolution and nationalization. Therefore, using the Gellner model to analyze the history of Iranian nationalism, it should be taken into account that Iranian intellectuals themselves are no strangers to such reflections on their own experience of nation-building ^[65]. They perceive simultaneous and parallel forms of development of Iranian and Azerbaijani nationalisms ^[66] and their identity as social and political consequences of modernization ^[67]. In this situation, a significant part of the works of Iranian historians focused on the problems of nationalism belongs to the modernist paradigm ^{[68; 69]}. The heterogeneity of interpretations of nationalism in the modern historiography of Iran was the result of the introduction of Iranian intellectuals to classical Western theories ^[70], designed to describe and interpret the nationalist experience. In addition, they assimilated interpretive models ^[71] used to analyze the history of Iranian nationalism and various identity projects. Therefore, an attempt to replace the imperial model of Qajar nationalism led to the assertion of a "reductionist understanding of the concept of an Iranian nation-state based on the Aryan race and the Persian language" ^[72], which excluded the Turks from the project of the Iranian political nation.

The limitations of E. Geller's model of the history of nationalism in the context of the history of Iran. Despite certain tendencies towards the universalization of modernist interpretations of nationalism and its spread in historiography, the concept presented within the framework of the dichotomy proposed by E. Gellner is periodically criticized.

Opponents of the widespread use of modernism to explain nationalism believe that in some countries this doctrine arose before the beginning of political and social modernization, as evidenced, for example, by the experience of states in which ancient civilizations existed, and their history actualized the trends of continuity. Iran is one of such countries. In the Iranian perspective, modernist theories of modernization are less effectively used, which have proved themselves well when studying the nationalism of minority groups in Central and Eastern Europe or postcolonial societies of North and South America. In addition, according to formal indicators, Iranian nationalism cannot be defined as minority nationalism, which also reduces to a certain extent the effect of using modernist models of interpreting its history.

Analyzing the weaknesses of Gellner's explanation of nationalism using the "Ruritania" / "Megalomania" dichotomy, it should also be taken into account that the model proposed by E. Gellner poorly explains the role of the Shiite factor, although the British researcher began his academic career with studies devoted specifically to Islam, later switching his attention to the study of the general problems of nationalism, reducing its up to the western experience. At the same time, the ideas proposed by E. Gellner in his early studies on North Africa may be less applicable to Iranian contexts due to their significant ethnic and religious (Shiite) specificity.

In this situation, Gellner's Ruritania and Megalomania are doomed to remain historiographical collective singulars, "big narratives", successful metaphors and allegories, fully applied to the study of the history of nationalism of minority and unequal groups for a long historical time deprived of the traditions of their own statehood. In the case of a shift of research attention to the East, including in the direction of Iran, their potential may significantly decrease, which does not exclude the universality of modernist interpretations and descriptive models of the history of nationalism proposed in the first half of the 1980s by Anglo–American historians and later developed in international historiography. This, for example, is evidenced by a rather deep acquaintance with the modernist ideas of modern Iranian historians, who have achieved significant success not only in integrating modernism into their own methodological languages of historiography, but also partially able to assimilate the concept, adapting it to analyze the local historical and cultural realities of social and political modernization, which led to the universalization of the principles of nationalism in Iran, however – with certain local peculiarities of its interpretation, which resulted from the dominance of the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism and the Ummah, which pushed and questioned nationalism and the nation as its derivative.

In general, the ideal types proposed by E. Gellner seem to be quite self-sufficient historiographical constructs that can be used in the study of the history of Iranian nationalism, but their application will remain extremely limited. E. Gellner's models seem to be quite applicable for studying the history of Persia during the Qajar period, when the country began to take the first steps towards political and socio-economic modernization, that is, attempts were actually made to eliminate the dichotomy described by E. Gellner, manifested in the desire of the elites to build their own version of Megalomania, that is, a civil nation by assimilation of Turkic communities – a conditional Persian Ruritania. The potential of Gellner's interpretations is significantly reduced if we take into account the collapse by 1979 of attempts to establish an ethnic nation within the Pahlavi policy. At the same time, the politics of modern Iran does not exclude the use of E. Gellner's ideal models in the analysis of the prevailing political realities. Transplanting Gellner's understanding of nationalism into modern Iranian contexts, it is probably necessary to state the achievement of a compromise between Megalomania and Ruritania: if the former is represented by attempts to consolidate identity and promote a consolidated image of Iran as a universal alternative to the Western project at the international level, then the second is the Shiite political theology that has prevailed since 1979, appealing not to the principles of civil, but mainly religious identity.     

Conclusions. The use of the ideal models of Ruritania and Megalomania proposed by E. Gellner makes it possible to analyze Iranian nationalism not in isolation from contemporary European nationalisms, but to consider it within the framework of historical dynamics, actualizing general patterns in the development of Western and non-Western nationalisms. The ideal model of Ruritania and Megalomania illustrates the modernization processes through which the Qajar Empire in the XIX century and Pahlavi Iran in the XX century demonstrate closeness with the European experience of nationalist construction. The ideal types proposed by E. Gellner are applicable to the study of the initial stages of the history of modernization, since the social and cultural dynamics of early nationalism was characterized by extremely negative conditions, the presence of significant regional and cultural imbalances, incomplete social structures and institutions, as well as the absence of classes necessary for nationalist modernization.

The appeal to E. Gellner's ideal types in the study of Iranian nationalism looks correct if we believe that it is comparable in its forms, level of development and achievements with European analogies. It makes sense to draw these parallels at the level of the social history of institutions that ensured the transition from tradition to modernity, from archaic communities to a modern nation. The use of images of Ruritania and Megalomania as universal interpretative models actualizes parallels with similar phenomena in the historical heritage of European nationalisms. In this context, E. Gellner's dichotomy becomes a link with other historiographical constructions, including theories of "imagining communities" and "inventing traditions".

Having revealed the significant potential of E. Gellner's ideal types for studying Iranian nationalism, the question of the failure of the nationalist project in Iran becomes particularly relevant against the background of the fact that European nationalisms, developing largely in similar conditions (or even worse), were able to implement the nation-state project. Analyzing the collapse of Iranian nationalism in its secular, civil and ethnic versions, starting from the theoretical constructions of E. Gellner, we actualize the problem of Iranian social analogues of the Western bourgeoisie and the working class. Such a drift away from ideal regional types in the direction of the possibility or impossibility of using Gellner's theory to study the external social history of Iranian nationalism is not accidental, actualizing the significance of E. Gellner's legacy as an orientalist and researcher of Islam, who applied broad cultural and socio-economic generalizations.

The analysis of the (non) success of Iranian nationalism indicates that its study is possible with the use of methodological languages of Western modernist historiography, including the ideal types of Ruritania and Megalomania by E. Gellner, provided integration into broader interdisciplinary contexts, taking into account the achievements of national Iranian historiography.