Iranian constitutional movement: An impossible illusion or an incomplete plan

Despite the fact that the issue of Iranian constitutional movement has been variously studied by researchers from different perspectives, only few studies have ever explored this significant event in its relation to the historical context of Iran. Most studies carried out in the field have taken two major theorethical stances: the first one holds that constitutionalism is believed to be a foreign import, and thus lacks any contextual congruency or social relevance to the historical context of Iran. This can suggest that from the very beginning the constitutionalists’ attempts to establish such a political order were doomed to failure. The second stance ascribes the failure of the constitutional movement to external factors, foreigners’ interventions and poor leadership.
Accordingly, the purpose of the current study is twofold: I) To examine if the failure of the Iranian constitutional movement in establishing a democratic political order was simply due to the asynchrony of the plan and the concrete-conceptual realities of Iran II) To theorize, if possible, an alternative explanatory pattern. To this end, both historical investigation and causal explanation are used as the research methodologies. The findings of research indicate that despite its ability to explain the failure of Iranian constitutional movement, the impossibility pattern proves to be a reductive approach which cannot account for other aspects of the historical reality. The findings also reveal that the alternative pattern (the incomplete plan) offers a credible explanation for the existing structural deficiencies, and considers constitutionalism as an open-ending project of a political transformation to come – what is still a matter of concern and relevance to the contemporary history of Iran.