Women’s magazines and Netherlands-Iran Relations 1959-1979
By Dr. Maaike Warnaar
Dr. Maaike Warnaar is an assistant professor in International Studies and Middle East Studies atthe Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS). Her research focuses on Iran and on the dialogical relationship between foreign policy and cultural representation.
The Netherlands maintained warm relations with Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was Shah of Iran. To better understand these relations, and as part of my NWO-funded research, I read women’s magazines from the early 1960s. Why?
Dutch interest in Iran, then often referred to as Persia, was first and foremost commercial. Iran at the time was seen as a land of opportunity because of the huge oil revenues at the Shah’s disposal, in combination with his modernization programme. The Iranian government was looking for expertise and technology in the fields of agriculture and industry, and many Dutch companies were eager to offer this.
The warm relations can be easily explained through analysing Dutch national (economic) interest. However, that hardly tells us anything about how they were possible in the first place. To answer that question, we need a deeper contextualisation of these policies in time and place. My research does this by asking the “how possible” of foreign policy discourse and behaviour, and in doing so it follows a poststructuralist tradition.
The dominant discourse in The Netherlands in which Dutch foreign policy toward Iran took shape was a discourse of progress and modernity. Iran was seen as a developing country and in the Netherlands it was seen not just as an opportunity, but a moral obligation to help the Shah in his efforts to have Iran, so to speak, “join the 20th century”. Helping the Shah turn Iran into a modern, affluent nation, industrialized, with modern technology, norms and values was considered the right thing to do. That this so-called modernization was, in fact, creating deep social divisions in Iran was either unknown or ignored, and the fact that the Shah’s so-called White Revolution was opposed by a growing group of people was explained as a natural, to-be-expected side-effect of this ambitious transition.
This dominant discourse on Iran was produced and reproduced in the national Dutch media and in government statements. Why then also read women’s magazines? After all, one would not expect to see foreign policy makers read women’s magazines and use them as background information when making foreign policy. However, as I was looking for the origins of the narratives that dominated Dutch views of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, this led me to women’s magazines in the early 1960s as original texts to which later texts and statements implicitly or explicitly refer. They are relevant in terms of reach as well as content.
The readership of these magazines was immense and, this may come as a surprise, also among men. In fact, Margriet had a reach of 33% among Dutch men above 15 years old, and Libelle 21%. An issue of Margriet would on average reach 23% of men, 14% of men in case of Libelle. 51% of Dutch men above over 15 years old admitted to reading a women’s magazine every once in a while, a percentage more than twice as high than that for opinion magazines (23% of men). This makes women’s magazines an influential medium for the dissemination of discourse. Equally important is that these magazines showed a particular interest in Iran, or actually: in Farah Diba and her family.
The way these magazines talked about the Iranian royal family, as well as Persia as a country, is marked by dualism. Farah as a woman of glamour and riches, but also a wife and mother with fears and concerns about her children, her husband, and her country. Similarly, Farah is talked about as someone with great power, yet a humble, approachable woman and a home maker. There is a similar opposition in the representation of the Shah. On the one hand he is talked about as a serious, hard-working man, on the other hand as an emotional and family man. The Shah was described as modern, with great plans for his country, but also as a traditional man, an heir and keeper of centuries, millennia, of tradition. Persia, or Iran, was talked about as an ancient civilization, a fairytale-like place, yet a country of opposites: tradition and modernity, riches and poverty, history and future.
In terms of Self versus Other, the overarching narrative here is of a Persia at the same time as “like us” (the Dutch) as well as “exotic”. This dualism is echoed in other mediums, books, documentaries, newspaper articles, museum exhibitions etcetera. Iran was at the same time similar and different. Iran was an Other in the sense that it was Eastern, mystical, reminding us of biblical times. And it was related to the Self in the sense that it shared cultural and linguistic roots, it was modernizing, and it was anti-communist.
This public representation of Iran provided a context within which the Dutch government could maintain its preferred views of Iran. Preferred in the sense that they were in line with the government’s interest in expanding economic relations with Iran. The government discourse in which the Shah was seen as a benevolent ruler was maintained, even when a counter-discourse on Iran grew more vocal during the mid and late 1970s. Public awareness of human rights violations and other concerns about repression under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi grew, and some organizations argued that the Dutch government should be held accountable for their implicitness to the maintenance of the Shah’s power. However, instead of responding to the concerns raised by a younger generation, the Dutch government merely reiterated the dominant discourse.In line with the dualistic view of Iran, the Shah was lauded whenever he announced reforms or liberalizations (The Shah was modern like us) and forgiven whenever there was talk of human rights violations (This is how they do it in Persia; or: Who are we to tell the Shah how to rule his country? Or: It makes sense that in a country like Iran there is a lot of resistance against modernization). It precluded speech acts such as criticism of the Shah, or any expression of sympathy with the Iranian opposition.
In sum, if we want to fully understand the warmth, depth and endurance of Netherland-Iran relations, in the face of increased pressure as information about repression in Iran became publicly available, we need to look at the foreign policy discourse that made these relations possible. This was a discourse which treated Iran as both similar and different, allowing for foreign policies targeted at increased economic relations, while never assuming any accountability for what was happening in Iran. Women’s magazines provided the popular understanding of Iran in the context of which this view “made sense”.