Of desire and indifference

Why Europe’s appeal is fading for young Iranians

After the Twelve-Day War, many diplomatic missions operated at reduced capacity, and in Tehran, long queues formed in front of European consulates which, in some cases over the weeks, turned into orderly protest demonstrations. “I have been separated from my wife and children for more than three years. My interview was conducted in May, but I still haven’t received a response,” a man named Massoud told the daily newspaper Shargh. Beyond blocking family reunifications, the visa freeze has affected thousands of young people already holding valid work contracts and just as many thousands of students waiting to begin the academic year at a European university. In the transition from summer to autumn, the processing of consular paperwork has largely resumed the pace preceding the conflict with Israel; that said, the number of unprocessed files remains high and the pressure from Iranians yearning for a future elsewhere seems far from destined to wane. This is suggested, on the one hand, by economic stagnation—a disheartening stagnation, destined to worsen after the EU’s reintroduction of sanctions following the snapback mechanism—and on the other, by figures provided by the Islamic Republic’s own Foreign Ministry, according to which the number of young people who completed their education at a foreign university tripled between 2008 and 2023. The trend is easy to read when one considers that although government estimates speak of an unemployment rate hovering around 7.6 percent, the reality is that one in five young Iranians is unemployed and that, with an average inflation rate of 42.4 percent (IMF data), even those with jobs risk teetering on the poverty threshold. That’s not all. To economic factors, one must add the struggle to cope with environmental ones—the water crisis, electricity blackouts, pollution, property speculation—and political ones—censorship, violence, the absence of freedom that manifests in a thousand daily abuses—so that for many young people the question is increasingly not so much why leave, but why stay.

Of this exodus, the Old Continent, narrowly surpassed by Turkey and secondarily by Canada and the United States (pre-Trump), remains one of the main destinations, albeit stripped of its former centrality. Indeed, it’s increasingly common to hear Iranian entrepreneurs complain about the choice of relying on European suppliers instead of Chinese ones and just as easy to stumble into debates in which the main actors on the scene are Russian, American and once again Chinese, but rarely, if not never, European.

One must therefore ponder on what has become of Europe in the eyes of Iranians, whether it has truly abdicated its propulsive force to content itself with playing a supporting role. Because before America entered the scene to capture dreams (or nightmares, depending on one’s point of view), for centuries Persian subjectivity was measured and constructed in the encounter-clash with Europe and its values, and answering Montesquieu’s question about what it meant to be Persian could not have excluded an examination of what it meant, by extension, to be European.

From the mid-1800s onwards, when Iran, having already lost Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Dagestan to Russia, saw the British also strip away control of Herat and thus its Afghanistan, in Tehran the most pressing question centred around the essence of the European experience, or rather the characteristics of its success. And it is from this period that the small contingent of emissaries the Qajar dynasty sent to London and Paris to study engineering and medicine, expanded. The new recruits attended the St. Cyr military academy, analyzed the workings of railways, immersed themselves in the pages of Shakespeare and Chaucer, and meanwhile wrote reports on the British parliamentary system. They were heirs to ancient Persian cosmopolitanism and beyond Farsi and Arabic, they mastered French, English and often German as well. Upon returning to Iran, they rose to the rank of ministers, opened schools like the prestigious Dar al-Funun, and founded newspapers. Such was the enthusiasm with which they extolled what they had observed during their travels that Shah Nasreddin, frightened by the subversive potential of this European education, imposed a suspension on excursions to the Old Continent. But curiosity would prove too strong to overcome even for him and in 1873 it was Nasreddin himself who visited Germany, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, where he was seduced by countless novelties, not least the tutus he admired during a ballet and with which, upon returning home, he would insist on portraying the women of the harem, swept up in a passion for photography that, according to converging sources, emerged after he received a camera as a gift from Queen Victoria.

Europe’s influence continued to gain ground during the years of the constitutional revolution (1905-1911), partly because the so-called “modernist” intellectuals drew inspiration from the Enlightenment and positivism, and partly because the Constitution that would be produced bore the imprint of the Belgian one. In 1910, Parliament passed a law awarding a scholarship for Europe to thirty deserving young people each year. (By 1919, 200 Iranians had already arrived in Paris under this scheme, 34 in England, 9 in Germany and a couple in Switzerland and Austria). The momentum accelerated further in 1928 when a new provision by the newly established Pahlavi monarchy expanded scholarship access to one hundred students per year, and it is estimated that between 1922 and 1938 more than 1,500 young Iranians took advantage of the opportunity to broaden their horizons in Europe. Among those who combined classical Persian education with European-style erudition were several of the most influential figures in Iranian politics, economy and culture, spanning the end of the Qajar era and the reigns of Reza Pahlavi and his son Mohammed Reza.

In a markedly different way, Europe played a role, both in the Western infatuation with Ayatollah Khomeini and in the support for the anti-monarchist militant activism that gravitated around the Confederation of Iranian Students in the 1960s and 1970s.

When did Europe stop representing the go-to mirror for Iranians then? It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment, but the rise of the American dream, European indifference toward the Khomeinist (and Khameneist) drift, and the sense that the Old Continent’s apathy has much to do with its inability to adhere to its own principles were likely contributing factors.

n. 8, December 5, 2025