Qunfuz

An edited version of this essay was published by Unherd.

As well as the most persistent, the Syrian Revolution has been the most total of revolutions. Starting in  early 2011 and culminating unexpectedly in December of 2024, it – or rather, the Syrian people – managed to oust not only Bashar al-Assad, but also his army, police and security services, his prisons and surveillance system, and his allied warlords, as well as the imperialist states which had kept him in place. The revolutionary victory marked the end of a dictatorship which had lasted 54 years (under Bashar and his father, Hafez), and also the final, belated death of the 77-year-old Baath Party, once the largest institution in both Syria and Iraq.

Founded in Damascus in April 1947, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the Arab region. The first stage was one of abstract and unrealistic ideals. Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser understood the Arab world as a strategic depth for Egypt and a field in which he could exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical apprehension of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces, one which had a “natural right to live in a single state.”

The founding figures were Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy (Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx) while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a means of constructing an alternative identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian and Zaki Arsuzi was an Alawi who later adopted atheism. The three mixed enlightenment modernism with romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. And Aflaq turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius”, and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the fertile crescent – the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and so on – to be Arab too, though they hadn’t spoken Arabic.

Like other grand political narratives of the 20^th Century, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. The word Baath means “resurrection”. The party slogan was umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida, or “One Arab Nation Bearing an Eternal Message”, which sounds strangely grandiose even before the realization that umma is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that risala is used to refer to the message delivered by the Prophet Muhammad.

The party’s motto – “Unity, Freedom, Socialism” – referred to the desire for a single, unified Arab state from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. The Arab state should be free of foreign control, and should construct a socialist economic system.

This dream was spread by countryside doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers and the membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.

By then, episodes of democracy were becoming more and more rare. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup – the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world – politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, then became a pan-Arab hero when he confronted the UK, France and Israel over the Suez canal in 1956.

Nasser’s popularity fueled an already raging popular desire to eliminate colonial borders and, on the urging of Syrian Baathist officers, Syria and Egypt merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. But Nasser’s conception of unity – one which the Baathists would emulate – was totalitarian. There should be only one leader, one party, one source of information. Following Nasser’s orders, the Syrian Baath dissolved itself. It would never be a grassroots movement again.

Syrian officers seconded to Cairo, meanwhile, including Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid, formed a secret Baathist Military Committee. This marked the second stage of the Baath, in which the party belonged to military elites.

In effect, Syria became a colony of Egypt, but only briefly. The UAR, widely recognized as a political and economic disaster, collapsed in 1962. Then in the following year, Baathists tasted power for the first time, seizing control of both Iraq and Syria.

The Iraqi Baath had a different sectarian make-up to the Syrian. Its membership was mainly Sunni Arab, which was a minority in Iraq but the majority community in the wider Arab nation. Iraq’s Shia Muslims, therefore, associated Baathism with Sunni identity, and were more likely to join the Communists, then Iraq’s largest party. This meant that the Iraqi Baath appealed to some – and may well have been sponsored by the CIA – as an anti-Communist force. Its March 1963 coup was accompanied by a massacre of Communists. In November, however, it was ousted by another coup.

The Syrian Baath retained power from 1963 on, but the party was riven by conflict, culminating in 1966 in an internal coup against the National Command by Salah Jadid’s Syria-first “regionalists”. Arsuzi was brought back from obscurity to play the role of ideological figurehead of the Syrian wing, but most of the party’s original leadership fled abroad, especially to Iraq, including Aflaq. Bitar was assassinated in Paris in 1980.

The Baathists turned on each other. The Syrian and Iraqi wings became irreconcilable enemies. In Syria, an endless series of purges further sectarianized an already sectarian army. Competent officers were replaced by loyalists, overwhelmingly from the same Alawite community as Jadid and Assad. The consequent weakening of the army may explain the catastrophic loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, when Hafez al-Assad, then defense minister, gave the order to retreat long before the Israeli army arrived.

Under Jadid’s “Leninist” leadership, the Syrian Baath practised a top-down leftism which aimed to eliminate the old bourgeoisie. In 1970, however, the “pragmatist” Assad launched a new internal coup. Jadid was sent to prison, where he languished until his death. Assad eased off the class warfare and concentrated instead on building his own impregnable power base. The Iraqi Baath, meanwhile, had returned to power in 1968, and Saddam Hussein ascended within it until he became absolute leader in 1979. This marks the third stage of the Baath, in which the party became a vehicle for one-man dictatorships.

The cult of personality exalted the respective Iraqi and Syrian leaders with North Korean-style rallies and titles like “first pharmacist” or “hero of war and peace”. They were described as “eternal leader” and “symbol of the Arab revolution”, as if the hitherto deified nation had been reduced to a single figure. Their portraits and statues showed them excelling in various roles, as scholar, farmer, warrior, father. Their sons were also iconized.

Some sections of society benefited, for a while at least. Members of hitherto marginalized rural communities, including religious minorities, went into the army and security services. Some of the urban working class benefitted from jobs in the rapidly expanding state sector, and from subsidized food and fuel. In Iraq, enormous oil wealth allowed rapid development of civilian infrastructure. However terrifying the regime, it became associated with modernization and progress.

On the other hand, political repression and widespread corruption caused a brain drain and scared off investment from both countries. Then Saddam’s regime squandered the national wealth on wars of choice, attacking Iran first, and then Kuwait. He described the international effort to remove his forces from Kuwait as “the mother of battles”, and interpreted Iraq’s defeat there as a victory – much as Assad’s propaganda represented the 1973 War with Israel – another defeat – as a triumph.

The gap between rhetoric and reality was vast and growing. The Assadist media insisted on the necessity of supporting the Palestinian-leftist alliance in the Lebanese civil war, but then invaded Lebanon in 1976 in order to defeat the Palestinian-leftist alliance. By now, both wings of the Baath party had built memberships of millions, but the party had become a mere means of getting on. Stripped of ideology, the members’ role was simply to rubberstamp the whims of the leaders.

Both Assad and Saddam built fearsome security states with overlapping intelligence services. Far from unifying the people, repression in both countries soon took on ethno-sectarian overtones. Saddam killed tens of thousands of Kurds – the 1988 chemical atrocity at Halabja was the worst single massacre of these campaigns – and then exterminated Shia Muslims when they rose against him in 1991. Assad responded to a challenge by the Muslim Brotherhood by killing up to 40,000 people in Hama in 1982. Then Assad’s son Bashar, who inherited the presidency in 2000, outdid his father, responding to the 2011 revolution by destroying cities and killing hundreds of thousands.

Saddam was deposed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many of his security officers later joined ISIS, which – despite its religious rather than secular rhetoric – is actually the Baath’s closest successor, pursuing the same reign by terror, the same system of mass surveillance, detention and torture.

So what became of  “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”? Instead of unity, the Bath brought divide and rule, splintering society by ethnicity, sect, class and region. Rather than freedom from foreign powers, Iraq and Syria ended up occupied by them. In both countries, socialism ended in sanctions, neo-liberalism, and ubiquitous corruption.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is brought down by a fatal flaw in his own character. The Baath party’s flaw was its identification of the Arabs with state power, and then the reduction of the state to one-man rule. An Arab nation can be said to exist, and at times it transcends state borders. The Arab Spring proved this, when Arabs in different countries, influencing each other, revolted simultaneously. But the Arab countries include non-Arab peoples, and the Arab peoples themselves are plural and diverse, far greater and more creative than a single man or a single mystical ideology could ever be.

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The editors at Unherd wanted an extra ending to the piece, so wrote this:

What lessons should present and future leaders learn from the failure of Baathism?

That strong men are brittle and easily broken, whatever their ideology. That the highly-centralized, hyper-authoritarian states built by such men end in military defeat and economic collapse. These dictatorships weaken and impoverish society, and provide security to no one, not even to the strong men in the end.

The Arabs have been assaulted by a string of foreign states – Israel and the US, Russia and Iran. The need to win freedom from the nation’s enemies – or at least to deter their aggression –  is more of an imperative than ever. But seizing control of the state by military force is not sufficient to shift the balance. There are no shortcuts. Lasting power can only be built by liberating the powers of the people rather than smothering them. That means human and civil rights are essential tools in constructing national power. Once the peoples of the Arab and Muslim region are able to express themselves freely and determine their affairs democratically, then their various polities will be ready to coordinate their energies. And that will change the world.