The Ideological Death knell of Ba'thism
On December 8, after 24 years of rule, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad collapsed after a combined rebel offensive advanced on the Syrian capital of Damascus. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of Baghdad in April, 2003, statues of the Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, have been toppled as Syrians take to the streets in rebel-freed cities to celebrate the collapse of the Assad dynasty. Beyond considerations of the geopolitical context of the Syrian Civil War and its repercussions for Middle East stability, least appreciated in the spectrum of events has been the political dissolution of the Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.1
At the forefront of the anticolonial activism and radical discourse in the postwar Middle East, the Ba’th constituted an ideologically coherent expression of Pan-Arab nationalism.2 Founded in the early 1940s by urban, middle class elements in Syria, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, with branches across the Middle East, the Ba’th was was conceived as a regional formation that strived for the coalescence of Arab peoples, eschewing individual nation states in favour of a unified political framework. Additionally, the organization sought to implement a program of modernization and secularization, overturning the old order of reactionary impulses optimized in monarchism and traditional Islam that epitomized the Arab world during the period of European dominance.
While the Ba’th coalesced as a political organization in 1947, the Syrian branch of the party was independently constituted in 1966. This emerged as a consequence of infighting between the civilian faction of Party and its military component. In February, 1966, the military wing of the Syrian branch decisively seized power in a coup by officers Salah Jadid & Hafez al-Assad. The latter would permanently constitute his authority in a coup in November, 1970, fostering dynastic rule over the next fifty years. In addition to factional splits between civil and military factions, the Ba’th was fraught by fractures on the basis of religious and sectarian conflicts within the ranks of the Party. Within this dynamic of communal strife, minority rule came to shape the character of governance within the party-state apparatus of those countries that fell to Ba’th Party rule.3 In the context of Syria, this brought about the ascendance of the Alawite community to the broader Sunni majority. Where Sunnis were shuffled in prominent positions within the civilian administration, the Alawites were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Syrian officer corps and the broader security-intelligence apparatus.
Despite a high minded political program aimed at radically reorganizing the postcolonial terrain in its commitment to socialism, secularism, and modernization through the vanguard of the revolutionary party-state, the Ba’th devolved into over fifty years of autocratic governance, corruption, & minority rule, personified in the Assad dynasty. While initially enacting reforms through a program of state centred development, the Assad regime morphed into a personalist system figured by stagnancy, nefarious regional meddling in the affairs of its neighbours, and simmering sectarian tensions within the party-state. To this extent, the measures adopted in the volatile geopolitical environment of the Middle East and the repressive rule exercised domestically came to serve the objective of perpetuating the rule of the Assad dynasty. This system was principally engendered through the instrument of the Ba’th Party, which pervaded all facets of Syrian society and its major institutions.4 Not unlike the myriad of lingering, postcolonial parties in the Global South - such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the FSLN in Nicaragua, and the MPLA in Angola - into the post-Cold War period the Ba’th constituted a movement that was ideologically and organizationally defunct, bereft of popular legitimacy and lacking in any pretense to revolutionary impulses.5
Alternatively spelled as “Ba’ath” within the popular press, the word is translated into “resurrection” or “renaissance.”
This was in contrast to the platitude & rhetoric of the variant of Pan-Arabism espoused by Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser. For discussion of the ideological intricacies of Ba’thism and its manifestation in a regional context, see William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, 6th ed., The History of the Modern Middle East. (Philadelphia, PA: Westview Press, 2016) & Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
In the context of Iraq, the Ba’thist regime was dominated by the country’s sizable Sunni minority, at the expense of representation to the Shia majority and Kurdish population.
See Barry Rubin, The Truth About Syria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Published four years prior to the outbreak of the civil war, the author present a vivid portrait of the structural dynamics undergirded the Assad regime and the centrality of the Ba’thist party-state apparatus.
For an incisive discussion of the pitfalls of the Third World project, see Geoff Schullenberger, “The Mirage of Third Worldism,” Compact, 24 January 2024. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-mirage-of-third-worldism/