Syria

Hot Spots in Global Politics

Samer N. Abboud

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509522415, 9781509522408
• eBook ISBN: 9781509522446
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With more than 500, 000 people killed and at least half the population displaced, Syria's conflict is the most deadly of the twenty-first century. Russia's decision to join the war has broken the long military and political stalemate but it looks unlikely to deliver any of the core demands that spawned the original uprising against the Ba'athist regime.

In this fully revised second edition of his acclaimed text, Samer Abboud provides an in-depth analysis of Syria's descent into civil war, the subsequent stalemate, and the consequences of Russian military involvement after 2015. He unravels the complex and multi-layered drivers of the conflict and demonstrates how rebel fragmentation, sustained regime violence, international actors, and the emergence of competing centers of power tore Syria apart in wholly irreversible ways. A resolution to the Syrian catastrophe seems to have emerged in the aftermath of Russia's intervention, but, as Abboud argues, this "authoritarian peace" contains the seeds of continued and future conflict in Syria. While the Assad regime has so far survived, the instability, violence, and insecurity that continue to shape everyday life for the Syrian people portend an uncertain future that will have repercussions on the wider Middle East for years to come.

1
The Rise and Fall of the Ba’ath Party

The Ba’ath Party has dominated Syrian politics since a bloodless coup brought military officers loyal to the party to power in 1963. The assumption of Ba’athist power in the 1960s initiated a period of relative political calm in Syria after decades of instability that had followed independence from France in 1946. The social and economic transformations in Syria that made possible the rise of the Ba’ath Party are rooted in the contradictions and consequences of the country’s transitions from Ottoman governance to the French Mandate and then through the independence period. These three seismic political shifts have had profound impacts on the shaping of Syrian politics, society, economy, and the state. It is within the context of these major changes in political power and foreign suzerainty in Syria that the ideological and political conditions in which the Ba’ath Party came to power should be understood.

The shaping of contemporary Syria began in the later Ottoman period, when a series of reforms created and empowered a landlord-merchant class that formed the political elite of Syrian society at the turn of the century. The period of the French Mandate was one of relative continuity in the social composition of Syria’s political elite, as the Mandate powers proved unwilling and unable to initiate major transformations in Syria’s distribution of political power. It is not surprising, then, that after the collapse of the French Mandate, these same landlord-merchant classes continued to rule Syria and dominate political and parliamentary life. Syria’s other major social forces, however, increasingly challenged rule by the nobility. Workers, peasants, and other social groupings that were effectively outside of politics and decision-making began to represent a threat to the nobility order. Such tensions between the ruling classes and the social forces that were on the periphery of political life generated tremendous instability in the decades following independence. Indeed, the instability of the independence period that preceded the seizure of power by the Ba’ath was mostly the result of three parallel processes in Syria that would have substantial effects on society: first, rapid social transformation wrought by integration into the global capitalist system; second, the expansion of state capacity and penetration of the state into society; and, finally, widespread social discontent and, eventually, mobilization, which would challenge and ultimately destroy the existing political structure. Out of the aftermath of the post-independence instability arose the Ba’ath Party. From 1963 until 1970 the party pursued a radical political agenda that reflected its leadership’s commitment to comprehensive social transformation. In 1970, a “corrective revolution” led by Hafiz al-Assad would moderate some of the party’s positions and initiate a process of consolidated state-building.

Having assumed power in 1963, the Ba’ath Party consolidated its rule over Syria and was effective at suppressing and containing any major political challenges by domestic actors (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) and external conflicts, such as the Iraqi and Lebanese wars. One of the key features of Syrian political life since Ottoman times is the differential incorporation of Syria’s social forces into political power and the often destabilizing and revolutionary implications of political peripheralization. The Ba’ath Party was largely successful in initiating major social transformation in Syria and uprooting the nobility-based order. This transformation was grounded in an attempt to overthrow the vestiges of nobility rule and to incorporate the disaffected classes, such as peasants, minorities, rural communities, and the petit bourgeoisie, into a new political order. The costs of such transformation, however, were high, and came at the expense of political democratization. During the period of Hafiz al-Assad’s rule, a patrimonial state emerged whose stability revolved around key pillars of authoritarian control: mainly the security apparatus, army, the Ba’ath Party, corporatized actors, and the public sector.

The pillars of authoritarian rule in Syria provided the institutions through which political mobilization of the disaffected classes and loyalty to the party could occur. By the 1980s, however, Ba’athist authoritarianism had shown signs of exhaustion. Conflict between the party and the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s represented a major threat to Ba’athist rule, and the financial crisis of the mid-1980s exposed the weak fiscal and institutional grounding of the Syrian development model. Thereafter, gradual liberalization occurred and became a vehicle for the slow reintegration of commercial and bourgeois interests into the ruling coalition as a way to spur development. By 2000, Hafiz al-Assad had died and bequeathed power to his son, Bashar al-Assad. Initially considered to be a reformer capable of steering Syria toward a more democratic system, Bashar al-Assad in the 2000s instituted further political contraction and a crackdown coterminous with economic liberalization. The decade preceding the uprising was one of intense and substantive economic change in Syria, in which the pressures of demographic growth, statist retreat, economic stagnation, and a shift toward marketization generated socioeconomic discontent with the regime that had no legitimate outlet. By the 2000s, the space for incorporation of social forces into the political system had shrunk and the social base that the regime had been based on from the 1970s had shrunk. Workers, peasants, rural communities, small business owners, and the increasingly shrinking middle class no longer had an outlet from which to derive material benefits from the state. Once again, in Syria, the peripheralization of social forces would have dramatic political consequences.

From Ottoman to Mandate politics

The Ottoman Empire underwent substantial change in the 1800s. The period of reforms, known as the Tanzimat (1839–1876), attempted to wholly reorganize the state and the relationship between the Sultan and his subjects. A series of military defeats and nationalist movements that set European provinces on the path toward independence led to the territorial contraction of the Empire. In response, the state initiated the Tanzimat reforms to stave off internal collapse and to confront external pressures associated with European encroachment and the Empire’s increasing integration into the global capitalist economy. These reforms were wide ranging and had profound effects on social and political identities in the Empire, principally by reorienting the relationship between state and sultan and introducing new modes of citizenship as well as a series of reforms that accelerated capitalist relations throughout the Empire. The attempt to eliminate distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims and to transform Ottoman subjects into citizens who would have a stake in the defense and continuity of the Empire would radically alter relations among political leaders and lay people within the Empire. There would be, however, two main outcomes of the reform that would shape political life in Syria for years to come. The first was the centralization of power in the expanding Ottoman state and the stronger, penetrative role for the state in the affairs of the provinces. Such centralizing measures proved to be both a threat and an opportunity to local provincial leaders who had grown accustomed to relative autonomy and distance, both politically and geographically, from the central Ottoman state. The second was the introduction of private property and landownership. The introduction of private landownership would ultimately form the economic basis of a new class that would assume greater political power in the final decades of the Empire and which had positioned itself for a role after its collapse.

By the mid-1800s, the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire were being integrated into the global capitalist system. Such integration meant increasing European penetration of the provinces and economic pressure against traditional industries. Such pressures stimulated the growth of agriculture, particularly for export to European markets. The importance of agriculture for the finances of the Empire was evident in the passing of the Land Code of 1858, a policy meant to encourage peasants to register state-owned land so that intermediaries could not concentrate control over the productivity of land (Khoury, 1983, p. 27). In fact, the opposite happened. Peasants so feared the encroachment of the state that they resorted to registering lands in the names of urban patrons or rural notables, thus having precisely the opposite effect of the Land Code. Even those peasants who attempted to register their land found the costs prohibitive, and their lands reverted to auction, where rural notables could easily acquire them. Because the peasants were unable to bear the costs associated with registration or agricultural production, they were transformed into sharecroppers and laborers on land that they had recently controlled. The effect of the Land Code, then, was the gradual concentration of land in the ownership of urban families who had more secure property rights and who could officially engage in commerce and trade.

As peasant proprietorship declined, land concentrations increased, and, after a series of political reforms, so did the political power of the landowning classes. In subsequent decades, class conflict became more apparent in the provinces, especially in agriculturally rich areas of Syria such as the Hawran, where conflict between peasants and landowners increased. In 1864, the Empire passed the Law of the Provinces, which established new administrative councils that would incorporate notables into the political system. P. S. Khoury (1983) held that the introduction of private property, the expanding Ottoman state, and new administrative councils provided the basis for the creation of a new kind of political leadership in Syria tethered to landownership. These leaders would be drawn from two sectors: first, the landowning scholars, religious families who controlled key religious posts in Syria; second, the landowning bureaucrats, who controlled the key political and administrative posts in the expanding Ottoman bureaucracy. The emergence of landowning classes would consolidate class structure in the Syrian provinces and more clearly demarcate divisions and conflict between landowners and peasants.

The Tanzimat reforms ultimately could not stave off Ottoman collapse and by the end of WWI, the victorious European powers were granted Mandates by the League of Nations to control former Ottoman lands and to midwife the new states into self-government. A unique form of suzerainty created by the League of Nations, the Mandates led to the creation of the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine. Having assumed the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon (the British had a Mandate for the remaining countries), the French reinforced, rather than undermined, the landed elite. In particular, the French authorities accelerated the private ownership of land through distributing formerly collectively held lands to the landed elite and tribal leaders in exchange for political subservience and commitment to the French project. In addition to increasing land holdings and wealth of the existing elite, they expanded the institutions of political representation to include a parliament, which, for the duration of the Mandate period, was dominated by landed interests. As the main site of political deliberation and decision-making, Parliament became a site of inter-elite negotiation where landed interests were nearly exclusively represented. Thus, the political and economic control of the landed elite was never seriously threatened during the Mandate period. It was not until the post-independence period that a political coalition would emerge that would challenge the authority of the landed elite.

French rule and independence

By the time the French had assumed the Mandate over post-Ottoman Syria in 1922–1923 after the deposition of the Syrian King Faisal in 1920, the country’s social structure had begun to crystallize. The period preceding the deposition of King Faisal was one of mass politics and popular mobilization (Gelvin, 1999) in which new ideas about politics and nationhood permeated Syria’s social and political landscape. During the immediate period of Ottoman collapse, popular committees emerged that reflected Syria’s plural social mosaic and which began to articulate ideals of national community, a concept that was largely foreign until the late Ottoman period (Gelvin, 1999). As ideas of nationalism spread throughout (mainly urban) Syria, social stratification took shape around agricultural production and exchange, which dominated the country’s economic activity. Owing to the active discouragement of industrialization by the French authorities, the class structure of Syrian society at the time revolved around landownership and the marketing and exchange of agriculture (Hinnebusch, 1990, pp. 39–40). At the top were the large landowners, numbering around 3,000 notable families who represented less than one percent of the total population but owned more than half of all private land in the country (Hinnebusch, 1990: 39). The landed families also dominated all major political, professional, and bureaucratic positions. Immediately below the landowners were the merchants who controlled trade. Agricultural exchange provided the basis for the emergence of a new commercial class who facilitated Syria’s entry into global capitalism. Merchants who were further removed from landowners and agricultural production and who were concentrated in and around urban areas made up the middle strata of society. These merchants held some land and positions within various professions and the bureaucracy, mirroring those of the landowners and commercial merchants. As such, they did not develop social interests that could challenge the landed nobility–based order. The lower strata of urban Syrian society were made up of the petit bourgeoisie, artisans, and laborers who were at the extreme economic peripheries of the benefits of agricultural production. Finally, Syria’s rural areas consisted of a very small group of rural notables who had either acquired some wealth from commercial activities or the zu’ama (political leaders). By far the overwhelming majority of rural Syrians, however, were either sharecroppers (around 30 percent of the total population) or landless peasants (around 60 percent) (Hinnebusch, 1990, p. 40) who earned wages cultivating land owned by the landed notables.

Syria’s social stratification and the elite politics it underpinned would remain economically and politically dependent on agricultural production and the elite’s control of land. The relative continuity of the composition of the elite from the Ottoman through the Mandate period could not, however, remain stable amidst more substantive political and economic changes introduced by the Mandate authorities. The growth of the state bureaucracy had created an entirely new class of middle-class professionals, mostly Western educated and urban. The increasing penetration of the state into all facets of Syrian life and, more specifically, the increasing control of rural affairs by the urban political center, would further divide rural and urban Syria and breed hostility and resentment from rural communities against increasing state encroachment. Perhaps the most important change under the French authorities was the introduction of formal institutions of political deliberation that would provide the framework for the exercise of a new kind of class cohesion among the landed notables. Unsurprisingly, the concentration of economic power in the landowning and commercial classes was mirrored in the new Syrian Parliament. While political parties did emerge, they entirely reflected landed interests and did not seriously incorporate peasant or rural interests into the political system.

Beginning immediately after the Mandate authorities took power in the mid-1920s, there was signs of resistance to French rule from both the urban elite and the rural peasants. On the one hand, the elite found that French interests were increasingly inimical to their nationalism and that the French authorities had little interest in fulfilling the Mandate of midwifing Syrian self-government. Although the elite had benefitted tremendously from the French reluctance to upset the social structure and balance that had developed under the Ottomans, there was a contentious division between the French authorities and the elite that they ruled Syria through. Such tensions would ultimately culminate in the establishment of various institutions of political representation that offered the elite some degree of autonomy from their French overlords. On the other hand, peasants in the rural areas had become increasingly discontent with their socio-economic plight, as well as with French intervention into Syrian affairs. Such grievances were both complementary and contradictory, and, as such, did not provide the basis for cross-class mobilization against the French. Nor did they provide the basis for horizontal linkages among the lower classes and the development of a class consciousness that could mobilize peasants. Syria’s many layered identities—clan, sect, geography—prevented such a development. Clientelism and the dependence of many peasants on the landed elite for social and political gains further ensured that such mobilization could not occur and that peasants would remain subordinate to the elite-dominated system.

By 1925, barely a few years after the Mandate took effect, there was a Great Revolt that lasted until 1927. This cross-sectarian, cross-class revolt occurred throughout Syria and Lebanon and was largely uncoordinated and decentralized but had the common aim of overthrowing French rule. Peasants, tribespeople, rural notables, nationalists, and the elite had all developed grievances against the French after the deposition of King Faisal in 1920. By 1925, a call to arms by a Syrian Druze leader named Sultan al-Atrash led to battles against French forces. In the first weeks of the revolt the Syrian forces were successful and al-Atrash and the nationalists had formed an alliance that led to a National Provisional Government. However, reinforcements from France eventually pushed the Syrian forces into retreat and by 1927 the rebellion had been crushed and along with it the experiment in transitional government. The rebellion had changed French attitudes toward Syria and had encouraged authorities to reform the political system and to begin responding to nationalist demands.

A series of policies followed that were meant to do precisely this, but they had not satisfied nationalist interests...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Hot Spots in Global Politics
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: The Rise and Fall of the Ba’ath Party
• 2: The Syrian Uprising
• 3: Networks of Violence
• 4: Before Aleppo: Stalemate and Fragmentation
• 5: After Aleppo: Breaking the Stalemate
• Conclusion: The Coming Authoritarian Peace
• Afterword
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement