‘Dead on arrival’: Fall of Syria’s Assad and why Baathism was a failed idea

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria potentially marks the end of the pan-Arab nationalist political and military movement represented by the Baath Party, heralding a new era for the Middle East at a crucial juncture of history.

Experts and analysts say that the Baath Party’s “impractical ideology” and authoritarian reigns meant that it was destined to fail from the very beginning.

“Many would say Baathism was dead on arrival…(as it was) an impractical ideology built on a false premise,” says Mostafa Minawi, a professor of history focusing on the Middle East at Cornell University and a fellow at the National Humanities Center.

The Baath Party’s roots go back to the late 1940s when the Arab nationalist movement emerged under the leadership of Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Arab from Damascus and Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawite from Latakia.

While the Baath Party – which mixed socialist ideas with Arab nationalism mixed with a hardcore version of secularism –promised Arab enlightenment in the Middle East in the 1950s-60s, it quickly became a suppressive apparatus at the hands of autocratic leaders like Syria’s Hafez al Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who ruled their respective countries with iron fists.

In 1963, the Baath Party grabbed power in both Iraq and Syria through military coups in February and March, respectively, and stayed in power for decades through autocratic one-party rule.

Suppressing dissenters

In Iraq and Syria, the Baath Party manifested “in authoritarian regimes that used the mantle of Arab unity to suppress” dissenters from different ethnic and sectarian backgrounds, according to Minawi, whose recent book on the Ottoman rule in the Middle East was the co-winner of Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Award in 2023.

But despite imagining a pan-Arab state across the Middle East, the party’s leadership in Syria and Iraq could never reach a real deal to unite their states in power for decades.

The Saddam Hussein-led Baath Party was wiped out in Iraq after the 2003 US occupation, while Syrian Baathism recently sank with the removal of Bashar al Assad, the son of Hafez al Assad and the leading figure of the party, from power.

“The fall of Baathism marks a major turning point for Syria and the wider region,” says Sean Foley, a professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University who specialises in the history of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

“Baathism has been a part of the region's history and political system for decades -- even before it took power in Iraq and then Syria,” Foley tells TRT World.

“It was such a permanent part of the landscape that a teacher told a literature class that I was taking in Damascus in 2003, as an aside, that he was convinced that the Baathist party would remain in power in Syria forever.”

The Baath Party regimes in Syria and Iraq became police states, which Samer al-Khalil famously called "The Republic of Fear", a bestseller, to describe Saddam Hussein’s brutal and oppressive policies, according to Foley. Al-Khalil, whose real name is Kanan Makiya, is an Iraqi-American academic who was criticised for supporting the US invasion of Iraq.

But with the removal of the last Baath regime in Syria, now the region has “an opportunity to build something new and better”, according to Foley.

“As a Syrian in the country noted to me, the day Assad fell, Syrians were certain that the future would be better because nothing could be worse than life under Assad. That says it all.”

The rise and fall

The defenders of Baath, which means revival in Arabic, emerged in the Middle East right after the colonialist Western powers ended their formal post-WWI mandates across Iraq, Syria and other states, leaving the region with deep divisions and 22 Arab states.

Minawi says that Baathist ideology emerged as a counter-balance to Western hegemony in the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI.

“Baathism was an idea that came as a product of a specific historical moment when an imagined ‘Arab revival’ was thought of as a unifying counter ideology to those imposed by post-Ottoman Western colonialism,” Minawi adds.

While Baath Party activists helped form a United Arab State between Syria and Egypt in 1958, it was a short-lived political experience, mainly because Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt was seen to be treating Damascus as a vassal state.

The idea of Arab unity hit another wall when Israel defeated four regional states in the Six-Day War of 1967.

“As early as 1967, it was clear that this vision could not deliver on these promises, especially regarding the Palestinians,” says Foley, referring to Baathist pledges to end bureaucratic negligence, class and religious divisions, poverty, Western colonialism and poor educational systems.

Having failed to unite different Arab states under one leadership and increasingly becoming politically irrelevant across the Middle East, Baathist parties of Iraq and Syria turned into repressive regimes, losing much credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of their populations.

“The Baathist party lived on for decades in Iraq and eventually only in Syria, a relic of a much earlier time,” Foley adds.

What will replace Baathism?

As a new transitional government under Mohammed al Bashir emerges in Syria, the political transition has been largely peaceful till now, unlike the US purge of the Baathist Party in Iraq following the 2003 occupation.

“One would hope that what replaces the 50+ years of darkness and unimaginable violent oppression in Syria would be decided freely by the will of the Syrian people,” Minawi says.

But he adds that “the odds are stacked against a genuinely free and prosperous Syria”, which needs reconciliation of a violent past by building a unified and inclusive future.

It also remains to be seen how Russia and the US, the two powerful non-regional states, which have long vied for power in Syria and control different segments of the country through their proxies, will react to the new government’s stated efforts to form an inclusive state.

The ongoing Israeli destruction of the Syrian army and invasion of Syrian territory with complete Western complicity shows that the Netanyahu government is aiming for more instability across the war-torn state.

Zahide Tuba Kor, an Istanbul-based expert on the Middle East, also sees various risks for Syria’s future due to its violent past. However, she believes that the collapse of the Assad regime has different circumstances than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US.

While the fighting between formerly Baath elements and the US turned Iraq into a chaotic state, Syria has taken a different course, Kor tells TRT World.

She believes that Syrian refugees who have lived abroad and have a different experience than people who survived the Baath regime will play a crucial role towards forming a democratic rule.

She, however, emphasises that a difficult road is ahead of Syrian people who need to get rid of the Baath Party’s decades-long brutal legacy to form a new state.

“The Baath was an intelligence state and an empire of fear, which was dismantled, but there is a risk that the new government can follow the path of the old regime due to a long legacy of suppression,” she says.

The Baath’s one-party rule created a state where no real opposition parties could run, leaving the country without any true political experience, says Kor.

“That might also create some issues in the post-Assad regime period in terms of consensus building,” she says, but quickly adds that the 13-year-long civil war has helped the opposition garner much political experience, which might be an asset for the country’s future.

“If the Syrian opposition had come to power in 2011 during the Arab Spring, they would have failed because they had no real political experience and organisational capabilities,” Kor says.

“After 13 years, they have learned a lot. As a result, their chances of success are stronger than in 2011. They have a real opportunity to build a new state.”