Throughout the eighty years separating independence from France on April 17, 1946, and specifically until the onset of the Syrian crisis in Daraa on March 18, 2011, there was a general feeling among a broad segment of Arabs in Syria that the “Syrian shirt” was too tight for them. Because of this, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party remained weak among the citizens of the Syrian state. Stronger than it was the People’s Party, which sought in the 1940s and 50s a “Fertile Crescent unity with Iraq,” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, who sought an Islamic bond and were not in a state of tension with Arabism, unlike their counterparts in Cairo. Meanwhile, the strongest of all in Syria were the Arabists in their Nasserist and Baathist versions; they are effectively those who have ruled Damascus since February 22, 1958—with the brief interval of the “Secession” from Egypt between September 28, 1961, and March 8, 1963, a period characterized by a clearly weak social base. Then the Arabists returned to rule again through a Nasserist-Baathist alliance on March 8, 1963, followed by exclusive Baathist power since July 18, 1963.
It is likely that this is attributed to the fact that the Syrian Kingdom, declared in March 1920 before the French arrived and dismantled it four months later, was built by Sharif Hussein and his son Faisal upon the project of the “Great Arab Revolt” declared against the Ottomans on June 10, 1916. That project was founded on the ambition of establishing an Arab state extending from the Anatolian mountains to the Gulf of Aden, and from the Mediterranean and Red Seas to the Zagros Mountains. In 1920, Faisal settled for his kingdom by declaring authority over “Greater Syria in its four parts,” but this remained on paper only. Reality dictated the emergence of the “State of Greater Lebanon” forty days after the Battle of Maysalun (July 24, 1920), then the “Emirate of Transjordan” in March 1921. Most critical was the “Balfour Declaration in Palestine,” the British implementation of which began when General Allenby entered Jerusalem in December 1917. Faisal bin Al-Hussein surrendered to this fate by accepting to be a London-backed king over Iraq in August 1921; however, he and the Hashemite family in Baghdad, until July 14, 1958, never ceased striving to bring Damascus and Baghdad under a single Hashemite throne.
This general Syrian inclination was heightened by French concessions to Turkey, which reduced the area of Mandated Syria since July 25, 1920. This can be seen by comparing Syria under the French Mandate in the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920)—where the Syrian-Turkish border extended to the Tarsus–Gaziantep–Urfa–Mardin–Jazirat bin Umar (Botan Island) line—with the Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923), which lowered those borders to the current ones. Later, in the late 1930s, France gave the Sanjak of Alexandretta to Ankara, severing it from the Lausanne borders also concluded with Ankara. This was a flagrant violation by France of the League of Nations Mandate Charter, which stipulates that the Mandatory power must preserve the borders of the mandated territory and not dispose of them to others. Paris did not stop at violating the charter by carving out parts of Syria for others; it also attempted to fragment Syrian land into multiple states (Damascus, Aleppo, the Druze Mountain State, and the Alawite State). This French partition project failed when Paris backtracked in the 1936 treaty. In practice, France did not accept the establishment of a unified Syrian state in 1943 except in conjunction with Damascus’s recognition of the Lebanese state, which took the “Four Districts” before the final French evacuation on April 17, 1946.
Here, what occurred between June 10, 1916, and April 17, 1946, is what shaped the Arabist psyche of the Syrian and made him view his “shirt” as tight. Among Arab Syrians, an Arabist sentiment was strong for many—strongest among those of the “Language of Dhad” (Arabic). This stems primarily from what happened between those two dates, and also from the fact that the Umayyad state was the declaration of the birth of the Arab state, albeit in Islamic garb. This was before the Abbasids arrived and overthrew the Umayyads via an Arab head and a Persian body toward an internationalist Muslim state project that later split between Arabs and Persians, before the arrival of the Seljuk Turks three hundred years after the founding of the Abbasid state, and before the division of the Islamic world between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shiite Safavids through the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514.
No serious Syrian debate regarding Syria’s Arabist identity occurred between April 17, 1946, and March 18, 2011. During the Syrian crisis starting in 2011, questions about “Syrian identity” began to be raised forcefully by Syria’s Kurds, whose power grew thanks to American support in the fight against ISIS—support they leveraged to impose themselves as a difficult factor in the Syrian crisis equations. These questions are also raised by secularists living in “phobia” of Islamists, within mental-intellectual frameworks that view Sayyid Qutb as an equivalent to Arabism, despite his internationalist thinking and his execution by the greatest symbol of Arabism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1966. Furthermore, there is hostility toward Arabism among many Syrian Christians who believe Syria’s identity has been usurped since the defeat of the Byzantines by the Muslims at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 AD. Under the Baathist Syrian authority (1963–2024), there was a strong adherence to Arabism, and official discourse maintained an identity unity between “Arabism” and “Islam,” according to the theory of Michel Aflaq, who viewed the latter as the soul for the body of the former. This did not prevent the Syrian authority from being the fiercest in its war against Islamists, as proven by the experiences of 1979–1982 and 2011–2024. This Aflaqian theory is what explains the alliance of Hafez al-Assad and his son, in the cultural-legislative field, with “Official Clerical Islam.”
With the fall of the Baath regime in Damascus on December 8, 2024, it can be said that the last Arabist political regime has fallen, following the experience of the Baathists in Iraq (1968–2003) and the experience of Nasser in Egypt (1952–1970). Currently, there is no regime based on the Arabist idea among Arabs. There is an impression among the majority of contemporary Arabs that the political systems offered by Arabist ideology have failed in the issues of “Arab Unity,” “Palestine,” and “Modernization”—if not the opposite, as the Baathists left Iraq and Syria in a state of sectarian fragmentation and left the Kurdish issue in an inflamed state.
It is now probable that Arabism will move toward being a cultural-social bond for Syrian Arabs rather than a political one, after its political experiments that began in the fifties and sixties failed. Similarly, the Arabist movement is no longer a political or ideological movement of significant weight. Arabism is a sense of a specific civilizational-cultural identity that can include Arabs and non-Arabs; it is not an identity to be imposed on anyone or a compulsory identity for the country.
There are questions that must be asked in post-Baathist Syria, after Arabism failed as an ideological-political movement in its experience of power and in achieving its goals. This means that attempts to forge an Arab identity for the country have reached a dead end, without this implying Syria’s lack of belonging to its Arab surroundings or the absence of ties between Syrian Arabs and the rest of the Arabs—just as the Syrian Kurd finds cultural-social ties with the Turkish Kurd or others.
These questions are: What is Syria’s identity? Is “Syrianization” (Syrian-ism) sufficient to be an identity for Syrians, or will it be a recipe for a state of “components” and religious-sectarian-national quotas, similar to the “Iraqization” practiced in post-2003 Iraq? Or should a search be conducted for a country without an identity, where the equality of citizens in freedoms and duties suffices, regardless of religion, sect, nationality, ethnicity, gender, or political orientation, while these citizens enjoy full democratic liberties?
