Syria – a postcolonial state

Reading the history of modern Syria, from the French occupation until now, I am struck by the number of continuities in how the state machine operates.

While the population of Syria is about 95% Arab speaking, the population is divided by religious differences. Religious differences are far more critical in the Islamic world than they are in the modern west; the closest parallel is Ulster, and even there distinctions of religion where actually distinction between coloniser and colonised. The situation in the Islamic world is a legacy of the long centuries of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans divided their subjects according to religion, allowing each recognised group the rights to administer themselves according to their own rules and practices. (such a self administering community was known as a millet).As conversion was prohibited, religious groups remained closed and effectively became ethnicities, even though almost always Arabic speaking. In Syria, this has meant that a number of religious minorities exist with very powerful identities. The four main minorities are the Christians, the Alawites ( an offshoot of the Shi’a tradition in Islam), the Druzes (an eclectic and syncretic religion derived from Islam and also neo Platonism) and the Kurds (the one minority with their own distinct language, related to Persian rather than Arabic). Due to the way borders were drawn after WWI when the Allied powers carved up the Ottoman Empire ( a process referred to in British archival documents from the time as ‘The Great Loot”), a Turkish speaking minority, known as Turkmens, also ended up within the Syrian borders. The minorities altogether possibly account for around 30% of the Syrian population – the vast majority being Arabs of the Sunni tradition. (Note that in religion the Kurds are also Sunni Muslims – this is one case where actual linguistic identity overrides religion).

The minorities are mainly located in the west of the country, the Sunni predominantly in the east.  At the time of the French occupation – and until the 1960s – the dominant class in the region were the ‘notables’ – not necessarily aristocrats in the sense of being ennobled or titled - but large landowners living mainly off rents and services from their tenants and exercising political control over the mass of dependent tenants, as is the usual case in pre-capitalist landlord regimes. The notables were overwhelmingly Sunni, and dominated the political life of the region. Once the French granted a constitution in 1930, this class also dominated the parliament and government. Syrian self government was very limited though, as France maintained and overriding power over all decisions. Crucially the army remained under French control.

This is the point at which the similarities become apparent. The French (like all colonial powers) favoured divide and rule policies. They distrusted the majority and relied on the minorities to staff the army and the gendarmerie. Using polices of indirect rule and building on the Ottoman tradition of millet, the minorities developed systems of patronage to penetrate more widely into Syrian society, and in particular into the administration and into commerce.

The other very consistent feature was the French technique of dealing with civil unrest and uprisings, which was to surround the towns concerned and bombard them with artillery and air power into submission. (The last such French bombardment of cities was Damascus in 1945).

The point is that these features have remained as key features of the Syrian state. Syria was granted independence in 1946. Government cabinets initially remained dominated by notables, but the minorities continued to staff the armed forces and the security services. After defeat in the 1948 war with Israel, Syria experienced three military coups in 1949 alone, and parliamentary government only returned in 1954. In 1958, after a attempts by Britain and America to destabilise Syria following its diplomatic recognition of the USSR and purchase of modern weapons, Syria joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic. This was terminated by another military coup in 1961, followed by parliamentary elections and a coup in 1963, at which point the French era Emergency Law was imposed and has been in force ever since.

The 1963 coup was carried out by an alliance of two strands of nationalist army officers – Nasser supporters and Ba’athists. At this point some understanding of the Ba-ath party is in order. Originally a nationalist body when founded by Michel Aflaq (a Christian) in 1952 the core ideology of the Ba-ath party was a pan Arab nationalism, wanting to fold the states created in the post WWI carve up into a larger Arab nation. The emphasis was on nationality and language as a unifying factor. The full title was Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party, the socialism being more in the line of using government administration and state ownership to modernise Syria. The Ba’athists entered the cabinet for the first time after the 1961 coup. The Ba’athist position was that the unification with Egypt had produced subordination to a much larger and more powerful state, rather than a true unity and Syrian development and interests had been sidelined. Again the Ba’athists participated in the coup two years later, as a way of removing what they saw as the roadblocks to their program in the still notable dominated parliament. Land reform legislation in the early 1960s broke up the large landholdings finally depriving the notables of power and reducing them to class of Sunni farmers and merchants in regional towns in the east.

The Ba’athist party proved attractive to the minorities (except the Kurds of course who were by definition excluded from the Arab nation unless they fully abandoned Kurdish identity)and as various minority politicians and officers moved up through both the party and the state machine, they were able to exercise patronage to bring in more of their communities. In the end the Ba’ath party became – like the French mandate administration – a means to keep the Sunni majority out of power.

For about 12 months after the coup the Ba’ath party experienced internal turmoil and struggle. By 1964 the old guard – including founder Aflaq – were purged. The Ba’athists consolidated their hold on the government, finally taking full power in the coup of 1970 by defence minister Hafez al Assad. Following this coup, the Alawite minority (to which Assad belonged) had consolidated its hold over the administration and especially the armed forces and the security service (the mukhabarat).

At a fundamental level the core French policy of excluding the Sunni majority from power has continued. The other key continuity has been the record of coups. The French had the habit f riding roughshod over the mandate era parliament, thus entrenching an attitude of rather than seeing the executive arm of government being in conflict with the legislative, with the latter seen as a source of problems rather than authority and sovereignty. Rather power, authority and sovereignty derive from control of the state machine, in particular the repressive apparatus.

This has been displayed in the continuity of repression by military violence, especially artillery and air bombardment as under the French. The first instance occurred in 1964 in Hama, although this was mild compared to the brutal and indiscriminate repression that followed the 1982 uprising. What has been seen since 2011 in the current Syrian Civil War has been a continuation of this policy.

The argument I am parsing here, derived from a reading of a number of texts on modern Syrian history) is that like so many other former colonial possessions, Syria is a post colonial state. My understanding of the post colonial thesis is that such states maintain continuity in practice, legislation, recruitment and state ideology with the previous colonial administrations. In their propaganda such states have either suggested they represent a rebirth of pre-colonial traditions (adapted to the modern world of course) or newly created national identities. In reality they continue the colonial project of ruling over and against the majority population, of perpetuating the interests of an elite (not necessarily based on a social class, more commonly an elite of state functionaries, who may become a class through using the state as a means to accumulate). In the post colonial state the interests of a colonising power are replaced with the interests of an elite often more at home culturally and socially in the western world of the former colonisers, than with the majority of the citizens (or more correctly subjects) of the state. Contempt and disdain frequently characterises the attitude of the elites to the majority. Where this elite – as in Syria – is recruited from actual minorities the state comes to represent the old colonial form even more so. In this case the rulers are not only socially distinct by wealth, power and lifestyle, but are also alien to the majority. Syria under the Assad dynasty is a post colonial state machine by means of which a minority exercises power analogous to that exercised in a formal colony by foreign administrators.