Historically, the “Syrian question” has revolved around cohesion. It has been a matter of maintaining a state able to establish a stable national governing system capable of incorporating, not just political plurality, but also the country’s ethnic and religious diversity. Since Hayaat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus and overthrew the Baathist regime, which was Arab nationalist in form but sectarian in substance, hopes have been vested in a successful transition to just such a system.
The question of the cohesion, stability and sustainability of the state has assumed various forms in different eras. At the end of the Cold War, James Rosenau formulated the law of the dynamics of states and societies in the post-Cold War era: they would variously gravitate towards either integration or disintegration. The EU model bore testimony to the ability of states to unify and integrate, overcoming centuries of mutual antagonism. The process was facilitated by their membership in the liberal capitalist order. Conversely, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and breakup of Yugoslavia manifested the inability to manage diversity and plurality in the existing state framework.
A quarter of a century later – which is about the same amount of time since Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” – the question began to look more complex. Britain’s exit from the European Union triggered an unexpected wave of disintegration in the West, while to the east, the decisions of the peoples of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine to rejoin Russia revived forms of unification few had thought still possible.
In the Arab region, the Arab nationalist school of political thought held that shared membership in the larger “Arab homeland” should forge an overarching citizenship bond that would prevail over subsidiary religious and ethnic affiliations. As this was hard to achieve in practice, nationalist leaders reinforced the pan-Arab bond by emphasising the shared Arabic language, culture, history, and mutual interests. Also high on their daily agenda was the focus on the “common threat”, usually in the form of assorted “enemies” conspiring to fragment the nation. Not surprisingly, nationalist ideology denied the existence of ethnic and sectarian distinctions or, if it acknowledged them at all, it used various indoctrination and socialisation mechanisms – through education, the media, and party structures – to mould citizens into ardent Arab nationalists.
This trend and its policies simultaneously fed a countertrend among minorities who felt the only way to express their own cultures and national identities was in a national state of their own. For decades, there was only one answer to the question of minorities in the existing Arab states: no such problem. Often, the powers that be would reject so much as the thought of classifying a religious or ethnic group as a minority, insisting that all members of the population were fused as equal citizens into a single melting pot.
The socialist school had a different take on the minority question: it was a problem fabricated by the exploitative classes to perpetuate their rule or, alternatively, the problem existed, but it should not be allowed to overshadow the socioeconomic concerns that unite the working class. Essentially, socialist thinkers believed that the class bond was stronger than other identity affiliations. The 1960s in the Arab region occasioned an ideological fusion between socialism and Arab nationalism, which identified the quest for Arab unity and justice as the avenue for merging diverse groups into a single state.
Meanwhile, the bureaucratic state borne of Arab nationalist and socialist doctrines developed mechanisms of coercion and repression capable of suppressing divergent aspirations and traditions. Then, even after Arab nationalist ideology waned and socialist thought collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union, the machinery of oppression persisted, even in Arab states that never fully adopted either ideology.
In contrast, the liberal school has offered many countries a solution to the challenges of ethnic and religious diversity within the state. It features a political toolkit whose various mechanisms proceed from several premises: that the individual is the primary political unit in the state; that every individual has a vote of equal value, and that the vote expresses their personal views, as opposed to those of the tribe or other affiliation. The concept of citizenship is rooted in such individualism. It, in turn, is founded on the principle that all citizens are equal partners in the state and endowed with full and equal rights before the law regardless of race, religion, creed or gender.
Can Syria embrace this outlook like other Arab countries not mired in sectarianism and sectarian militias?
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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