Circumstances of history beyond the scope of this column have suppressed Syrian patriotism and placed the term between scare marks. The Baath’s notorious lexicon rendered Syria, “the beating heart of Arabism," nothing more than a “qutr” (segment). "More” and “less” were made interchangeable, which speaks volumes about the difficulties of this nation building.
The fact is that there are historical precursors, a myriad of historical episodes and developments that predate their reign, to the things that the Baathists and Assadists did on a mass scale.
In the background are two successive historical shifts, one that the broader Levant produced and another that it greeted, and both of them were destructive. Led by Arab radicals and officers, the first shift was the transformation of cultural Arabism, which embraced patriotism in rejection of Ottoman unity, into political and militant Arabism, which fueled resentment of nations by pushing the idea that Sykes-Picot was the sole reason for their existence. Coming to us from the Cold War, the second shift was the notion that patriotism boils down to "anti-imperialism" and aligning with the Soviet Union gaining mass appeal.
Despite a few attempts at crystallizing Syrian patriotism, by parliamentarian notables during their brief time in power, removing Syrianism from Syria remained the dominant trend.
When the "secessionists" of 1961 felt compelled to save face after having attained independence from the "United Arab Republic," they named their state the "Syrian Arab Republic," seemingly using "Arabness" to veil "Syrianness."
Earlier, the struggle for independence from the French had been framed as more an Arab nationalist than Syrian nationalist objective. As for its national anthem, which described the country as the "den of Arabism" and celebrated "Al-Walid" (Khalid) and "Al-Rashid" (Harun), it did not mention a single historical figure born in the geographical area that would eventually become modern Syria. After Syria gained its independence in 1946, Shukri al-Quwatli, the president of the republic at the time, declared that when he bowed to his country’s flag, he did so in anticipation of the day that he would bow to the flag of the promised Arab state. Thus, Syria was declared inevitably ephemeral the moment it came into the world- a peculiar way to celebrate a birthday. In the 1950s, however, as Syrians belittled themselves and other countries belittled Syrians, it became the arena of an Egyptian-Iraqi power struggle. The historically unprecedented "solution" of Syria’s officers was to hand the country over to Nasser’s Egypt, establishing the "United Arab Republic."
The Baathists and Assadists made many toxic additions to these precursors. They reduced Syria to a strategic function; domestically, the country was governed through repression alone, and its aggression alone shaped its engagement with neighbors. As the state became an instrument of coercion and a mechanism of discrimination, communal and sectarian loyalties deepened. In turn, these loyalties further sucked Syria dry of what little had remained of Syrian patriotism. Since the 1980s, as Islamists became Assadism’s most prominent opponents, Syria began disappearing into the non-existent "Muslim Ummah" as well as the even less existent "Arab Nation” that it had previously been disappearing into.
Whether or not there is a causal relationship between the two, the weakening of Syrian patriotism (at least since its 1958 union with Egypt and then the rise of the Baath regime) coincided with the emergence of a strong ideology that peaked between 1966 and 1970, the year it came under strongman rule with Hafez al-Assad’s rise to the top.
As for the son, Bashar, his personality, behavior, and brutality made him the ultimate barren fruit of Syrian patriotism’s (and by extension the Syrian people’s) occultation. Unlike earlier periods, 1958–1961 and then since 1963, the quiver was totally empty under his leadership. Without the powerful ideologies and strongmen that had been there before, the traditional weakness of patriotism was laid bare, unprotected and uncompensated for, and his reign crowned a long period of decline.
The country hitting rock bottom under his rule might help explain the downfall of his barren world. As for other rotten fruits of his reign, they include the country’s subjugation to multiple occupations, its prisons becoming slaughterhouses and mass graves, disappearing tens of thousands of citizens, pulling 90 percent of the Syrian population beneath the poverty line, and the implosion of Syria’s relationships with its so-called "brothers" (nations his regime sought either to subjugate or to flood with Captagon). As for the ideology of steadfastness and resistance that Syria’s rulers had, to somewhat varying degrees, relied on, it ended in scandalous collapse. The regime’s control over the country’s airspace and coastal regions met the same fate, and its military infrastructure was obliterated. The Syrian people losing their appetite for regional conflict, which has brought them nothing but tragedy, amounted to the “regime culture’s” most emphatic defeat.
In other words, total bankruptcy defined the second phase of suppressing Syrian patriotism after it had been associated with a leader or an ideology that, while corrupt, was at least strong.
Today, some find temptation in retaliating to Bashar’s zero-sum reign through a strong leader and ideology that represent the polar opposite of the fallen president’s deficiencies. However, doing so would be to address the result rather than the cause, and the moment it withered and crumbled rather than the entire historical context behind it. The only way to truly respond to and move forward is to rebuild Syria and turn into a homeland that treats all of its citizens equally, acknowledges their distinct identities, and does not produce another powerful leader or ideology of any kind.
Syrian patriotism is the only bulwark against these two threats, as well as the void that defined the Basharist culmination of their two stages. It reassures Syrians and deserves to be the driving force behind their aspirations.
