Ba'athism
Ba'athism, also spelled Baathism, is an Arab nationalist ideology which advocates the establishment of a unified Arab state through the rule of a Ba'athist vanguard party operating under a revolutionary socialist framework. The ideology is officially based on the theories of the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar. Ba'athist leaders of the modern era include the former president of Iraq Saddam Hussein, and former presidents of Syria Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad.
The Ba'athist ideology advocates the "enlightenment of the Arabs" as well as the renaissance of their culture, values and society. It also advocates the creation of one-party states and rejects political pluralism in an unspecified length of time—the Ba'ath party theoretically uses an unspecified amount of time to develop an "enlightened" Arab society. Ba'athism is founded on the principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism, as exemplified by its slogan "Unity, Freedom, Socialism".
Ba'athism advocates socialist economic policies such as state ownership of natural resources, protectionism, distribution of lands to peasants, and planned economies. Although inspired by Western socialist thinkers, early Ba'athist theoreticians rejected the Marxist class-struggle concept, arguing that it hampers Arab unity. Ba'athists contend that socialism is the only way to develop modern Arab society and unite it.
The two Ba'athist states which existed—Iraq and Syria—attempted to prevent criticism of their ideology through authoritarian means of governance. Ba'athist Syria's state ideology was neo-Ba'athism, a more left-leaning form of Ba'athist ideology developed by the Assadist leadership of the Syrian Ba'ath party, which was quite distinct from the Ba'athism which Aflaq and Bitar wrote about. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party, meanwhile, was dominated by Saddamism, which had a more right-wing political orientation, culminating in an inter-Ba'athist conflict between the two Ba'athist states. Both Ba'athist regimes were ousted from power as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the renewed rebel offensive in Syria in 2024 amid the Syrian civil war.
History
Ba'athism originated in the political thought of Syrian philosophers Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and Zaki Arsuzi. They are considered the founders of the ideology, despite forming different organizations. In the 1940s, Bitar and Aflaq co-founded the Ba'ath Party, while Arsuzi founded the Arab National Party and later the Arab Ba'ath. The closest they ever came to being members of the same organization was in 1939, when, together with Michel Quzman, Shakir al-As and Ilyas Qandalaft, they briefly tried to establish a party. The party likely failed due to personal animosity between Arsuzi and Aflaq.Arsuzi formed the Arab Ba'ath in 1940 and his views influenced Aflaq, who alongside the more junior Bitar founded the Arab Ihya Movement in 1940, later renamed the Arab Ba'ath Movement in 1943. Though Aflaq was influenced by him, Arsuzi initially did not cooperate with Aflaq's movement. Arsuzi suspected that the existence of the Arab Ihya Movement, which occasionally titled itself "Arab Ba'ath" during 1941, was part of an imperialist plot to prevent his influence over the Arabs by creating a movement of the same name.
Arsuzi was an Arab from Alexandretta who had been associated with Arab nationalist politics during the interwar period. He was inspired by the French Revolution, the German and Italian unification movements, and the Japanese economic "miracle". His views were influenced by a number of prominent European philosophical and political figures, among them Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler.
Arsuzi left the League of Nationalist Action in 1939 after its popular leader died and the party fell into disarray, founding the short-lived Arab National Party. It dissolved later that year. On 29 November 1940, Arsuzi founded the Arab Ba'ath. A significant conflict and turning point in the development of Ba'athism occurred when Arsuzi's and Aflaq's movements sparred over the 1941 Iraqi coup d'etat by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani and the subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War. Aflaq's movement supported Gaylani's government and the Iraqi government's war against the British and organized volunteers to go to Iraq and fight for the Iraqi government. However, Arsuzi opposed Gaylani's government, considering the coup to be poorly planned and a failure. Because of this, Arsuzi's party lost members and support that transferred to Aflaq's movement. Arsuzi's direct influence in Arab politics collapsed after Vichy French authorities expelled him from Syria in 1941.
Aflaq's Arab Ba'ath Movement's next major political action was its support of Lebanon's war of independence from France in 1943. Still, the movement did not solidify for years until it held its first party congress in 1947 and formally merged with Arsuzi's Arab Ba'ath Party. Although socialist values existed in the two Ba'ath movements from their inception, they weren't emphasized until the party merged with Akram Al-Hawrani's Arab Socialist Movement in 1953.
Taking advantage of the chaotic years of the 1950s and 1960s, the Military Committee of the Syrian Ba'ath party, led by its civilian leadership, launched a coup in 1963 that established a one-party state in Syria. In 1966, the military wing of the Syrian Ba'ath initiated another coup which overthrew the Old Guard led by Aflaq and Bitar, resulting in a schism within the Ba'athist movement: one Syrian-dominated and one Iraqi-dominated. Scholar Ofra Bengio claims that as a consequence of the split, Arsuzi took Aflaq's place as the official father of Ba'athist thought in the pro-Syrian Ba'ath movement, while in the pro-Iraqi Ba'ath movement Aflaq was still considered the de jure father of Ba'athist thought. The Iraqi Ba'ath wing granted asylum to Aflaq after seizing power through the coup of 1968.
The Al-Assad family and Saddam Hussein emerged dominant in the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties, respectively, eventually building personalist dictatorships in the two countries. Hostilities between the two Ba'ath movements lasted until the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, after which his successor Bashar al-Assad pursued reconciliation with Iraq.
Throughout their reigns, the two Ba'athist autocracies built police states that enforced mass surveillance and ideological indoctrination and subordinated all student organisations, trade unions, and other civil society institutions to the party and the state. Both regimes pursued Arabization of ethnic minorities and legitimized their authoritarian rule by implanting conspiratorial anti-Zionist, anti-Western sentiments upon the citizens.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003 during the United States invasion, and the Iraqi Ba'ath party was subsequently banned under the new De-Ba'athification policy. In Syria, a deadly civil war began after Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown of the 2011 Syrian revolution. It culminated in the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024, signaling the end of Ba'athist rule in Syria. Assad’s downfall also signals the likely demise of the Syrian Ba’ath Party’s presence in Lebanon where it once wielded significant power during Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, but currently derives its influence from Hezbollah. The fall of the Ba'athist regimes in Syria and Iraq also marked the end of its ideological influence.
Definition
is today considered the founder of the Ba'athist movement, or at least its most notable contributor. Other notable ideologues include Zaki Arsuzi, who influenced Aflaq, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, who worked directly with Aflaq. From the founding of the Arab Ba'ath Movement until the mid-1950s in Syria and the early 1960s in Iraq, the ideology of the Ba'ath Party was largely synonymous with that of Aflaq's. For more than 2 decades, Michel Aflaq's 1940 essay compilation, titled, "Fi Sabil al-Ba’ath" was the primary ideological book of the Ba'ath party. Additionally, Aflaq's views on Arab nationalism are considered by some, such as historian Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute, as romantic and poetic.Aflaq's ideology was developed in the context of decolonisation and other events in the Arab world during his life. It recast conservative Arab nationalist thought to reflect strong revolutionary and progressive themes. For example, Aflaq insisted on the overthrow of the old ruling classes and supported the creation of a secular society by separating Islam from the state. Not all these ideas were his, but it was Aflaq who succeeded in turning these beliefs into a transnational movement.
The core basis of Ba'athism is Arab socialism, socialism with Arab characteristics which is separate from the international socialist movement and pan-Arab ideology. Ba'athism as developed by Aflaq and Bitar is a unique left-wing, Arab-centric ideology. It claims to represent the "Arab spirit against materialistic communism" and "Arab history against dead reaction". It holds ideological similarity and a favourable outlook to the Non-Aligned Movement politics of Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito and historically opposed affiliation with either the American-led Western Bloc or the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
Concepts
Arab nation
supported the Arab nationalist Sati' al-Husri's view that language was the principal defining and unifying factor of the "Arab nation" because language led to the unity of thought, norms and ideals. History was another unifying feature for them, as it was the "fertile ground in which our consciousness took shape". The centre of Aflaq's Ba'athist thought was the feature bath.This renaissance, according to Aflaq, could only be reached by uniting the Arab nation, and it would transform the Arab world politically, economically, intellectually, and morally. This "future renaissance" would be a "rebirth", while the first Arab renaissance had been the seventh-century emergence of Islam, according to Aflaq. The new renaissance would bring another Arab message, summed up in the Ba'ath party's slogan, "One Nation, Bearing an Eternal Message".
Aflaq thought that the Arab nation could only reach this renaissance through a revolutionary process towards the goals of "unity, liberty, and socialism". In Aflaq's view, a nation could only "progress" or "decline", and Arab states of his time were consistently declining because of their "illnesses""feudalism, sectarianism, regionalism, intellectual reactionism". These problems, Aflaq believed, could only be resolved through a revolutionary process, and a revolution could only succeed if the revolutionaries were pure and devoted nearly religiously to the task. Aflaq supported the Leninist view of the need for a vanguard party following a successful revolution, which was not an "inevitable outcome". In Ba'athist ideology, the vanguard was the Ba'ath party.
Aflaq believed that the youth were the key for a successful revolution. The youth were open to change and enlightenment because they still had not been indoctrinated with other views. According to Aflaq, a major problem was the disillusionment of the Arab youth. Disillusionment led to individualism and individualism was not a healthy sign in an underdeveloped country, in contrast to developed countries, where it was seen as a healthy sign.
The party's main task before the revolution was to spread enlightened ideas to the people and to challenge reactionary and conservative elements in society. According to Aflaq, a Ba'ath party would ensure a policy of proselytization to keep the uneducated masses out of the party until the party leadership was imbued with the thoughts of enlightenment. However, the party was also a political organisation, and, as Aflaq notes, politics was "a means is the most serious of matters at this present stage". Ba'athism was similar to Leninist thought in that a vanguard party would rule for an unspecified length to construct a "new society".
Aflaq supported the idea of a committed activist revolutionary party based on the Leninist model, which in practice was based on democratic centralism. The revolutionary party would seize political power and from there on transform society for the greater good. While the revolutionary party was numerically a minority, it was an all-powerful institution which had the right to initiate a policy, even if the majority of the population were against it. As with the Leninist model, the Ba'ath party would dictate what was right and what was wrong, since the general population were still influenced by the old value and moral system.