Many nationalists would be loathe to admit it, but national units – distinct, bounded groups of people who have an exclusive homeland, language and other attributes – are largely historical fictions.
Most historians now agree that nationalities are constructed, not “natural” entities that existed since time immemorial. A glance at the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire confirms this. Cities like Damascus, Baghdad and Salonica were multiethnic, multireligious tapestries whose denizens’ diversity defied attempts at identifying the cities’ truly indigenous groups.
But with the fall of the Empire, and the participation of its former territories in the modern system of nation-states, nationalism became a necessity of independence throughout the Middle East. As nationalists in every region looked to history for experiences and culture around which to build a viable identity, they did so – as did nationalists everywhere – in opposition to other groups who they defined as nemeses of the nation. The history of the modern Middle East testifies to the truth of Gelvin’s assessment that all nationalisms “are defined by what they oppose.”
The history of Syrian nationalism is an interesting example of this phenomenon because the extreme diversity of the region made the creation of a common national identity an especially daunting task, in contrast to other emerging nations in the Middle East. In Egypt, the construction of nationhood was not such a stretch. Cairo and especially Alexandria were very diverse, but Egypt’s countryside was largely Sunni Arab and was unified by the Nile River and the unbroken history of empires that had founded themselves upon it. Syria, in contrast, held within its artificial boundaries Christians, Jews and Muslims of many different sects, including Alawi, Shia and Druze; it also included a variety of languages in addition to Arabic, including Aramaic, Kurdish and Turkish. As “Syrians” faced the possibility of independence after World War I, around what shared characteristics were they to rally? To answer this question, Syrian nationalists have – as Gelvin argues – constructed their identity in opposition to a nemesis. In fact, all Syrian attempts at nationalism were fundamentally attempts at throwing off the oppression of foreign powers. In every nationalistic creation of common identity, there was a foil.
In the early struggle for independence, the occupying French were the target, and this helped the young nationalists overcome the challenging diversity of the people they claimed to represent. After suffering terribly through World War I (Cleveland writes that more than 600,000 people in Greater Syria may have died during this period), Syrians were then subjected to the direct rule of the French. The French chopped up Syria into Lebanon (the Maronite area), a Druze state, an Alawi state and the states of Aleppo and Damascus. Then, the French dominated the political and bureaucratic systems of these regions, limited the growth of institutions of self-government and supported these endeavors with “an all pervasive intelligence service” and a standing garrison of some 15,000 troops (Cleveland:222). In addition to their crippling of institutions, the French made liberal use of violence. In 1925 and 1945, in the most egregious cases, the French savagely suppressed uprisings through the shelling of civilian areas in Damascus.
This oppression created for Syrians a common nemesis, in Gelvin’s mold, irrespective of their religion, class or ethnicity. In response, Syrian nationalism grew where none had existed before. For those that stressed Islam, the religion became a political, anti-imperialist force in a way that it had never been before. For regionalists, being Syrian morphed from an abstraction based on history – with little relevance to daily life – to a reason for unity against the French. And for Arab nationalists, the word “arab” changed from being a derogatory term that city-dwellers used to describe Bedouin to a term of pride that represented the strength of the unity of millions – the kind of unity that could resist the imperialists most effectively (Gelvin 202).
The possible Syrian paths to nationhood all focused on different shared characteristics. What each approach to nationalism had in common, though, was a rejection of the identity of the oppressor.
The regional identity was the most inclusive identity, and it is the one on which the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) based its promotion of the Syrian nation when Antun Sa’adah established the party in 1932. This identity drew on the historical links of Greater Syria – today’s Palestine, Lebanon and Syria – to argue for the cultural integrity of this corner of the Eastern Mediterranean as a nation. This national identity did not directly draw on religion or language; conceivably it could have included all the diverse groups that inhabited the region in nationhood. Perhaps because this diversity would have been too much at odds with the modern notion of nation, or perhaps because of the centrifugal economic factors Owen and Palmuk outline, the SSNP ideology was not the one that came to define Syrian nationalism. (The party is still active, however, especially in Lebanon.)
Then, there was the option of building the nation around religious identity. Along these lines, the Lebanese Druze notable Amir Shakib Arslan “advocated a militant Islam” and “sought to reconstruct the bonds of Islamic solidarity” throughout the Middle East, a message that gained widespread credence in the 1920s and 1930s (Cleveland 236).The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt during the interwar period, as well, similarly stressing religious bonds and the importance of social and economic justice. But while the Muslim Brotherhood would become a potent and often violent force in Syrian politics in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not a major part of the Syrian nationalist movement in it early years. And while Arslan’s ideas gained traction, they did not spearhead the nationalist movement either in Greater Syria or in what actually became the present-day country of Syria. Syria was too diverse: a pan-Islamic bond was simply not inclusive enough. No one vision of Islam could be applied to all the Muslims in the region, let alone the many sects of Christians or the tens of thousands of Jews who still lived in Damascus and Aleppo at the time.
Pan-Arabism was the nationalist movement that won out in Syria, partly because it balanced inclusiveness with a better fit to the modern definition of nation. It described a group of people who shared a common language and heritage, even if they were from different religious backgrounds. Like the SSNP, Arab nationalism was profoundly secular. Michel Aflaq, a Damascene and one of the founders of Baathism, was a Greek Orthodox Arab, just like Antun Sa’adah. But unlike the SSNP, pan-Arabism chose the unity of all Arabs and the effective exclusion of the region’s small non-Arab minorities (such as the Kurds) over the fragmentation of the Arabs by region.
But even more than its inclusiveness, pan-Arabism won out because it was most at opposing the nemesis of French domination. Like the other two nationalisms – based on Islamic unity and region – that arose in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, pan-Arabism was founded in opposition to the imperialists of the era. Pan-Arabism succeeded because it opposed this enemy more effectively than any other – a united Arab front provided the strongest threat to European occupation of Arab lands.
The Baath party gained strength through the post-independence years precisely because it asserted its opposition to imperialist powers more forcefully than any other movement. After the French withdrawal from the region, these powers became increasingly nebulous, but they existed in the shadows of any debate on patriotism. Nationalistic economic policies, like those of Hafez al-Assad and Gamal Abul-Nasser, were implemented with the objective of limiting the influence of these nemeses. Through the latter part of the 20th Century, Syria’s nationhood was consolidated in opposition to Israel and to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even today, there is a sense that Syrian nationalists must always highlight the threat of enemies of the nation in order to buoy the concept of the nation. Centrifugal forces – ethnic, religious and political – always threaten to disturb the nation’s integrity; the existence of a nemesis keeps them at bay. Nationalism is a powerful force, and since the overt threat of oppression by the French faded, there is always a space in nationalist ideology for the common enemy – that most binding of forces – to fit in. I recall an SSNP banner I saw in Lebanon in 2006:
Wa laisa lana min ‘ado yuqatilunana fi dinina wa ardina wa huqina illa al yahud.
“We have no enemy that fights us in our religion and our rights except for the Jews.”
Should that nemesis fade, surely another will rise in its place, and Syrian nationalism will chug onward.
Cited works
Abrahamian,
Cleveland, William, A History of the Modern Middle Eas.t
Gelvin, James, The Modern
Owen, Roger and Sevket Pamuk,
Rahnema, Ali, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival.
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