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Syria's Democratic Years
Citizens, Experts, and Media in the 1950s
By Kevin W. Martin Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Kevin W. Martin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01893-9
CHAPTER 1
Syria during the Democratic Years
On February 24, 1954, military dictator Colonel Adib al-Shishakli resigned as president of Syria and fled the country, thereby ending a five-year period ("The Era of Military Coups") during which all political activity in Syria had been circumscribed by the will and objectives of senior military officers. Four years later, on February 21, 1958, the United Arab Republic (UAR), a pan-Arabist union of Syria and Egypt, was proclaimed, producing a three-year subsumption of all political activity beneath several layers of corporatist mass-mobilization organizations that operated under the authority of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his local surrogates. The interim period of 1954–1958, remembered locally as the "Democratic Years," provides the temporal framework of this book. The retrospective designation of this period expresses a widely held revulsion for the periods of war, oppression, and occupation that preceded 1954, as well as equally intense disappointment with the increasingly brutal and repressive regimes that followed.
From 1516 to 1918, the area comprised by the Syrian Arab Republic, like most of the countries in the region we now call the Middle East, was part of the Ottoman Empire. At its height, the empire, one of the great "world empires" of the early modern period, stretched from the Balkans to Yemen and from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Syria owes its existence to the post–World War I settlement that destroyed the empire. In the Levant, the First World War was truly calamitous. An Allied naval blockade, combined with Ottoman requisitions of foodstuffs and ethnic cleansing campaigns, yielded malnutrition, disease, and civilian casualties on a scale unimaginable in Europe. In Damascus, Ottoman wartime governor Jamal Pasha's imprisonment and execution of Arab nationalists earned him the appellation al-Saffah ("the shedder of blood"), and resulted in renaming the city center Martyrs' Square. The chief legacies of the wartime experience were profound bitterness, the spread of Arab nationalist sentiment, and longings for independence from "foreign" governance.
These sentiments were heightened by British wartime promises of an Arab Kingdom that encompassed much of the Arabian Peninsula, including most of Syria. But the British also made other wartime allies conflicting promises that were, unlike their pledges to the Arabs, upheld by the new League of Nations. Thus arbitrary borders were drawn separating British and French mandate territories, the French receiving present-day Syria and Lebanon and the British taking Iraq and Palestine, the latter comprising present-day Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
French armed forces invaded Syria in July 1920, defeated the armed forces of the short-lived Kingdom of Syria at the Battle of Maysaloun, where they created Syria's first military martyr, Defense Minister Yusuf al-'Azma. The French then put King Feisal and his government to flight, carved the Republic of Lebanon from Syrian territory for the benefit of their Christian clients, divided the remaining territory into several mini-states, and ruthlessly crushed any overtly expressed opposition to their political and economic domination. After twenty-six years of economic stagnation and social unrest under French occupation, Syria finally achieved its sovereignty in 1946.
The ensuing flourishing of post-independence optimism — an attitude captured in Najat Qassab Hasan's eulogy for 'Adnan al-Malki — soon gave way to disgust with the corruption and incompetence Syria's civilian politicians displayed during the First Arab-Israeli War (1948–1949). As a result, many Syrians rejoiced when General Husni al-Za'im staged the country's first military coup in April 1949. Al-Za'im and his eventual successor, al-Shishakli, brushed Syria's traditional political elites aside and initiated sweeping legal, constitutional, bureaucratic, economic, social, and political reforms designed to accelerate Syria's development. As a result, both strongmen were initially supported by a majority of Syria's reform-minded journalists, entrepreneurs, professionals, and intellectuals.
Syria's abortive experiment with democracy was terminated by another short-lived experiment, the United Arab Republic that merged Syria and Egypt (1958–1961). A subsequent attempt to reestablish the old political order ended with yet another military coup in March 1961, initiating a chaotic period of successive coups, counter-coups, mass arrests, bloody street battles, and increasingly more repressive forms of governance culminating in the populist-authoritarian dictatorship of Hafez al-Asad (1970–2000).
Thus for many who lived through the postwar period, the Democratic Years became the focus of nostalgic reflection, a hopeful interregnum between periods of occupation and disillusion. Such attitudes are understandable, as these years featured the restoration of civilian government and the constitution of 1950, a document that afforded, in Syria's historical experience, unprecedented freedoms of speech, press, and association. These events were soon followed by the "first free election in the Arab world," featuring universal adult suffrage, candidates from across the ideological spectrum, secret ballots, private voting booths, and extraordinary measures to prevent fraud and corruption. In this way, the Democratic Years later seemed the antithesis of the subsequent "Arab malaise" or the "widespread and deeply seated feeling that Arabs have no future, no way of improving their condition."
While this period is now seen as one of general optimism, it actually featured increasing tension and political instability, as the old system of resource allocation, under which personality and patronage networks administered by the traditional elites controlled the lion's share of economic activity, broke down. The political arrangements devised to serve and perpetuate this segment's interests also disintegrated in the 1950s. This breakdown was manifested in increasingly complex social stratification and the incessant realignment of classes, personalities, and interest groups, resulting in the intensification of social conflict and the presentation of alternative models of political, social, and economic relations. One manifestation of this new environment was labor unrest. Private and public sector employees struck or threatened to strike over salaries, benefits, and working conditions throughout the summer and fall of 1954.6 As a result, the lot of many civil servants was improved, and new links were forged between wageworkers and leftist political parties.
THE LEGAL CONTEXT OF CITIZENSHIP
In Syria, urban elites had been laboring to "fashion" the "identity of that historically unique subject" — the citizen — since the late-Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–1876), a period of modernizing reforms that included numerous liberalizing edicts; a new land code; extensive revisions of the empire's commercial, civil, criminal, and penal codes; a constitution; and the establishment of a parliament. The Tanzimat initiated a process of defensive developmentalist reforms that persisted in the empire's successor states long after its dissolution.
The French Mandate period (1920–1946) produced a system of "colonial citizenship" that was rigorously gendered and hierarchical, imposing on "citizens" all the obligations inherent to a civic-republican order while bestowing few of its rights. Syria's first post-independence governments were content to maintain this system, neglecting to address its structural anachronisms and gender inequalities. Ironically, it took the authoritarian regimes of al-Za'im and al-Shishakli to spur the drafting of a new constitution and the reform and streamlining of Syria's welter of Ottoman and French legal codes. Al-Shishakli repealed and replaced the French Mandate legislation on nationality in stages (1951, 1953), oversaw the drafting of a more liberal constitution in 1950, and promulgated a new Personal Status Code in September 1953 (Legislative Decree 59). While the key elements of al-Shishakli's subsequent Peronist-style authoritarian presidency were dismantled, his previous reforms were retained, providing the structural basis for a relatively more democratic social and political order after his overthrow.
The Personal Status Code, part of al-Shishakli's broad program of top-down legal and social reform, was particularly significant, and was supported by most reformist intellectuals. At the time of its enactment, the 1953 code represented the most fully realized example of a continuing, region-wide project — the reconciliation of the shari'a with the perceived imperatives of modern state and economic development by reference to various European civic and criminal codes.
The constitution of 1950 is another case in point: It defined Syria as a "sovereign Arab Republic with a democratic parliamentary regime"; eliminated legal designations based on gender, class, and other distinctions; and simultaneously invoked "the will of God and the free wish of the people." It also guaranteed "freedom of belief" while stipulating Islam as the religion of the country's president, designating the shari'a as the "main source of legislation," and restricting the government's "respect" and "protection" to the practices of "theistic religions ... consistent with public order." In other words, this syncretic document gestured to the norms of both parliamentary democracy and modernist Islam, while retaining one of the authoritarian state's most critical presumptions, the right to intervene into the "private" sphere in the name of public order.
The 1950 constitution also provided the framework for the discussion of citizenship during the Democratic Years. Although the citizen is clearly the subject of this document — the term muwatin (citizen) appears more than twenty times — the concept is never explicitly defined in relation to nationality or criteria like birth, naturalization, or parentage. What is clearly articulated, however, is the drafters' conception of citizenship. While several articles bestow equality of rights and opportunities, the overwhelming emphasis is on duties and responsibilities. For example, "every citizen" is expected to "contribute his life, effort, wealth, and knowledge" to "the republic," to display a "spirit of sacrifice," and to fulfill his "sacred duty" through "compulsory" military service."
Thus the operative definition of citizenship at the outset of the Democratic Years was "civic-republican" (emphasizing duties) rather than "liberal" (emphasizing rights), striking a tenuous balance between individual freedoms and the authoritarian requirements of the developing state, while ultimately favoring the latter. This perspective is evident in the expert media discourse featured in this study. These experts usually elaborated the citizen's duties through concrete, minutely detailed examples while celebrating rights as vague abstractions or subsuming them within the concept of "virtues." Prominent among the latter were various forms of "judgment," "strength," and "self-discipline," individual qualities deemed critical to the development and advancement of a vulnerable, young state. Those asserting or lauding modern expertise incessantly celebrated civic virtue in the form of service to God, family, state, and nation.
The noblest expression of this civic virtue was the fulfillment of patriotic duty through military service. The ideal of the "citizen-soldier" entailed the "ultimate sacrifice" — life itself — on behalf of the state. Since military service had, until quite recently, been an exclusively male endeavor, citizenship was "a status invented by men for men." Syrian discourses about civic virtue consistently displayed this gendered conception of citizenship, either ignoring women altogether, or celebrating their "gentle," "civilizing," and subordinate role in the making of virtuous citizens.
THE POLITICS OF POSTCOLONIAL DEVELOPMENT
A leitmotif of the literature on modern Syria is the prolonged conflict that ended in the establishment of a populist-authoritarian dictatorship and its inventory of political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. The "struggle for Syria" actually comprised the dynamic interaction of several interrelated global, regional, and domestic contests that unfolded in the fields of high politics, political economy, and culture. Scholars who privilege an internal struggle disagree over the identity of the key players, variously favoring social classes or political actors who commanded the loyalties of ethnic, confessional, or regional groupings. Viewed from the outside, the struggle appeared to be a contest between regional and/or global powers, for instance, Egypt versus Iraq or the United States versus the Soviet Union.
During the Democratic Years, Syrian domestic politics shifted decidedly leftward, and the country pursued a foreign policy of alignment with Egypt and nonalignment in the international sphere. 'Adnan al-Malki's life and death were critical in the foreign policy sphere, as he was an advocate of the ESS (Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia) alignment and Syria's joint-military defense pact with Egypt. The response to al-Malki's murder eliminated the sway of officers receptive to American influence, and accelerated the progressive, anti-Western trends in parliament and the army. During late 1955 and early 1956, a "progressive, anti-Western, and deeply pro-unionist" coalition emerged in Syria's parliament based on an alliance of the Ba'th Party, "red millionaire" Khalid al-'Azm, and Communist Party General Secretary Khalid Bakdash.
In early 1956, these forces formed a "Progressive National Front" in parliament. Later in the year, the Suez Crisis and a failed U.S./British/Iraqi coup attempt further discredited pro-Western politicians and intensified leftist tendencies in parliament, the army, the state bureaucracy, and the populace. A second U.S. coup attempt failed in 1957, producing a diplomatic crisis, the movement of Turkish NATO troops to Syria's northern border, and invasion hysteria among the Syrian public. In the same year, new electoral successes for the Progressive Front led to the signing of a trade and cooperation agreement with the Soviet Union. Finally, a conflict within the Progressive Front in late 1957 produced a political crisis, which was finally resolved when a coalition of leftist military officers and progressive politicians accomplished the "dissolution of Syria's existence as an independent state" by compelling the country's absorption into a pan-Arabist union with Egypt, the United Arab Republic.
The Syrian armed forces played a significant role in these processes throughout the Democratic Years. Upon independence in 1946, the government of urban notables viewed Syria's army, an institution trained, equipped, and commanded by French officers, and which included sizeable numbers of Circassian, 'Alawi, Druze, Isma'ili, and Christian commissioned and noncommissioned officers, with suspicion and unease. These tense civil-military relations deteriorated markedly after independence, as the civilian government slashed the size and budget of the army, then awarded military supply contracts to corrupt or incompetent cronies. Both measures yielded disastrous results on the battlefields of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948–1949, producing widespread, bitter resentment, a major contributing factor to the army's decision to seize power in 1949.
Despite pledging a permanent "return to the barracks" immediately after deposing Adib al-Shishakli in February 1954, the army soon began to interfere in the composition of cabinets, attempted to influence legislation, drew a series of red lines in foreign policy, and otherwise made its collective opinion known to civilian politicians, foreign governments, and the public. A newly predominant clique of army officers — largely a single generational cohort — attempted to remake the institution in its own image, to forge a collective, professional identity that would "preclude subnational and primordial allegiances," thereby completing the army's transformation from a despised instrument of French imperialism populated by groups of suspect loyalty into a corps of citizen soldiers.
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Excerpted from Syria's Democratic Years by Kevin W. Martin. Copyright © 2015 Kevin W. Martin. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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