Last week, when Syria's President-for-life, Bashar Assad, convened the 10th Baath Party congress in Damascus, he promised to loosen the party's monopoly on power to encourage greater political participation among the country's disaffected population. But Assad's concession was less a sign of noblesse oblige than a reflection of just how weak and isolated the nearly 60-year-old party has become.
Ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq put an end to the only other Baathist regime in the region, Syria's Baath Party has been forced to cast aside what little remained of the quixotic, transnationalist ideals that gave birth to the movement seven decades ago in favor of a far more modest domestic agenda of political and economic reform. In his opening address to the congress, Assad vowed -- rote-like, as Baath Party leaders always do these days -- to continue to pursue "unity, freedom and socialism" among the Arab peoples. But his delivery made it clear that bringing together the Arab world was no longer a pressing concern.
This was a far cry from the tone of the first Baath Party congress, held in Damascus on April 7, 1947. The fervent ideology of pan-Arabism then ruled the day, and the principal goal was nothing less than creation of a single Arab superstate.
Pan-Arabism, which had emerged as a response to Western colonial domination in the Middle East, sought to reassert Arab power through an appeal for ethnic unity across political and territorial boundaries. It found its first formal expression in the creation of the Arab League in 1945, which gave a single voice to the newly independent Arab states after World War II. But the primary channel through which pan-Arabism spread was unquestionably the Baath Party.
"Baath" is the Arabic word for "renaissance," and it was precisely as a reawakening of the Arab spirit that the movement's ideology was conceived in the 1930s by Syrian activists and political philosophers such as Michel Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi. The Baath preached a revolutionary mixture of Arab nationalism and secular socialism that appealed to Syria's intellectuals and university students, many of whom had become disillusioned with the other great movement of political unity in the Middle East, pan-Islamism.
After the catastrophic defeat of the Arab forces in Palestine in 1948, the Baath Party's ideals began spreading through the rest of the Middle East: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen all drew heavily from the Baath's pan-Arabist ideology.
