ABSTRACT
Islamic movement are examined. It is suggested that the president is facing similar challenges to those faced by his predecessor in the early stages of his command, namely an economic crisis exacerbated by strong demographic growth, Islamist activity at the domestic level and a new geo-political reality as a result of war in the region. But an important difference in the situation facing Bashar’s government is that his response options are narrowing. This is because of the previous command’s economic, social and regional policies discussed in the last chapter, which have led to an ongoing re-configuration of state-society relations such that these relations are no longer entirely under the current leadership’s control. The new political command thus stands at a critical juncture, which is the natural outcome of the built-in structural limitations of the PA regime created by the Bath in 1963.2 Ultimately, the regime’s survival strategies, while successful in postponing the need for larger structural adjustments during Hafez al-Asad’s presidency, are no longer sufficient to tame the opposition or to secure the loyalty of strategic sectors. The reason for this is that economic development without political liberalization is “bound to deepen civil society, and continuing social mobilization in this context will generate stronger, more autonomous social forces that cannot readily be controlled except through greater political liberalization.”3 More specifically, Hafez al-Asad’s regime succeeded in maintaining its control over the mobilized Islamic groups, but the regime of his son is no longer able to do so, for a number of intertwined reasons: in the nondemocratic setting of Syrian politics, the social engineering from above that is aimed at inhibiting the emergence of a viable political alternative to the regime, and thus at consolidating the latter’s control, has constrained the set of options available to it. On one hand, the co-opted Islamic sector that was allowed to develop and recruit members under the previous presidency has today become a significant organizational force that, thanks to its outreach methods,4 is growing increasingly independent of the regime’s control. On the other hand, the bourgeois class that Hafez al-Asad co-opted through selective economic liberalization has also become an important force, and is successfully pushing the state for further economic liberalization. The predicament, therefore, is that although selective economic liberalization addresses the desires of the powerful capitalist and arriviste elements linked to the regime, it also forces the state to abandon its
social-welfare programmes and thus to widen the gap between the impoverished classes and the economic elite. A widened gap means that the state can no longer maintain its balancing act of satisfying its base of support – the middle and lower classes – and the new capitalistic class. In this sense, the strategic choices available to the leadership in Damascus have been altered, and generally narrowed. It is at this juncture that the link between the economic and the Islamic factors emerges: the impoverished class can no longer rely on the regime’s populist policies for support, and feels abandoned. Thus its members are shifting their attention and allegiance towards the only sector that was allowed to prosper under the previous political command and that can help to fill their needs through its proficient welfare network, the Islamic sector. A critical examination of the current government’s social, economic and regional policies will serve to validate the above arguments, and is presented in this first chapter of Part III. Chapter 6 will thus survey the ongoing deBathization and de-laïcization of the Syrian social system, the regime’s renewed alliance with the Islamic sector, as well as the regime’s economic policies, particularly its abandonment of a large part of Bathist populist reforms and its encouragement of private enterprise. Also surveyed are the regime’s regional policies, which have focused on deepening patron-client relations with Islamist groups in neighbouring countries, a step believed to be aimed at maintaining Syria’s political standing and influence in the region.5
