ABSTRACT
The origins of authoritarian-populism in Syria, a dominant route of state formation in the Middle East, throws some light on the nature of political change there. The failure of the “traditional” elite, owing to profound liabilities rooted in Syria’s long history, opened the door to the Ba‘th. The Ba‘th regime’s first challenge, confronted from 1963–1965, was the concentration of power over the command posts of the state and the exclusion of rival elites. The Ba‘th, relying on a mixed patrimonial/organization-building strategy, produced a mixed state, part-Bonapartist, part-Leninist. The Ba‘th’s populist-statist “modernizing strategy”—social leveling, the concentration of economic power in the state—was shaped by its origins in a populist revolt against the old oligarchy. In responding to the expectations of the constituency the Ba‘th was incorporating and in breaking the economic dominance of its rivals, the Ba‘th was also deploying development policy as an instrument of regime power consolidation.
