The Arab Winter by Noah Feldman

Author:Noah Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: The Age of Bashar

Nothing in the post–Arab spring fills me with greater terror and pity than the current (and likely final) act of the Syrian civil war. Victory for Bashar al-Assad is bad enough. But what makes it so much more pitiable is that this result almost seems like the lesser evil when compared with the alternatives. Vladimir Putin’s air force has bombed and killed countless civilians. Some 5.6 million Syrians have little prospect of returning home from abroad. Another 6.6 million remain displaced within Syria’s (resolidified) borders.11 The areas controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish militia are isolated, small, and not strategically sustainable over time. Yet the killing seems to be slowing and perhaps even coming to an end. This seems to be better than the available alternatives; and if that reality is not a tragedy, I do not know what is.

Seen from the standpoint of Arab or Syrian nationalism, Bashar’s currently existing regime means something very different from what the regime meant before the Arab spring and the war. The “triumph” of Bashar is that he has stayed alive and sustained his regime for the ‘Alawi community. Unlike Egypt, where the new dictator has more political legitimacy than the previous one, Bashar after the civil war has far less claim to popular support than he did at the start. Or, to be more precise, after killing so many Syrians, he has even less claim to be the legitimate ruler of Syria. Among the much-reduced population of Syrians who remain in the country, he might conceivably have a higher percentage of support than before the mass flight of refugees. But if this were true, it would only be as a result of a movement of populations unprecedented in the modern Middle East—the breaking of the Syrian nation.

The aftermath of the Syrian civil war thus demonstrates the hollowness of the nation that was supposed or presumed to exist before. Syrians, it turned out, could rather easily cease to act as Syrians but could begin to act as Sunnis, ‘Alawis, Kurds, or jihadis. That is, the ideology of the nation-state could give way to alternative identities shaped by denomination, ethnicity, or religious orientation. The trigger was not precisely the same as the externally driven breakdown of security in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Instead the trigger was the political action of uprising, coupled with the political action of violent regime repression.

This breakdown of the nation-state’s ideology of identity could have occurred in other Arab states. Something analogous had already occurred in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and decades before that in Lebanon in its civil war. A version focused more on tribal affiliation took place in Libya more or less simultaneously with the events in Syria. And Yemen’s complex, ongoing civil war also reflects deep and multiple divisions in its society. Together the breakdowns following the Arab spring demonstrate the collapse of the very possibility of imagining Arab nation-states as stable entities reflecting common ethnicity, language, and religion. The reality may always have been the underlying diversity and potential for breakdown.

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