Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab;

Author:Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

FOUR

Tanwir and the Damascus Spring at the Turn of the Millennium

The Promethean Moment

The First Decade of Bashar al-Assad’s Presidency, 2000–2010

The Promethean moment was prompted by the passing of Hafiz al-Assad after thirty years of personalized rule. Hafiz had carefully prepared for his son’s succession and made sure that the system he had built would persist after him. Yet his death inevitably heralded the end of an era, and it was obvious that a transition phase had started. No matter how well the succession had been planned, people felt that things were somehow bound to change, without being able to predict the nature and extent of the change. The personality that Hafiz al-Assad projected would not be easy to replace, and the regime he had established was to a great extent his own creation.

But changes had already started to take place in the last decade of Hafiz al-Assad’s rule. Indeed, he had begun to evoke the need for change himself in the early 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformations in Eastern Europe and Latin America, he felt the need to affirm the stability of his rule, which he claimed was based on the democratic nature of his regime, adding that Syria had its own style of democracy in line with its own history, culture, and circumstances. However, he also called for more inclusiveness in representation, encouraging and allowing some independent candidates to participate in the 1990 elections. He repeatedly demanded that authorities curb corruption and improve legal services. He released large numbers of prisoners, while keeping freedom of speech in check. However, the more pressing need for change came from the ailing economy. The public sector had failed to generate capital, and too many public funds went into financing the many intelligence and security agencies. Funds were also used to provide state benefits in terms of jobs, patronage, and subsidies. Private capital had fled the country and was discouraged from returning by the scale of corruption and the absence of legal guarantees for making investments. Aid from the Arabian Gulf countries and the Soviet Union had secured some rents to the state independently from society. But in the late 1980s the economic crisis became aggravated, and the state had to cut social benefits and shrink the public sector, leaving large sectors of society in dire need. Strict import limitations were imposed, causing a huge smuggling business to develop, primarily in the hands of the army and security agents.

Some measure of economic liberalization from overwhelming state control had become necessary. Hafiz al-Assad wanted to make sure this liberalization did not entail a political liberalization leading to a democratization process. He went for a “calculated decompression as a substitute for democratization,” in the words of political scientist Raymond Hinnebusch.1 This calculated decompression consisted in granting some room for private capital, including diaspora money, to operate, while controlling the bourgeois civil society it would bring about. But Assad’s maneuver, according to Hinnebusch, was bound by the very structures he

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