Baath Party

Baath Party, political party and movement influential among Arab communities in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq. The Baath Party was from the beginning a secular Arab nationalist party. Socialism (not Marxism) was quickly adopted as the party’s economic dogma: “Unity [Arab], Freedom [from colonialism], and Socialism” are still the watchwords. Its secular socialist nature made it attractive to disadvantaged and marginal communities such as the Alawites in Syria and the various Christian groups in the region. From its earliest development, the motivation behind Baathist political thought and its leading supporters was the need to produce a means of reasserting the Arab spirit in the face of foreign domination. Moral and cultural deterioration, it was felt, had so weakened the Arabs that Western supremacy spread throughout the Middle East. Arabs needed a regeneration of the common heritage of people in the region to drive off debilitating external influences.

Articulated as the principle of Arab nationalism, the Baath movement was one of several political groups that drew legitimacy from an essentially reactive ideology. Nevertheless, unlike the Arab nationalism typified by Gamal Abdel Nasser, which generated much of its support from his personal charisma, Baathist ideology spread slowly by educating followers to its intellectual attractions. The three major proponents of early Baathist thought, Zaki al-Arsuzi, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and Arab Christian Michel Aflaq, were middle-class educators whose political thought had been influenced by Western education. During the 1930s Arsuzi, Salah, and Aflaq expounded their vision of Arab nationalism to small audiences in Syria. By the early 1940s Salah and Aflaq had taken the initiative to extend the movement’s operations in Damascus by organizing demonstrations in support of Rashid Ali al-Gailani’s government in Iraq against the British presence there. By 1945 the word baath (Arabic for “resurrection” or “renaissance”) had been applied to what was then officially a party rather than a movement. The official founding of the party may be dated from its first party congress in Damascus on April 7, 1947, when a constitution was approved and an executive committee established. However, significant expansion beyond Syria’s borders took place only after the war of 1948, when lack of Arab unity was widely perceived as responsible for the loss of Palestine to the new state of Israel. The Iraqi branch of the Baath party was established in 1954 after the merger of the Baath with Akram al-Hurani’s Arab Socialist Party in 1952, to form the Arab Baath Socialist Party. Baathist parties came to power in both Syria and Iraq in the 1960s, and went on to dominate the political process in these states.