Syrian Exceptionalism: Learning from the Failures of the Arab Spring
Syria's new government is avoiding the mistakes made in the Arab Spring and by its neighbours
Syria Takes a Different Path
It is too early to speculate where Syria ends up, but we can assess to a great extent where it will not end up. The common heuristic has been to look to the outcomes of the political upheaval of the Arab Spring as guideposts for Syria’s future, with the assumption being that what happens in one Arab country is likely replicable in another.
This anachronistic perspective generalises the unique circumstances in each of these countries and the subsequent failure of their revolutions; the only commonality in the Arab Spring was a relapse into tyranny or the wholesale collapse of state institutions into civil war. Each country came to these conclusions by different roads.
For now, Syria stands as the exception among Arab countries, having gone through and beyond the Arab Spring: it had its civil war, there is no ‘deep state’ to overturn this victory, and the new government’s foreign policy blitz has forced a fait accompli among regional and international states on the need for Syria’s stability under new management.
Most importantly, Syria’s leadership has shown a keen awareness of their own failures throughout the revolution, and failed political reforms in other Arab countries. Chief among the lessons learned have been the threats of: sectarian quotas like in Iraq and Lebanon, counterrevolutions like in Tunisia and Egypt, or a relapse into civil war like in Libya. Whatever challenges surface in Syria will do so within its unique context.
Sectarian States and Quotas
The most painful lesson from Iraq was the poorly managed political transition of de-Baathification after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. While it was correctly recognised that Ba’athist cadres had no role to play in Iraq’s future, the Americans and Iraq’s new government indiscriminately purged the predominantly Sunni army and government instead of a managed transition. This sowed the seeds for a counterinsurgency that would quickly become extremely sectarian in nature, with Shi’ite parties and individuals, mostly affiliated with Iran, quickly filling the vacuum.
In Syria, the government did not summarily dismiss all those affiliated with or working in state institutions under the Assad regime. To the contrary, those who had not committed crimes against the Syrian people (and who were not working in ‘ghost jobs’ that drew salaries from the government without ever coming to work) were immediately called back to service. The current Central Bank governor – and first woman to hold that post in Syria’s history – Maysa Sabreen, is the highest ranking official from the previous regime to work under the new government. The emphasis has been on an orderly transition that does not permit for sectarian grievances or further disruption to what remains of Syria’s state institutions.
Another example of the menace of sectarianism is Lebanon, where the state is constitutionally designed to allocate ministerial seats to different sects – Sunni, Shi’ite, Christian, and Druze – which all but ensures that various ministries turn into rent extraction mechanisms for whichever sect controls them. The Syrian government has flatly rejected calls for sectarian quotas and representation, emphasising instead appointment to ministerial positions by merit.
‘Deep State’ Interventions in Egypt and Tunisia
In Tunisia, the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 led to elections in which the Ennahda party won 36.97% of the vote under Rachid Ghannouchi’s leadership. However, Tunisia’s temporary experiment with democracy quickly resulted in a downward spiral of fine-tuning constitutional design and democratic mechanisms as counterrevolutionary movements gained momentum. The largest of these parties was Nidaa Tounes, ostensibly led by Beji Caid Essebsi but really the work of Tunisian oligarch Nabil Karoui. The economic chaos caused by neoliberal economic reforms hollowed out Tunisia’s state capacity which meant the state could not effectively deal with economic issues, and allowed space for oligarchic entrenchment that further impoverished the people.
Over the 2010s, public sentiment had turned against democracy as the people sought a strongman to lead them out of this economic and political chaos. In 2019, Kais Saied was elected President, and in the years that followed suspended and rewritten the constitution, abolished elections, and consolidated power in himself. These moves were backed and supported not just by Tunisia’s oligarchic class and secular opposition movements, but also with the support of Egyptian ‘military advisors’ who have applied lessons from Egypt’s counterrevolution against Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to Tunisia. In 2024, Ghannouchi was imprisoned to three years in prison on trumped up corruption charges.
In Egypt, the fall of Hosni Mubarak and subsequent elections in late 2011 led to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice party, led by Mohamed Morsi who became Egypt’s first democratically appointed President in its history. However, Egypt’s military and intelligence services, alongside external powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supported the counterrevolutionary Tamarod movement. Although Morsi had been democratically elected, he did not control the key levers of power in Egypt, and as public opinion was swayed by the Tamarod movement and external media bombardment from the Arab Gulf, democratic legitimacy (for what this is worth in Egypt) proved temperamental. In 2013, using the street movements under Tamarod as a pretext, the Egyptian army overthrew President Morsi was overthrown in a military coup led by Abdelfattah El-Sisi. He died in jail in 2019, awaiting “trial”.
In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, revolutionary change was predicated on democratic legitimacy. The experience of these countries shows that the key levers of power, found in a strategic alliance between military, intelligence, and oligarchic interests (i.e. their ‘deep states’), cannot only be reformed through popular votes. True political reform requires the support or purge of the deep state.
In Syria, the new government has been busy rebuilding their version of the deep state, ensuring that armed power and political legitimacy remain within the hands of those who led Syria’s revolution to victory:
The objective of the council is to build enough strategic depth within the Syrian state to withstand the extreme security threats and challenges Syria currently faces, chief among them being potential counter-revolutions—the most successful of which often come from within the ‘deep’ part of the state itself. Building a state imbued with the principles of the Syrian revolution will be crucial if Syria is to avoid the counter-revolutions that thwarted democracy in Egypt and Tunisia, which were led by their deep states against elected parties. The mistake of democratic movements in Egypt and Tunisia was to quibble over democratic elections and the design of new constitutions while the economy floundered and the deep state mobilised (along with regional allies) against them. If Syria is to attempt a political transition in these early stages without basic state institutions and a broken economy, the country will become very susceptible to counter-revolutionary efforts led internally or externally, and prove inflexible in responding to various threats.
However, even if the state is consolidated and potential internal counterrevolutionary currents neutralised, Syria’s government will still have to rebuild basic state institutions, deliver on visible measures of economic redevelopment and reconstruction, and fend off the temptation to lean into neoliberal reforms that would not only crush the ability of the Syrian state to rebuild itself and the country, but create the conditions for a new oligarchy that could play a role similar to that of Karoui and Nidaa Tounes in Tunisia—except this time, relying primarily on foreign powers.
Relapsing into Civil War
In Libya, the rapid fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 was followed by the refusal of various armed factions to lay down arms and integrate into the state. The proliferation of armed factions with various interests fragmented the country and resulted in a decade of civil war which has now consolidated into two rival governments: the Government of National Unity in Tripoli, and the Government of National Stability in Benghazi, led by the Egyptian and UAE-backed military henchman Khalifa Heftar.
Of all the Arab Spring comparisons, detractors of both the Syrian revolution and the new government favour Libya the most. Even in its worst days, Libya’s situation was better than Syria’s situation in its best days: the expulsion of millions, the flattening of entire towns and suburbs, the use of chemical weapons on civilians, the industrial-scale dungeons that saw torture, rape, and execution of tens of thousands of Syrians who to this day have been unidentified, their families hoping against hope to find some news of them, or at least a body to bury.
In any case, unlike in Libya where militias refused to lay down arms and fold into the state, the Syria government has enforced this as a red line for armed factions in the country. Most of them have now folded into the military of defence with the exception of the Druze factions in Suweyda and the Kurdish PKK-led “SDF” in northeast Syria. The PKK-SDF are universally reviled in Syria and have little chance of becoming Syria’s “Heftarite candidate” for external powers seeking to support a rival counterrevolutionary government like in Benghazi.
Is there a Syrian Exceptionalism?
Syria arguably had the most stupid and vicious rulers of any Arab regime and ensured that they lasted longer than Mubarak, Ali, and Gaddafi, among other tyrants. This also meant that when Syria was liberated, it was liberated to the roots. The Assad regime could have survived if the other actors within the regime had removed Bashar al-Assad from power and replaced him with another figurehead and maintained political repression like with Egypt’s El-Sisi or Tunisia’s Saied. Instead, the Assad regime went all in. Now, they are all out.
Unlike Egypt and Tunisia where the deep state maneuvered a counterrevolution against democratically elected governments, the deep state in Syria is now being rebuilt and staffed by the revolutionaries themselves. The government has secured the key levers of power in the country through the state. They have refused to allow militias outside of the state or for militias to fold into the state as blocs. Instead, the demand has been for individual assimilation into the new Syrian military. Most factions have acquiesced to this.
Syria’s foreign policy shows the appropriate level of maturity to demonstrate to neighbours, regional powers, and the west that Syria is not interested in exporting revolution, nor that it desires hermetic status. This has navigated Syria out of the immediate danger zone for externally sponsored counterrevolutionary action in the first few months after Assad’s fall:
If Damascus had nursed old grudges and opted for a remote if not hostile attitude and general distrust towards regional and western states, it would have incentivised long-term hostile action by neighbouring states like Egypt and the UAE and the maintenance of western sanctions that would cripple Syria's reconstruction efforts. Instead, the government chose to demonstrate that they are not ideologically hostile to regional states (even if those states remain ideologically hostile to Damascus), that Syria was not going to be a launchpad for revolution, and most importantly that the region has much more to gain from Syria’s stability and reconstruction.
The effect of this strategy was also to mitigate the immediate threat of external actors sponsoring potential counter-revolutionary activity in Syria. This threat was at its highest in the first month after the fall of the Assad regime when it was still unclear whether the new government in Damascus could successfully position itself as a legitimate actor and stabilise the country. The initial ramp-up of hostile media rhetoric among Egyptian and Emirati outlets in December, for instance, has since seen a significant decline in January. It is certain that there will continue to be distrust and agitation towards the new government in Damascus, but potentially destabilising or violent means of doing so have been heavily disincentivised by the government’s diplomacy.
What makes Syria exceptional may also suggest potential dangers to the roadmap to political stability and reconstruction. The successful overthrow of the Assad regime does not necessarily mean the success of the revolution: the establishment of consensus-making mechanisms, accountability of public officials, transitional justice, and equitable economic growth.
To achieve any of these things require state capacity, something that Syria does not currently have and must build from scratch after fifty four years of pillage by the Assad dynasty and its cronies. The economy is in ruins and is experiencing a liquidity crisis and fluctuating market prices that has worsened the peoples’ suffering as basic needs like food, energy, and shelter are still out of reach. For now, there is an understanding in Syrian society of the situation that the regime has left the country in, and that the new government needs time to solve these issues.
How and whether or not the government can solve them will determine where the country ends up in the future. And this will be unlike any other example from the Arab Spring.