Syrian Social Nationalist Party

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) (Arabic: الحزب السوري القومي الاجتماعي‎, transliterated: al-Ḥizb as-Sūrī al-Qawmī al-'Ijtimāʕī, often referred to in French as Parti Populaire Syrien or Parti Social Nationaliste Syrien), is a secular nationalist political party operating in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine ^[1][2]. It advocates the establishment of a Syrian nation state spanning the Fertile Crescent, including present day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Cyprus, Kuwait, Sinai, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.^[3] It is the largest political group in Syria after the Ba'ath,^[4] with over 100,000 members. In Lebanon, it is part of the March 8 Alliance.

Founded in Beirut in 1932 as a national liberation organization hostile to French colonialism, the party played a significant role in Lebanese and Syrian politics and was involved in attempted coups in 1949 and 1961 following which it was thoroughly repressed. It was active in the resistance against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 while continiously supporting the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In Syria, the SSNP became a major political force in the early 1950s, but was thoroughly repressed in 1955. It remained organised, and in 2005 was legalised and joined the Ba'ath Party-led National Progressive Front.

Foundation and early years

The SSNP was founded by Antun Saadeh, a Lebanese Syrian nationalist philosopher from a Greek Orthodox family in the town of Dhour el Shweir. Saadeh had emigrated to South America in 1919 (via the USA where he stayed for about a year before continuing on to Brazil), at the age of fifteen, and in the years he lived there engaged in both Arabic-language journalism and Syrian nationalist political activity. On his return to Lebanon in 1930 he continued working as a journalist and also taught German in the American University of Beirut.^[5]:43

In November 1932 he secretly established the first nucleus of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which operated underground for the first three years of its existence.^[5] In 1933 it started publishing a monthly journal called Al-Majalla which was distributed in the American University of Beirut. The articles written in that journal and the speeches given by Saadeh consolidated the ideological basis of the party, and contributed to its popularity.^[5]:43

Since its inception, the party endorsed an open hostility to colonialism and advocated national self-determination, which eventually led to its ban by French authorities and the incarceration of Saadeh in 1936. Saadeh was sent to trial in 1936 and spent six months in prison for creating a clandestine party.^[5] He was also accused in the trial of having been in contact with the fascist movements of Germany and Italy, but the charge was dropped as a letter was addressed from Germany denying any relationships. ^[5] It is during his months in prison that Saadeh laid down the final ideological foundations of the party in The Genesis of Nations.

Saadeh emigrated again to Brazil in 1938 and afterwards to Argentina, only to return to Lebanon in 1947 following the country's independence from the French in 1943. By that time, the SSNP had grown exponentially and had clashed on many occasions with its primary ideological rival, the Kataeb Party.

While the latter was committed to the notion of Lebanon as a nation state defined as an entity presiding over the borders outlined first by the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, and afterwards by the French administrative division of its mandate into six states including the state of Greater Lebanon, the SSNP rejected this national claim on the basis that the borders outlining the newly-created states were fictious, resulting from colonialism, and do not reflect any historical and social realities. The party claimed that Greater Syria as defined by Saadeh represents the national ideal encompassing the historical people of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, bound together by a clearly-defined geography and a common historical, social and cultural development path^[6]. Furthermore, and with the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, Saadeh radicalized the party's Anti-Zionist stance by declaring that "Our struggle with the enemy is not a struggle for borders but for existence".

On July 4, 1949, a year after the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel and the Nakba, and a response to a series of aggressions perpetrated by the Kataeb-backed central government,the SSNP attempted its first revolution. Following a violent crackdown by government forces, Saadeh traveled to Damascus to meet with Husni al-Za'im in an attempt to obtain his support. Viewed as a radical agitator and threat to the newly-created Syrian state, Al-Za'im handed Saadeh over to Lebanese authorities, who had him executed on July the 8, 1949. It was the shortest and most secretive trial given to a political offender^[7]

The SSNP in Lebanon

From Confrontation to Accomodation: The 1950–1960 years

Following the execution of Saadeh and the arrest of its high-ranking leaders, the party remained underground until it started resurfacing with the events that transpired during the 1950-1960 period. With the outbreak of the Cold War and the rise of Marxist and communist influences supported by the USSR, the SSNP found itself facing a new ideological adversary, especially that most left-wing movements in the Middle-East rallied around Gamal Abd El Nasser and Arab nationalism.^[8]

The party objected to the declaration of The United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria, and during the Lebanon crisis of 1958, party members sided with the government and then-president Camille Chamoun, fighting against the Arab nationalist rebels in northern Lebanon and in Mount Lebanon.^[9] The party was subsequently legalized.

Second Coup d'Etat and Repression: 1961–1975

In 1961 the party launched an abortive coup attempt in Lebanon, resulting in renewed proscription and the imprisonment of many of its leaders.^[10] In prison the SSNP militants read and discussed politics and reconsidered their ideology, coming under the influence of Marxism and other left-wing ideas. By the beginning of the 1970s, the party had undergone a considerable ideological transformation, and was seen as decidedly left-wing and no longer deeply inimical to pan-Arab nationalism. These ideological turns, however, resulted in splits, and there are now two rival groups laying claim to Saadeh's mantle.

The Lebanese Civil War: 1975-1990

With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, SSNP militias fought alongside the nationalist and leftist forces allied in the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), against the Phalangists and their right-wing allies of the Lebanese Front. An important development followed with the renewal of contact between the party and its former bitter enemy, the Syrian Baath Party.

After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and subsequent rout of the leftist forces, a number of the leftist organizations regrouped to engage in resistance to the Israeli occupation. Along with the Lebanese Communist Party, the Communist Action Organization, and some smaller leftist groups, the SSNP played a prominent role in this. One of the best-known early actions of the resistance was the killing of two Israeli soldiers in the Wimpy Cafe on west Beirut's central Rue Hamra by party member Khalid Alwan. The party continues to commemorate this date. The FBI blames them for the assassination of Bachir Gemayel in 1982.^[11]

In 1983 the party joined the Lebanese National Salvation Front established to oppose the abortive May 17 accord with Israel signed by Gemayel's brother and successor Amine Gemayel.

Some party members were willing to sacrifice their lives through suicide attacks in resistance against Israel, the first being in 1985.^[12] A party member Sana'a Mehaidli, who martyred herself at age 16 against an Israeli checkpoint in Lebanon, is considered "the progenitor of all female martyrs for the Palestinian cause".^[12] Diego Gambetta says that they can't be considered a terrorist organization because they only act against military targets, and that they should be considered a guerrilla organization.^[12]

Recent Years: 1990 onward

The SSNP participated in the 1992 Lebanese general election and won 6 seats. In the 1996 Lebanese general election the party won 5 seats. In 2000 Lebanese general election the party won 4 seats. In the 2005 Lebanese general elections the party won 2 seats and in the 2009 Lebanese general election again 2 seats.

During the 2008 conflict in Lebanon, at least 14 people were killed in the town of Halba, in the Akkar region of north Lebanon, as about 100 pro-Future Movement gunmen attacked an office of the SSNP.^[13] 10 of the dead were SSNP members, three were government loyalists and one was an Australian citizen of Lebanese descent on vacation in Lebanon, who was trying to get information at the SSNP offices about evacuating from the city.^[14][15][16] The Australian father of four, Fadi Sheikh, reportedly had his hands and feet cut off.^[17][18]

The SSNP in Syria

In Syria the SSNP grew to a position of considerable influence in the years following the country's independence in 1946, and was a major political force immediately after the restoration of democracy in 1954. It was a fierce rival of the Syrian Communist Party and of the radical pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, the other main ideological parties of the period. In April 1955 Colonel Adnan al-Malki, a Baathist officer who was a very popular figure in the Syrian army, was assassinated by a party member. This provided the Communists and Baathists with the opportunity to eliminate their main ideological rival, and under pressure from them and their allies in the security forces the SSNP was practically wiped out as a political force in Syria.

The SSNP's stance during the Lebanese civil war was consistent with that of Syria, and that facilitated a rapprochement between the party and the Syrian government. During Hafez al-Assad's presidency, the party was increasingly tolerated. After the succession of his son Bashar in 2000, this process continued. In 2001, although still officially banned, the party was permitted to attend meetings of the Baath-led National Progressive Front coalition of legal parties as an observer. In Spring 2005 the party was legalised in Syria. It is considered to be one of the largest political parties in the country, after the ruling Baath Party, with perhaps 100,000 members.^[19]

In the 22 April 2007 election for the People's Council of Syria, the party gained 2 out of 250 in the parliament.

Ideology

Political Tenets

While in jail from early February to early May 1936, Saadeh completed The Genesis of Nations which he had started writing three months before the French authorities in Lebanon discovered the secret organization and arrested its leader and his assistants. In his book, Saadeh formulated his belief in the existence of a Syrian nation in a homeland defined as embracing all historic Syria extended to the Suez Canal in the south, and that includes modern Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait. The boundaries of the historic environment in which the Syrian nation evolved went much beyond the scope usually ascribed to Syria, extending from the Taurus range in the north-east and the Zagros mountains in the north-west to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian desert and the Persian Gulf in the east.^[20] According to Saadeh, this region is also called the Syrian Fertile Crescent, the island Cyprus being its star.

According to Saadeh, geographical factors play an important role in setting the parameters for the process of association and thus for the establishment of a nation. He held that the process of human evolution from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture was among the most important factors that led to the creation of private property and the class system. Saadeh highlighted the role that the class system played in the flourishing of trade and commerce and the creation of wealth, ascribing it to be a characteristic of the Semitic peolples, namely the coastal Phoenicians. He also stressed the link between the economic modes of production and the establishment of cultural norms and values, a view he shared with Karl Marx.

However, Saadeh believed that while the economic modes of production can create culture, culture acquires a life of its own with time and eventually becomes embedded and perpetuated in its people, who come to recognize themselves as a living organism. Hence comes the importance of the state in serving the interest of the nation, and of national democracy as the legitimate source of political legislation.

The party's foundations were that the Syrian people are exemplary of this development path and came to constitute a complete nation and civilization throughout history, from the Pre-Christian era, to the Islamic era, all the way up until the present. The SSNP claimed that the Greater Syria is the natural home of the Syrian people with clearly defined geographic boundaries, yet that its people are suffering from an identity crisis due to Ottoman occupation, colonialism, and sectarianism. Saadeh claimed that the renaissance of the Syrian nation is inevitably linked to the purge these decadent forces through the reinforcing of national solidarity, resistance against colonialism, and secularism. Saadeh's concept of the nation shaped mainly by geography, rather than ethnic origins, language or religion, led him also to conclude that the Arabs could not form one nation, but many nations could be called Arab.

Economic Theory

While the core of the party's political theory revolves around the establishment of a Greater Syrian nation state, the economic theory upon which the state is to be organized remains a topic of contention. As a matter of fact, Saadeh did not elaborate a comprehensive economic theory, yet proposed a social nationalist model which can be considered to some extent as a distinctive form of socialism. As a matter of fact, among the key tenets of social nationalism figured the abolition of feudalism, the emancipation of the working class, the establishment of economic dirigisme and the welfare state, universal healthcare as well as universal education for the purpose of securing national solidarity. This remains a topic of debate however, as the strongly pronounced nationalistic features of SSNP ideology would permit scholars to interpret social nationalism as a distinctive breed of National Syndicalism.

Organization

The SSNP was organised with a hierarchical structure and a powerful leader. Its ideology was an entirely secular form of nationalism; indeed, it posited the complete separation of religion and politics as one of the two fundamental conditions for real national unity. The other condition was determined economic and social reform.^[21]

Emblem and Flag

The party's emblem was designed by the SSNP students American University of Beirut while the party was still clandestine and before the French authorities had uncovered it in 1936. The SSNP emblem is a combination of the crescent and the cross.^[22] The party flag features a red hurricane, called the "Zawba'a", within a white circle on a black background. Each arm symbolizes one of the four virtues of the party's mission: freedom, duty, discipline and power.^[5]:45 According to SSNP lore, the black color symbolizes the dark ages of Ottoman rule, colonialism, sectarian division, national division, and backwardness. The "Zawba'a" allegedly represents the blood of the SSNP martyrs bound together as Muslims and Christians through freedom, duty, discipline and power as a hurricane to purge the dark ages and spark their nation's rejuvenation and renaissance. Critics claim that the symbol was modeled after the Nazi swastika.^{[23][24][25][26][27][28]}

Criticism

Ideological criticism

Despite Saadeh's claims, some authors state that when the party began overt activity, it was the object of many critiques due to having many ideological and organizational resemblances to European fascism, and due to the resemblance of its external symbols to those of German Nazism.^[23][24][25] Such resemblances went against the idea that it was an authentic national ideology and couldn't be acknowledged by the party.^[5] The party's founder Saadeh was aware of these accusations and he addressed them during his speech of 1 June 1935 (long before the events of World War II, and before the party was given publicity and the accusations started appearing in the press):

According to Reeva S. Johnson, Saadeh, the party's 'leader for life', was an admirer of Adolf Hitler influenced by Nazi and fascist ideology.^[26][30] The party adopted a reversed swastika as the party's symbol, sang the party's anthem to Deutschland über alles, and included developing the cult of a leader, advocating totalitarian government, and glorifying an ancient pre-Christian past and the organic whole of the Syrian Volk or nation.^[23][26]

Arab nationalist thinker Sati' al-Husri considered that Saadeh "misrepresented" Arab nationalism, incorrectly associating it with a Bedouin image of the Arab and with Muslim sectarianism. Palestinian historian Maher Charif sees Saadeh's theory as a response to the religious diversity of Syria, and points to his later extension of his vision of the Syrian nation to include Iraq, a country also noted for its religious diversity, as further evidence for this.^[31] The party also accepted that due to "religious and political considerations", the separate existence of Lebanon was necessary for the time being.^[21] From 1945 on, the party adopted a more nuanced stance regarding Arab nationalism, seeing Syrian unity as a potential first step towards an Arab union led by Syria.^[21]

Scholarly criticism

Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi gives a somewhat contrasting interpretation, pointing to the position of the Greek Orthodox community as a large minority in both Syria and Lebanon for whom "the concept of pan-Syrianism was more meaningful than the concept of Arabism" while at the same time they resented Maronite dominance in Lebanon. According to Salibi,

Saadeh found a ready following among his co-religionists. His idea of secular pan-Syrianism also proved attractive to many Druzes and Shiites; to Christians other than the Greek Orthodox, including some Maronites who were disaffected by both Lebanism and Arabism; and also to many Sunnite Muslims who set a high value on secularism, and who felt that they had far more in common with their fellow Syrians of whatever religion or denomination than with fellow Sunnite or Muslim Arabs elsewhere. Here again, an idea of nationalism had emerged which had sufficient credit to make it valid. In the Lebanese context, however, it became ready cover for something more archaic, which was essentially Greek Orthodox particularism.^[32]

Prof. Salibi remarks on the beginnings of Saadeh's party in the 1930s: "[A]mong its first members were students and young graduates of the American University of Beirut." This early party was "mainly Greek Orthodox and Protestants with some Shi'ites and Druzes... ." In Lebanon as a whole the party was not popular. "Christians were generally opposed to their Syrian unionism, while Moslems were suspicious of their reservations with regard to pan-Arabism. [T]he Lebanese authorities were able to suppress them without difficulty."^[33]

According to historian Stanley G. Payne, the Arab nationalism was influenced by European fascism, with the creation of at least seven Arab nationalist shirt movements similar to the brown shirt movement by 1939, with the most influenced ones being the SSNP, the Iraqi Futawa youth movement and the Young Egypt movement.^[34] These three movements would share characteristics like being territorially expansionist, with the SSNP wanting the complete control of Syria, belief in the superiority of their own people (with Saadeh theorizing a "distinct and naturally superior" Syrian race), being "nonrationalist, anti-intellectual, and highly emotional" and "[emphasizing] military virtues and power [and stressing] self-sacrifice".^[34] Also according to Payne, all these movements received strong influence from European fascism and praised the Italian and German fascism but "[they never became] fully developed fascist movements, and none reproduced the full characteristics of European fascism"; the influence in Arab nationalism remained long after 1945.^[34] Also, Saadeh's superior race was not a pure one, but a fusion of all races in Syrian history.^[34] The SSNP would be "[a] elite group, with little structure for mobilization".^[34]

Notable SSNP politicians

In Lebanon

• Dr. Antoine Abu Haidar
• Dr. Milad el Sibaaly
• Assaad Hardan
• Salim Saade
• Gebran Areiji
• Ghassan Ashqar
• Mahmoud Abdel Khalek
• Mahmoud Al Hassan
• Georges Bourgi
• Ali Qanso
• Assad Ashqar
• Abdallah Saadeh
• Inaam Raad

In Syria

• Joseph Sweid
• Bushra Massouh
• Issam Bagdi

See also

• Politics of Lebanon
• Greater Syria
• Antun Saadeh
• French colonialism
• Sykes-Picot Agreement
• Greater Lebanon

Footnotes

References

• Charif, Maher, Rihanat al-nahda fi'l-fikr al-'arabi, Damascus, Dar al-Mada, 2000
• Hourani, Albert, La Pensée Arabe et l'Occident (French translation of Arab Thought in the Liberal Age)
• Irwin, Robert, "An Arab Surrealist". The Nation, January 3, 2005, 23–24, 37–38. There is an online version, but only the first two paragraphs are shown to non-subscribers.
• Salibi, K. S., The Modern History of Lebanon (New York: Praeger 1965)
• Salibi, Kamal, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, University of California, Berkeley, 1988; reprint: London, I.B. Tauris, 1998 ISBN 1-86064-912-2
• Seale, Patrick, Asad: the Struggle for the Middle East, Berkely, University of California Press, 1988 ISBN 0-520-06976-5
• Information on Lebanese parties, from Lebanese nationalist-leaning website www.cedarland.org

External links

• SSNP website (in Arabic)
• SSNP School
• Tahawolat Magazine Articles about society and culture
• Terrorist attacks attributed to the SSNP