Syrian Social Nationalist Party

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) (الحزب السوري القومي الاجتماعي, transliterated: Al-Ḥizb Al-Sūrī Al-Qawmī Al-'Ijtimā'ī, often referred to in French as Parti populaire syrien or Parti social nationaliste syrien), is a left-wing secular-nationalist political party operating in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine. It advocates the establishment of a Syrian nation state spanning the Fertile Crescent, including present day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Sinai, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran, based on geographical boundaries and the common history people within the boundaries share. With over 100,000 members, it is the second largest legal political group in Syria after the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, In Lebanon, it has been a major secular and highly organised elite party in the political history of the country for over 80 years. Until recent times it was a key group in the March 8 Alliance.

Founded in Beirut in 1932 as an anticolonial and national liberation organization hostile to French colonialism, the party played a significant role in Lebanese politics and was involved in attempted coup d'etats in 1949 and 1961 following which it was thoroughly repressed. It was active in resistance against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000 while continuously supporting the Syrian presence in Lebanon out of belief in national unity across the 'Greater Natural Historical Syria'. 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. From 2012 to 6 May 2014, the party was part of the Popular Front for Change and Liberation.

The Early Syrian Nationalists
Prior to its foundation, the doctrine of the SSNP, namely Syrian nationalism, had been developing since the mid-19th century, with the advent of the Tanzimat during the late Ottoman Era, through which, the Ottoman Empire sought to rescue its failing status on the international scene by attempting to transform itself from imperial dominion to national constitutional monarchy, under which subjects would become citizens bestowed upon personal freedoms that are characteristic of the general mood of the 19th century, and which reflect the ideological transfer that existed between 19th century Europe and the Ottoman East, particularly personal freedoms such as religious freedom and secularism. In the 19th century, profound economic changes had struck the Arab world, mostly relegating it to a periphery of an increasingly industrialized and assertive Europe. These changes put the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II, and the Ottoman ruling elite under great pressure to modernize the increasingly declining Ottoman Empire, as with these economic and social changes, intellectual and ideological influences generated from Europe and from the legacy of the French Revolution started permeating into the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

It is within this context that a new group of thinkers of the Arabic Literary Renaissance, the Nahda flourished. They addressed key social issues such as the role of nationalism and religion in society, often providing a critical account of the present order of things. Among these thinkers figured Butrus al-Bustani, one of the first to assert the existence of a nation, Natural Syria, that is Arab in essence yet distinct by history and geography, and that should nevertheless materialize under a reformed Ottoman Empire.

Another historian and thinker of his time, Henri Lammens, the Belgian Jesuit scholar who was ordained priest in Beirut in 1893. It was not long before Lammens became acquainted with the intellectual upheavals that were taking place in the Arab provinces of the Empire after the Tanzimat, whereas conservative elements of the Ottoman Empire were wrestling against Arab and Turkish thinkers who would soon usher a new era in the history of the Levant - the Young Turks and the Second Constitutional Era. During this time, Lammens interacted with his milieu and came to endorse the doctrines of al-Bustani, becoming even more passionate about the existence of a distinct Syrian nation that is bound to emerge from the bosom of the Ottoman Empire. According to Henri Lammens, Greater Syria is a national entity bound with geographical characteristics and historical foundations, lying between the Arab peninsula, Egypt and the Levantine corridor, and the Taurus Mountains, encompassing all the cultural elements within the Fertile Crescent since ancient times.

Colonialism, Zionism and Sectarianism
The late 1920s and the early 1930s were also a period of cultural and political effervescence that greatly contributed to the emergence of Syrian nationalism as a distinct ideology. In 1920, the French army toppled the first Arab Kingdom of Syria and the Hashemite King Faisal, who had been proclaimed "King of all-Syria" by the Syrian National Congress at the Battle of Maysalun. The British and the French dissected the region into spheres of influence in what later became known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, setting up colonial administrations throughout the Levant. The Great Syrian Revolt was brutally repressed in 1925 while a small clique of traditional landowners and notables coalesced around the newly founded administration of the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. Greater Lebanon was established on the ruins of the Mutasarrifiyya of Mount Lebanon with arbitrarily drawn borders and with a state structure largely dominated by the Christian Maronites, a community whose elite were historically well-disposed to the French, and who would ensure the French colonial empire a strong foothold in the Arab World. Jewish immigration to Palestine was increasing at an alarming speed, bringing to the shores of Palestine Zionist migrants who had little affinity to (Revisionist Zionism) or similarities with (Marxist and Labor Zionism) the local populace, be it the Palestinian Arabs or the traditional local Jewish communities. Class tensions sharpened as some Palestinian landowners sold their lands to the Jewish National Fund, with little regard to the national aspirations and plight of the peasantry. As the Balfour Declaration became public, fears in the Levant of the parceling out of the region along Colonial borders implied in the minds of many the need for concerted action throughout the Levant that would transcend traditional sectarian divides. Similarly, Communism, perceived by many as an alien ideology that did not resonate much with the socioeconomic conditions of the early 20th century Levant, was looked upon with suspicion, particularly since many Zionist migrants settling in Palestine were coming from the Soviet Union.

Many Syrian and Lebanese youth saw these events as omens of an ill future in which the Levant, which had until then been a single economic and social entity within the Ottoman Empire referred to as Bilad al-Sham, would be dismembered along religious, ethnic, and class lines. As the traditional elite stirred away from the people and slowly sought the good offices of the French High Commissioner, and given the repression with which the French Mandate was applied, Secret societies flourished in the late 1920s. Similarly, many begin to see the devastating effect that sectarianism was bringing upon the people of the region, be it pro-Christian Separatism in Lebanon or the radicalism of Islamist elements in Syria, which pitted each faction against the other and benefited no other than the colonial administration, and began to condemn the mixing of religion with politics. The path was hence laid down for the emergence of a political ideology that would simultaneously fight against the dismemberment of the region, Zionism, and Colonialism, through Anti-colonialism, Liberation War, and National Revival, while keeping communism in check. It also represented a clear departure from the Arab nationalist current that advocated the unification of the entirety of the Arab World, and which had implicit Islamic nationalist undertones. This ideology was to be that of a Romanticized Secular Greater Syria based upon the natural geographical boundaries that defined the region loosely dubbed as the Fertile Crescent, an ideology that Antun Saadeh would come to assert with the foundation of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, where it found its full expression.

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.

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. 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.

Since its founding, 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. 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. 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. On his way to Argentina, he visited Italy and Berlin, which increased the suspicions of the French that the SSNP might have been entertaining relations with the Axis. Coming back shortly to Lebanon in 1939, he was questioned by the French authorities who accused him of plotting with the Germans. The charge was dropped when no evidence of collaboration had been found and after that Saadeh declared that even the French rule to which he was vehemently opposed would be better than German or Italian rule. Having afterwards left for Argentina, Saadeh found out that the Argentinian branch of the SSNP newspaper had been voicing its outright support for Nazi Germany and to the Axis powers, which led Saadeh to issue a lengthy letter to the editor-in-chef, restating that the SSNP is not a National Socialist party and that no stance should be taken vis-à-vis the Allies or the Axis. By that time, the SSNP had grown exponentially and had clashed on many occasions with its primary ideological rival, the Kataeb Party, a Spanish Fascist-Inspired party that had been founded by Pierre Gemayel, a pharmacist and athlete after his return from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Being vehemently anti-communist in its early days, a position that would later change, it had also clashed with the Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, the latter accusing the SSNP of Nazi sympathies.

While the Kataeb 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, and had espoused a strong bond between the nation and the church as well as outright social ultraconservatism, the SSNP rejected these national claim on the basis that the borders outlining the newly created states were fictitious, 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 away from all sectarianism 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 1948 Palestinian exodus (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 8, 1949. It was the shortest and most secretive trial given to a political offender.

The SSNP in Lebanon


After Saadeh was executed and its high-ranking leaders were arrested, the party remained underground until 1958 when it sided with then-president Camille Chamoun against the Arab nationalist rebels.

The party launched an abortive coup attempt in 1961, under the semi-authoritarian rule of General Fouad Chehab. This resulted in a renewed proscription and the imprisonment of many of its leaders. In prison, some of the SSNP militants came under the influence of Marxism with the left-wing Al Taware faction splitting off in the 1970s, a split that would remain until the end of the Lebanese Civil War.

With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, the SSNP formed a militia that allied with the leftist Lebanese National Movement (LNM), against the Phalangists and their allies of the Lebanese Front. The SSNP saw the Lebanese Civil War as the inevitable result of the divisions of the Syrian nation into small states and away from a liberation war against Israel. After the defeat of leftist forces in the 1982 Lebanon War, the SSNP joined a number of the leftist organizations who regrouped to resist the Israeli occupation, including the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a Wimpy Cafe in west Beirut by party member Khalid Alwan. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation blames the SSNP for the assassination, in 1982, of Bachir Gemayel, Lebanon's newly elected president supported by the Israelis besieging Beirut. In 1983 the party joined the Lebanese National Salvation Front. In 1985, a member of the party, Sana'a Mehaidli, detonated a car bomb next to an Israeli military convoy at Jezzin, South Lebanon. She killed two Israeli soldiers and become one of the first known female suicide bombers.

The SSNP participated in a number of general elections in Lebanon, winning six seats in 1992, although seeing a decline in subsequent elections winning two seats in both 2005 and 2009. The SSNP were involved in the 2008 conflict in Lebanon, with gunmen attacking an SSNP office.

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 Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, the other main ideological parties of the period. In April 1955 Colonel Adnan al-Malki, a Ba'athist officer who was a very popular figure in the Syrian army, was assassinated by a party member. This provided the Communists and Ba'athists 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 Ba'ath-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 Ba'ath Party, with perhaps 100,000 members.

In the 22 April 2007 election for the People's Council of Syria, the party gained 3 out of 250 in the parliament.

Notable SSNP politicians in Syria

 * Issam Al Mahayri
 * Joseph Sweid
 * Bushra Massouh
 * Issam Bagdi

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, Israel, 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. 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 peoples, 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 this development pattern is exemplary to the Syrians and they 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 of these "decadent" forces through the reinforcing of national solidarity, resistance against colonialism, and adoption of secularism. Saadeh's concept of the nation shaped mainly by historical concrete interactions amongst people over the centuries in a given geography, rather than being based on ethnic origins, race, language or religion. This 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.

Emblem and flag
The party's emblem is the whirlwind (in Arabic Zawba'a زوبعة). It was designed by the SSNP students at the 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 Islamic crescent and the Christian cross. The party flag features a red hurricane, called the "Zawba'a", within a white disc on a black background. Each arm symbolizes one of the four virtues of the party's mission: freedom, duty, discipline and power. 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.

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. Such resemblances went against the idea that it was an authentic national ideology and couldn't be acknowledged by the party. 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):

The system of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is not a Hitlerite or a Fascist system, but that it is purely a Syrian system which does not stand on unprofitable imitation, but on basic originality which is one of the characteristics of our people.

According to Reeva S. Johnson, Saadeh, the party's 'leader for life', was an admirer of Adolf Hitler influenced by Nazi and fascist ideology. 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.

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. The party also accepted that due to "religious and political considerations", the separate existence of Lebanon was necessary for the time being. 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.

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."

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. The Lebanese authorities were able to suppress them without difficulty."

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. 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". 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. Also, Saadeh's superior race was not a pure one, but a fusion of all races in Syrian history. The SSNP would be "[a] elite group, with little structure for mobilization".