Syria has been headline news since March 2011, yet, because it has not been readily accessible for half a century and is therefore poorly understood, it is still a mysterious and enthralling country. Although much has been written about Syria, its centres of power and decision-making processes remain opaque to foreign observers. Is Syria run by the military or civilians? Is it a republican or a hereditary regime? Are its politics right- or left-wing? Is it really a minority regime? Is it supported by the majority? There are no easy answers to any of these questions.

Syria’s remote and recent history has been described in the most eloquent of terms. Ancient Syria is often described as the crucible of civilizations, the cradle of religions, the crossroads of three continents. Ancient Syria’s contribution to the advancement of humankind is immense and includes the invention of both the alphabet and algebra. Syria has had a glorious history since ancient times. It saw the first city states and the first empires. Syria has been Hittite, Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, and Ottoman. Omeyyad Syria stretched all the way to Andalusia. Saladin’s Syria fought the Crusaders and liberated Jerusalem and Palestine. Baibars’ Ayyubid Syria became Mamluk, then Ottoman, and then the modern Syria that Egyptian President Nasser, in his customary flights of oratory, called its capital, Damascus, ‘the pounding heart of Arabism’.

The term Syria has always been geographically indeterminate from the time of Ancient Syria until the time of Levantine Syria encompassing present-day Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Syria, and certain Turkish territories. Ever since the Arab provinces were wrested from the Ottoman Empire in 1918, many have expounded their views about what Syria should or should not be as a political entity. These are sore points that leave no one indifferent in the Near East, where most of the borders are contested. This is not the place for value judgments about diverging opinions as to the geographical extent of Syria. What is important about modern Syria is not its spatial extent. What sets it apart from the region’s other political entities is not its geographical size but the very idea of Syria: a generous and embracing idea in a region often characterized by sectarianism and exclusion; an idea that rallies and integrates without assimilating, in a region that is split and tending to disintegrate.

Syrians themselves know little about their own constitutions.Footnote ¹ Precious little has been written about them. Even the rare specialists and academics seem to have given up on constitutional law. Sadly, even the constitutional law textbook recently used to teach at Damascus University devotes just 30 of its 721 pages to Syria’s constitutions. The previous textbook had just 56 out of 603 pages on Syrian constitutions.Footnote ² Regrettably, then, a part of the country’s rich history is deliberately blacked out, condemned to oblivion, and concealed.

This book has been written in part to try to fill this gap. It is a combined study of Syria’s constitutions and the political regimes they underpinned. It encompasses the history and analysis of the political regimes, their constitutions, electoral laws, and laws on political parties. The task is a complex one. Not so much because of any intrinsic difficulty in the subject matter but because of the profusion of constitutional texts. I examine twenty-five constitutional texts drafted in less than a century. They include seven permanent constitutions (1920, 1928, 1950, 1953, 1962, 1973, 2012), five provisional constitutions (1949, 1961, 1964, 1969, 1971), three pan-Arab constitutions (1958, 1963, 1971), three constitutional arrangements (1949, 1951, 1966), and seven draft constitutions (1949, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2016 (2), 2017). This multitude of constitutional texts reflects the country’s intense political history.

Few of these texts had been translated so most of the research has been done using Arabic sources. For want of textbooks on Syrian constitutional law or comparative studies of Syrian constitutions, my research into the historical circumstances peculiar to each of the constitutions was based on manuscripts in Arabic by the actors of the time. Some periods were better covered than others. I also took advantage of my stays in Damascus to interview prime witnesses and actors in Syrian political life over the last fifty years.

Understanding constitutional texts requires knowledge of their causes, origins, and purposes. Each of the texts relates to a particular political regime that ruled the country. Those regimes were as different as can be (monarchic and republican, liberal and authoritarian, right- and left-wing, military and civilian, unionist and sovereignist). Yet despite this diversity, all Syrian regimes for close to a hundred years shared the same values in the shape of a national project outlined by the Founding Fathers of modern Syria in a crucial but often overlooked document, the Damascus Programme, given by the Syrian congress to the King–Crane commission, which was despatched by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 on behalf of the Peace Conference to enquire into the wishes of the Eastern populations previously part of the Ottoman empire.

The Syrian congress claimed to represent the aspirations of the ‘Syrian’ population in the former Ottoman provinces that included not just present-day Syria but also Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, and certain Turkish territories. All the successive political regimes, all the constitutions, and virtually all the draft constitutions were fully in keeping with this spirit and in one way or another took up the main points of the national project. These points can be summarized as the coexistence of all the component parts of Syrian society in the form of a Syrian secularism, the refusal of the partitioning of Syrian geographical space, the refusal of any foreign hegemony, and the dismissal of Zionist ambitions for Palestine. All Syrian national and regional policies were developed within this general framework with variations on the theme depending on the period and circumstances. Two further consensus-based items were subsequently added to these four initial points of the Syrian national project, namely social justice and then individual and collective liberties.

The original points developed in the Damascus Programme shaped the values and principles to which generations of Syrians to come were attached. These themes are the unchanging component underpinning all the political contingencies and all the regimes and their legitimizing constitutional texts. The permanence of these themes reflects the fact that, wittingly or not, Syrians have the impression that the national project remains unfinished to this day, preventing the foundation of a full-fledged modern state and focusing Syrians’ attention on the container instead of its contents. It has weakened all rulers and promoted forms of power that are antagonistic by nature to the concepts of state and citizenship and not dissimilar to what Ibn Khaldun described in the fourteenth century.

Syria’s constitutions and political regimes should first be examined in the context of the Syrian Question and the Founding Fathers’ national project because the first constitutions were drafted to address them and not to regulate the executive and legislative branches of power. The earliest reference to any intention to create a constitutional form of power dates from 5 October 1918, just two days after Emir Faysal’s triumphal entry into Damascus following the departure of Ottoman troops. On that day, Faysal declared in the name of his father, Sharif Hussein, that he was establishing an independent constitutional government for all Syrian territories, which would respect the rights of minorities. Faysal added that the government would abide by the principles of justice and equality and would treat all Arabs the same regardless of their religion or sectarian origin and would not discriminate in law between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It was a remarkable declaration in many respects, for from the outset Faysal declared his intention to create a non-despotic, non-religious, civil constitutional state that would promote multi-sectarian coexistence.

This declaration was taken up and developed in the Damascus Programme prepared by the Syrian congress in July 1919 and given to the King–Crane commission, which was officially mandated by the Peace Conference but in fact comprised exclusively US delegates despatched by President Wilson. It was for the Peace Conference again that, after declaring Syria’s independence and proclaiming Faysal King of Syria, the Syrian congress drafted the 1920 monarchical constitution. The point of the exercise was not to regulate power between the executive (king, government) and the legislature but to force the hand of the Peace Conference and present it with a fait accompli – the independence of Syria, the proclamation of a king, and the adoption of a modern secular constitution.

The manoeuvre was miscalculated and failed tragically. The Syrian nationalists were irredentist and unrealistic; colonial France was intransigent and blind. The outcome was pitiful. Syrian nationalism and French colonial tutelage in the form of a mandate were to be at loggerheads for a quarter of a century. Against this background the second – republican and not monarchic – Syrian constitution was drafted in 1928. Republican France could not spawn a monarchy. Again the purpose of the constitution was not to balance executive and legislative powers. For Syrians its purpose was to express their refusal to the carving up of their country and their rejection of the French mandate. Under the mandate charter granted by the League of Nations in 1922, France had to bestow on Syria an organic law (constitution) in agreement with the population within three years, that is by 1925. The policy by which France sliced up Syrian geography (into the State of Damascus, State of Aleppo, Greater Lebanon, the Alawite State, and Druze Territory) and then reshaped it (Syrian Federation in 1922, State of Syria in 1925) and the Great Revolt of 1925 had strained relations between French representatives and the Syrian population. This constant strain had prevented any constitution being written and adopted within the time frame set by the international organization. It was not until 1930 that the 1928 constitution, revised and corrected by the high commissioner, was submitted to the League of Nations.

The 1928 constitution was an instrument in the fight against the French mandate. The institutions it created (parliament, government, presidency) led the struggle for independence and the reunification of the Syrian territories. In this, the 1928 constitution kept all its promises. It was after independence that its shortcomings began to show. The flaws lay not so much in the actual text of the constitution and its mechanisms, but rather in the lack of vision of the political class, which was incapable of identifying the challenges and setting the priorities for national action. The political class gave the disastrous impression that it was just looking after itself and its privileges and disregarding the most pressing social needs of a young and largely rural population.

Against this backdrop, the army decided to overthrow the regime and seize power in March 1949. This frightful year for Syria saw three coups d’état by the armed forces. The military had entered the political arena, where it has remained, save for the period between 1954 and 1956 when it was confined to barracks and left power to the civilian authorities.

When civilian rule was restored with the second coup d’état in August 1949, the political class called almost unanimously for a new constitution. A constituent assembly was elected and bestowed a provisional constitution on Syria that took up the provisions of the previous constitution on constituted powers. Then a second republican constitution was adopted in 1950 and remained in force until 1962, with two interruptions. The first of these was between 1951 and 1954 further to the coup d’état by Colonel Shishakli setting up a military republic and then a presidential regime. The second interruption was from 1958 to 1961 during the union between Syria and Egypt that gave rise to the United Arab Republic. The end of the union brought a return to the main provisions of the 1950 constitution in the form of a provisional constitution, before a new constitution was adopted in particularly testing circumstances in September 1962.

The 1950 constitution remains the only Syrian constitution that actually sought primarily to regulate and limit the exercise of power beginning with executive power. The intention was laudable but the context hardly conducive. The country had just experienced three coups d’état in less than a year and the army, like the constituent assembly, overtly claimed to represent the will of the people. Under the circumstances, it was probably unwise to weaken the executive, which ought instead to have been strengthened so that it could fully assume its role and resist the demands of the military. This was not the way the constituent assembly chose to go in 1950. This was an error of judgment, yet, even so, this constitution still has its supporters who call for it to be re-enacted.

The 1950 constitution should be credited with attempting to put social issues and especially the agrarian question at the heart of the Syrian political system. But the governments of the time made no effort to implement the generous social provisions in the constitutional programme, thereby giving the impression that no social advance, no meaningful reform could be made without a violent shift in the established political and social order, in other words, without regime change. The insensitivity of the traditional political class to the social question led in 1962 to the fall of the last liberal assembly that had been democratically elected in 1961. Instead of amending the ‘socialist’ laws (agrarian reform, nationalizations) enacted during the union with Egypt, it purely and simply rescinded them. The 1962 constitution was adopted in these highly dramatic circumstances. It took up virtually all of the provisions of the previous constitution. Its article 59, however, granted the president the power to govern by decree, whereas the 1950 version of that same article had formally prohibited this. It was a derisory constitutional disguise for a political reality that completely escaped the civilian authorities despite the full powers granted to the executive. Independent, Ba’thist, and Nasserist officers met with no resistance to their coup d’état on 8 March 1963.

The coming to power of the Ba’th turned the page in the history of a liberal, pluralistic, and parliamentary Syria and ushered in an era of authoritarian, presidential, monolithic regimes of the popular democracy type found in eastern Europe in Cold War times. The notorious exceptions to the previous liberal period were the brief interlude of General Husni Al-Zaim in 1949 and the regime established by Colonel Shishakli between 1951 and 1954, the forerunner of all Arab military regimes and especially those of Nasser in Egypt and Qassem in Iraq. Regime change in Syria was naturally mirrored in the constitutional texts, all of which became authoritarian. The first period of Ba’th rule was that of a supposedly collegiate leadership among comrades. This did not preclude a relentless struggle for power among the various clans, each with its ramifications within the party and the army.

It was not a foregone conclusion that the Ba’th would engage in constitutional window dressing. The Ba’th was a left-wing reformist type of political movement and the proponent of liberal, parliamentary, representative democracy. Its party constitution, its ideology, and its parliamentary history attested to this. It was mostly the Syrian Communist Party renegades who joined the Ba’th when it came to power who gave it a Marxist-leaning ideological line legitimizing an authoritarian regime. This ideological turn-around came at the Sixth National Congress in October 1963 and was reflected in a ‘A Few Theoretical Foundations’, the publication that heralded the constitutional window dressing to come.

The first two constitutional texts under the Ba’th – the 1964 provisional constitution and the constitutional arrangement of February 1966 after the neo-Ba’th came to power – both reflected the collegiate aspect of their rule. The 1969 provisional constitution was to maintain that collegiality. Although never really applied, that constitution was still the parent of all the ensuing Ba’thist constitutions. The next two, the 1971 provisional constitution and the 1973 constitution were tailor-made for Hafez Assad. The first restored the office of president of the republic instead of the 1969 provisional constitution’s head of state. This was a harbinger of the personalization of the regime reflected in the next constitution, which bestowed the widest-ranging powers any Syrian president had ever enjoyed. This constitution brought stability not so much because of the strength of the institutions it put in place or the mechanisms governing relations among them but because of the strength of the regime. That stability was based on the army, the intelligence services, the party, and a bold but cautious regional policy. Moreover, Hafez Assad’s regime developed and maintained a broad social base through an informal social compact.

Some of the crucial factors behind that earlier stability vanished under Bashar Assad. On coming to power, the young president announced his intention to make reforms, but the leadership had no ideological foundation for doing so. All the partial reforms initiated (regarding the economy, public sector, and administration) were ultimately attempts to modernize what had become an obsolete system. A return to the ideas of the Founding Fathers of the Ba’th before 1963 could have provided an ideological basis and a general framework for change. That ideological basis could have combined economic and political reforms. An opening up of the economy to the private sector should have been accompanied by an opening up of politics to the opposition. The opportunity for such change came – and went – with the Ba’th Tenth Congress of 2005 at which the party adopted the principle of a ‘social market economy’ but with no political outreach and it clung to its comfortable role as the party that ran the state and society under the terms of the 1973 constitution. That constitution had enshrined the Ba’th trilogy (Union–Freedom–Socialism) and had integrated it into the constitutional text. What had initially been simply a partisan slogan acquired constitutional standing. The Ba’th trilogy was variously interpreted before and during Ba’th rule. Each of these interpretations reflected the orientations of the time. The latest interpretation was that of the Ba’th Tenth Congress, which modified the concept of ‘socialism’ without changing the idea of ‘freedom’, which remained confined to an outmoded meaning of the popular democracy type.

This failing was to have tragic consequences when crisis broke out in March 2011. The regime was distraught and ideologically disarmed when confronted with legitimate demands for political reform. Intellectually, the authorities were not ready for dialogue, concessions, or compromise. It would have meant discarding the dogma in which it had been steeped since 1963. Accordingly, laws inspired in principle by liberal thinking – on peaceful protest, political parties, the press, and a new electoral law – were rushed through with virtually no discussion. But those laws proved highly restrictive, and the changes made since the outset of the crisis amounted to continuity.

In February 2012 a new constitution introduced a multi-party regime and the election of the president by universal suffrage. It also introduced a control over the constitutionality of law by enabling citizens to file objections, the starting point of constitutionalism. However, it failed to meet the expectations of those hoping for an emancipated parliament and a shift in the balance of power between executive and legislature. Despite some irrefutable advances, it is likely that this will be no more than a transitional constitution which, when the time comes, will be superseded by another constitutional text to end the crisis.

Describing Syrian constitutions and political regimes chronologically is only a first step towards understanding them. They still have to be classified, analysed, and their internal architecture examined. The classification used here is inspired by the traditional ordering of political regimes in France: the monarchy followed by a chronological ordering of republican regimes. Such a classification proved feasible as Syria experienced a monarchical constitution followed by several republican constitutions. I have therefore called the 1920 constitution and the Faysal period from his entering Damascus in 1918 the Syrian Monarchy (Chapter 2); the 1928 constitution and the regime it established the First Republic (Chapter 3); and the 1950 constitution and its regime the Second Republic (Chapter 4). I have included the 1962 constitution in the Second Republic because it is virtually a copy of the 1950 constitution. I have called the 1953 constitution and its presidential-style regime the Third Republic (Chapter 5); the Ba’th constitutions (1964, 1969, 1971, and 1973) and their regimes the Fourth Republic (Chapter 6). I have inserted a separate chapter on the pan-Arab constitutions to which Syria adhered (Chapter 7). I have termed the 2012 constitution and the present-day regime in Syria the Fifth Republic (Chapter 8). I have ended by analysing the dynamics for the establishment of the Sixth Republic (Chapter 9).

The structure of the book reflects the history of Syrian political regimes, namely liberal parliamentary regimes and authoritarian presidential regimes. There is obviously no necessity for a presidential-style regime to be authoritarian, but that is how things have been in Syria. I therefore address the parliamentary constitutions and liberal regimes in Part I. This includes the Syrian Monarchy and the First and Second Republics. I cover the presidential-style constitutions and authoritarian regimes in Part II. This includes the Third and Fourth Republics, a brief chapter on the pan-Arab constitutions, then the Fifth Republic and the march towards the Sixth Republic. To introduce the subject, I have thought it necessary to begin with a first chapter on the Syrian Question since the early nineteenth century by including it in the context of the Eastern Question more generally.

The events that have shaken Syria since March 2011 are evoked in Chapters 8 and 9 and in the conclusion. I deplore the loss of human lives in both camps, just as I deplore the militarization of the crisis by the protagonists. It is true that the Syrian political system was sclerotic, obsolete, authoritarian, and required far-reaching reforms. But did that justify a civil war that may well, albeit inadvertently, bring an end to the national project of the Founding Fathers? What Syria needed was not a war but a gradual, well-thought-out process of political development that could preserve its national unity and the idea of Syria. Unless, of course, the hidden agenda in the war is to put an end to the national project of the Founding Fathers and perhaps to the very existence of a Syria that has often proved rebellious. A Near East without Syria would be a terrible step backwards for everyone without exception. Despite its imperfections, the Syrian model has proved to be a stabilizing force, protective of minorities, and an antidote to the region’s disintegration. A regional order without Syria would give free rein to primal instincts and sectarian exclusions. In this sense, Syria remains more than ever an ideal to be attained and a forward-looking idea.