The publication of Karim Atassi’s work on Syrian constitutions, which was the subject of a PhD thesis in public law (December 2012) that I had the pleasure of supervising at Grenoble University (France), is a very welcome event. When this research was first undertaken, Syria, long isolated and little known, appeared in many ways to be totally left out of the transformations of the contemporary world. When Karim Atassi completed his work in 2012, Syria was unfortunately headline news, with the uprising against the backdrop of the Arab Spring having changed into a frightful civil war that is emptying the country of its population and threatening its very existence.
Given this context, readers opening this book might think that taking an interest today in the Syrian constitutional question is somewhat anachronistic, not to say derisory. Yet, both for those simply seeking to understand the current Syrian crisis a little better and for specialists and experts trying to come up with a solution to it, Karim Atassi’s book will be a valuable reference work. For this work, far from being a positivistic exegesis of Syrian constitutional texts, deals, through its analysis of them, with the construction of the Syrian state and results in a decoding of the latest events. What the author tells us of is ultimately the failure of constitutionalism in the country despite some considerable endeavours, especially when Hashim Atassi was active. Through both observation of the increasingly intense involvement of the army in the Syrian political system and analysis of the transformations of the Ba’th party, Karim Atassi shows how an authoritarian regime builds itself up and veers away from a constitutionalist project. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the state and the brilliant analysis of it by the late Michel Seurat, he underscores the social dimension of the failure of the various Syrian regimes, liberal and authoritarian alike.
This book has the merit of addressing a subject that is truly novel. No work to date, whether in French, English, or Arabic, has covered all of Syria’s constitutions. In this respect, Karim Atassi’s developments soon take readers beyond any idées reçues that assume somewhat hastily that a country like Syria can do without a constitutional architecture and the complex procedures that it necessarily generates. The author has examined seven permanent and five provisional constitutions, three constitutional arrangements, and four draft constitutions. The bold undertaking shows that even a state in which constitutional power has largely failed can produce a substantial constitutional literature of interest for research.
The author is impressive in his ability to provide readers with keys to interpreting such complexity, because it was not easy to become immersed in so many texts and unravel their storyline. Very methodically, by writing a preliminary chapter on the Syrian question and tying the country’s constitutional inconsistency to the difficulties inherent in its existence, Karim Atassi comes up with an astute means to set the scene for the successive Syrian constitutional documents. He then manages to come up with a complete and finally very understandable synthesis of Syrian constitutional history through a meaningful categorization (liberal and authoritarian constitutions) that avoids a purely chronological account and makes it easier to identify and analyse the various texts. Far from drawing on second-hand sources, the study is based on meticulous and comprehensive spadework involving the original texts. This is what makes it so valuable. Through the excerpts of this constitutional literature that the author systematically puts into context, readers discover the key moments in the construction of the Syrian state, its leading actors, its major challenges, its accomplishments, and its missed opportunities. This journey to the heart of the country’s constitutional writings provides an opportunity to revisit Syrian political history in a particularly thorough and above all novel way.
English translation of the Preface to the 2014 French edition.
