Arab socialism

Arab socialism (Arabic: الإشتِراكيّة العربية, romanized: Al-Ishtirākīya Al-'Arabīya) is a political ideology based on the combination of pan-Arabism or Arab nationalism and socialism. The term Arab socialism was coined by Michel Aflaq, the principal founder of Ba'athism and the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in Syria, to distinguish his version of socialist ideology from the international socialist movement. While distinct from the much broader tradition of socialist thought in the Arab world, which predates Arab socialism by as much as fifty years, direct influence and evolutions of his thought, Marxist or otherwise, were realized and expanded upon in countries like Syria, Egypt, Iraq and others. A main innovation of Aflaq's thought was the transformation of Arab unity from an intellectual ideal into a real-world political pursuit of rights alongside a new set of socioeconomic conditions. Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in particular served as a potent vehicle for Aflaq's thought, and would have to grapple with crises in the intellectual and military spheres.

Niqula Haddad, the brother-in-law of Farah Antun, was a Syrian writer from an Orthodox Christian family who arguably wrote the first book on socialism in Arabic, titled al-Ishtirakiyah, in the early twentieth century. Haddad believed in a welfare state where the government would supply employment, medicine, school, and old age pensions. Haddad, along with Antun and Catholic-born Shibli Shumayyil, is credited with influencing the works of Salama Moussa, a well-known Egyptian writer from a Coptic family who wrote about Egyptian nationalism and later founded a short-lived socialist party in Egypt.

The spawning of Arab socialism is thought to be a product of two developments in Aflaq's life: of the intellectual labor spent studying European philosophy in Paris, and his practice in the Arab political sphere. It can be considered monist given that the concept of Arab unity was both the origin and main goal of his project. For Aflaq, to be Arab is to be Islamic, Arabic-speaking and of a shared history. His line of thinking is best understood not as a linear evolution over time, but as a set of ideas all interlinked by what he called the "Arab Mission". The three main branches of the Arab Mission include "unity", "liberty" and "socialism", all backed by Islam as a spiritual driver and nationalism as a binding force. These branches, while all having significant overlap with each other, can be independently defined: "unity" meant an Arab majority in parliament, "liberty" meant parliamentarism and "socialism" meant national development. Liberty's allowances were twofold: it would prevent the splintering of the state and allow for proper combat against the enemies of the project (Imperialism, Zionism and Western colonization). After all, the goal of the Arab liberation struggle was to fight imperialism, oppose the ruling classes and fight for social justice. Tying "unity" to "liberty" was nationalism, which he defined as, "love before anything else". More concretely, he believed the nation ought to have the same kind of ties between citizens as do family members to each other, with nationalism primarily serving as a means to unite in the face of imperial threats. Parliamentary liberty combined with "socialism" served as a pathway to achieving unity. Socialism was to mean equality of opportunity and access to education, with education forming the foundation of practice.

Socialism, while subservient to the Arab unity project and liberty, remained just as important. Aflaq would contend that fighting for Arab liberation and unity was the same as fighting for socialism, believing they were two sides of the same coin. However, only with "intellectual consistency" and a "rejection of corruption" could socialism properly fuse with nationalism. Aflaq further noted that "the social economic question is the issue of prime importance in our life, but it is directly related to the wider issue of nationalism" and "we want socialism to serve our nationalism."

In 1950, Aflaq defined socialism as, "not an aim in itself, but rather a necessary means to guarantee society the highest standard of production with the farthest limit of cooperation and solidarity among the citizens […] Arab society […] needs a social order with deeper foundations, wider horizons, and more forceful realization than moderate British socialism." In 1955 Aflaq defined socialism as "the sharing of the resources of the country by its citizens."

The Ba'ath Party was founded in 1947 as the Arab Ba'ath Party, becoming the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in 1952 upon merging with the Arab Socialist Party. The party constitution of 1947 called for a "just redistribution of wealth", state ownership of public utilities, natural resources, large industry, and transport, state control over foreign and domestic trade, limiting the agricultural holdings of owners to the amount the owner could cultivate, an economy under some sort of state supervision, workers' participation in management and profit sharing, respected inheritance and the rights of private property. Prominent in Ba'athist writings from the 1940s and the 1950s, was the concern of exploitation of one group of citizens by another. The party forbade exploitation in its constitution in line with its direct confrontation with colonialism. It further called for the abolition of class and class differences in the future envisaged society.

Aflaq's concept of Arab unity would become a reality with the merger of the Syrian and Egyptian regimes from 1958 to 1961, built off the fusion of Nasser's revolutionaries with Aflaq's pan-Arabism. This embracing of authoritarian Nasserism exemplifies a shift within the Ba'athist movement away from liberalism and towards authoritarianism. The causes of this shift, as argued by scholar Rey Matthieu, are intertwined and threefold. First, internal struggles within the Ba'athist party coinciding with the Arab defeat in the Six-Day-War and subsequent Naksa revitalized the issue of defense in the minds of Arab nationalists. Furthermore, the super-powered tension between the Cold War blocs served to unify the fragmented Arab political landscape under a policy of neutrality. And in the Arab world, the political head of the concept of neutrality was Nasser. (In 1947 the Ba'athists had not yet chosen a side: the US funded Israel and Turkey, while the Soviets were atheist).

The socialism envisaged in the party's constitution of 1947 and in later writings up to the establishment of the United Arab Republic, is moderate and shows little, if any, signs of Marxism. The party's 1947 constitution reads, "socialism is a necessity which emanates from the depths of Arab nationalism […]. Socialism constitutes the ideal social order [for] the Arab people."