Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 2 (Summer 2000)

 

Authoritarianism in Syria: Institutions and Social Conflict 1946-1970
By Steven Heydemann. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Dirk Vandewalle

 

To anyone teaching the politics of the Middle East, this book comes as an extremely welcome addition to a somewhat sparse covering of Syria in academic writing. Except for Volker Perthes's 1995 excellent book that covers the political economy of Syria under the Assad regime, few works exist that not only provide a good overview of internal political and economic developments inside the country, but as well a more abstract, interpretive framework that illuminates continuities and discontinuities across time. Heydemann attempts to explain these continuities and discontinuities in part by a "neo-institutional emphasis" that nevertheless accounts for "the fluid quality of institutions . . . [and their effects] on the strategic choice of actors" (p. 9). In so doing, the author casts his lot with a number of recent works in Middle Eastern studies that have attempted similar interpretations.

The outcome is a tightly reasoned work that across eight chapters clearly delineates the contradictions that make him question the customary description of Syria as a country run by a succession of populist authoritarian regimes. Going beyond those more customary explanations of repression, sectarianism, or simplified political economic approaches as the modus operandi of Syrian political life, the author's careful investigations and conclusion lead him to focus on "changes in the organization of social conflict during . . . phases of Syrian state formation" as the basis for explaining the country's political life (p. 8). The argument is tightly reasoned and pursuasive; the theoretical framework is marvelously conceptualized and executed. Along the way, the book provides, among many other insights, a highly insightful interpretation of the rise of the Ba'th party and its consolidation of populist authoritarianism between 1963 and 1970, which despite its relative parsimony, provides a persuasive account that stands in contrast to earlier explanations.

One limiting factor to the book's usefulness for the more general audiencelies in the fact that Heydemann's inquiry only covers the 1946-1970 period in detail. Syria's political economy since then has witnessed major new developments, including an economic crisis in the 1980s and an attempted recovery, which forced the Hafiz al-Asad regime to recombine and reshape the complex network of patronage, interests, and institutional arrangements that emerged in the earlier period.

The somewhat perfunctory attempt to address these changes in the final chapter and to encapsulate almost thirty years of political and economic development in a few pages, while attempting to accentuate similarities with the earlier three decades the book covers, is somewhat unsatisfactory. While this reviewer would agree with the author that in today's Syria "[I]nterest groups and associations remain embedded within top-down, corporatist institutional frameworks" (p. 206), the refashioning of those groups and associations, and the regime's "flexibility and adaptability" as a new private sector emerged, have been dramatic and novel enough to warrant a fuller treatment than that provided here.

Despite this caveat, Heydemann's book is a first-rate contribution about the 1946-1970 period against which subsequent works will need to be measured. His analysis of how political continuity proceeded across a number of decades that witnessed often severe challenges to the country's leadership goes far beyond the unidimensional caricatures of brutal suppression that often mark less sophisticated studies of Syria. The author's mixture of theoretical inquiry and carefully gathered data from an array of resources makes it an example of the kind of second-generation studies on the Middle East that prove not only informative but, more importantly, also deliver new and significant insights based on careful abstraction from gathered data. In combination with the Perthes book, this volume on the earlier period of Syrian political and economic development is indispensible reading for any professional, whether academic or not, who deals with matters Syrian.

Dirk Vandewalle
Dartmouth College