5. “The Country Should Unite First”: Pan-Arabism, State and Territory in Syria Under the Baath Rules

Even though Syria was established as an independent state in 1946 within the limits of a “national” territory, the issue of regional border arrangements long continued to be a source of debate and division. This was not intrinsically connected to extant Syrian territorial disputes or ambitions related to neighboring countries, but instead revolved around different ideological views on (pan-Arab) nationalist or regionalist projects including the pan-Arab project advocating for the creation of an Arab polity by merging various Arab national territories; the pan-Syrian nationalist project which suggested dissolving the Near-East Arab states into a nation-state of “Greater Syria”; and the Syrian regionalist project which was based on the idea of a pan-Arab alliance of “regions” (quṭr), i.e., independent Arab states. With the ascent to power of the Baath Party in the 1960s, and particularly after Hafez al-Asad seized power in Syria, the «regionalist» vision became predominant. This chapter aims to show how this notion shaped the structure of Syria’s state apparatus and foreign policy and transformed the Syrian pan-Arab project into that of Syrian «sovereignism», which resulted in policies that sought to counter the expansionism of neighboring countries including Israel, Turkey and Iraq.