Is Arab socialism dead?

The Arab socialisms, a political family

At the outset, one will note the use of the plural, and this on account of an unequivocal observation: there exists no single Arab socialism, but rather a plurality of distinct models.

Nevertheless, despite their philosophical and national divergences, one cannot deny the profound similarities that unite them.

Firstly, these regimes were almost all characterised by the existence of an authoritarian state apparatus, generally structured around a charismatic leading figure.

Secondly, they adopted heavily dirigiste economies, marked by socialising tendencies, while rejecting numerous fundamental contributions of orthodox Marxism, notably the paradigm of class struggle.

Thirdly, one observes within them a modernising inclination as well as a fairly secular conception of the role of religion vis-à-vis the State.

All of these elements converged toward an imperative deemed supreme, namely that of national emancipation and the unification of an Arab nation conceived as a historical, political and civilisational entity.

At the sources of Arab socialism

It bears specifying that, when one speaks of the Arab socialisms, the matter is not one of socialist doctrines imported into the Arab world (such as Maoism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism or even democratic socialism), although these currents likewise gave rise there to political and trade-union movements that were at times influential.

It is, on the contrary, a matter of socialist theories elaborated within the Arab world itself. When one evokes the Arab socialisms, two names may spontaneously come to mind: Nasser and the Ba'ath party.

This is not fortuitous: both constituted the principal matrices of Arab socialism.

The former constituted the first experience of government embodying, in its tenets, the principles of Arab socialism, while the latter offered its most structured, most systematic and most accomplished formulation on the ideological plane.

Notwithstanding this, Arab socialism cannot be reduced to that single figure or to that single political formation.

One must also mention Gaddafi's Jamahiriya, the National Liberation Front in Algeria — notably under the presidency of Ahmed Ben Bella — as well as, to a certain extent, certain factions of the Socialist Destourian Party in Tunisia, just as the Arab socialist movements in both Yemen and Sudan.

At the sources of Arab socialism: from the Nahda to Lenin

For all that, they are inscribed within a relatively common historical frame of reference, most of them drawing their origins from the Nahda (Arab Renaissance), a period of the late nineteenth century marked by an intense intellectual, linguistic and cultural effervescence in the Arab world, in reaction to the shock of European colonisation.

Language as the first political act

This cultural revolution translated notably into a progressive transformation of the Arabic language with a view to facilitating communication, journalism, as well as scientific and intellectual production.

It led to the emergence of modern literary Arabic (al-fuṣḥā), which progressively imposed itself across the Arab world as the reference language for the press, literature and education.

In a space fragmented by a great dialectal diversity (at times mutually unintelligible), this standardisation constitutes one of the first foundations of a common cultural consciousness.

This linguistic modernisation was likewise accompanied by the importation and translation of European philosophical and political concepts, such as social justice, class struggle, or even constitutionalism. It thus opened the way to new grids for reading the social and political world.

In this context there also emerged several socialist sensibilities, relayed by major journals such as Al-Muqtataf, as well as by intellectual figures such as the Egyptian Salama Moussa, notably through his work al-Ishtirakiyyah (Socialism), published in 1913.

The Soviet irruption

The intrusion of socialist ideas into the Arab world took a new turn from the 1920s onward: the Soviet Union, henceforth a power in search of international influence, exerted a growing influence over several Arab intellectual and political figures.

This influence began notably with the Manifesto to the Muslim Workers of Russia and the East, co-written by Lenin in 1917, which contributed to disseminating a first revolutionary grid of reading in colonised and peripheral spaces, in the wake of the failed Hussein-McMahon correspondence.

It continued with the creation, in Egypt, of the first socialist party in 1921, then the dissemination, the following year, of Lenin's work The State and Revolution. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, this circulation intensified through the translations of Marx's writings as well as of the major founding texts of European socialism.

To this was added the role of an Arab elite, trained or in contact with Europe, which, within the framework of the anti-colonial struggles, often found in the European socialist movements political allies and theoretical resources for thinking emancipation.

However, what distinguishes the Arab socialists from other leftist currents resides in their ambivalent, even critical, relationship with the contributions of classical Marxism.

Why was it not Marxism?

One observes first a rejection of Marxist internationalism, inasmuch as, contrary to Arab socialism (deeply shaped by a nationalist matrix and by the experience of colonialism), Marxism proves rather to inhabit an internationalist tradition.

Likewise, the Arab socialists generally reject state atheism and the total distancing from the religious fact, privileging on the contrary a more supple approach, founded on freedom of belief. For many of them, they see in Islam the very expression of the genius of an Arab civilisation.

In this perspective, several leaders sought to legitimise Arab socialism by invoking a compatibility, indeed an affinity, between Islam and socialism.

This reading is notably visible in figures such as Nasser and Bourguiba, to cite only these two.

Secondly, the rejection of class struggle is particularly marked there; it is explained by the fact that many Arab leaders privilege a reading of political conflict centred not on the opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie, but on the confrontation between colonised peoples and imperial powers.

In this perspective, the principal opposition is not social but national, namely that of a united and solidary people facing the colonial enemy.

Finally, the Arab socialists do not envisage private property as a problem in itself. Contrary to certain Marxist traditions, they do not necessarily aim at its abolition, but rather at its regulation in the service of the collective interest and national development.

Ultimately, and this is doubtless the most decisive element, they do not pursue the same finality: Arab socialism does not aim at the establishment of communism; it presents itself above all as an instrument in the service of the development of the Arab States. It is a political and economic tool.

It is moreover for this reason that several thinkers and leaders of Arab socialism did not hesitate to distance themselves, over time, from a strictly interventionist socialism, in order to draw closer to forms of market socialism, or even at times to social liberalism.

In order to circumscribe the substance of Arab socialism, our examination here is confined to the physiognomies of Nasser and of the Ba'ath.

Nasser, pan-Arab ideology and political realism

The former commands attention: despite his popular fervour as herald of pan-Arabism, Nasser reveals himself, under the test of facts, to be a realist far more than a fanatical revolutionary.

A man of a thousand influences

If his original condition assimilates him to the Ba'athist cadres (this rising middle bourgeoisie), an intellectual gulf separates him from them: his youth was not lulled by Arab nationalism, but by a fierce Egyptian nationalism, nourished at the sources of Mustafa Kamel and Tawfiq al-Hakim.

To this substrate were added eclectic influences, whether the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the cult of the great leaders of history, the anti-colonial readings of Gandhi, as well as the socialist dogmas from Marx to Lenin, all the way to Trotskyism; to this, finally, was annexed the more muted imprint of British Labour reformism.

It must also be recalled, moreover, the close commerce that Nasser maintained, for a time, with the Muslim Brotherhood. The most striking fact dates from 1947, when the future Raïs went to seal his submission by an oath of allegiance before the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

Although this rapprochement had obeyed strict military necessities (the brotherhood then disposing of a paramilitary apparatus acting in the Sinai), it nonetheless remains a capital milestone of his political itinerary, especially for understanding the success of the 1952 coup d'état.

It is thus from this sheaf of socialist speculations, conjugated with a religious atavism and a nationalism, that there was born this synthesis that would later be called Nasserist Arab socialism.

Military experience as revelation

To this armature is added the verdict of lived experience: in the first place, the career in the army and the outrage of the siege of the royal palace in 1942 by the British cohorts anchored within him the vision of a bloodless monarchy, struck with indignity and incapable of carrying Egypt's destiny.

This affront nourished a hostility within him toward the throne, completing the maturation in him of a rather revolutionary temperament. Nevertheless, the baptism of fire would be the 1948 war in Palestine, which radically changed his vision of the region.

It tore Nasser away from his Egypto-centred insularity to open before him the horizons of the Arab world: the destiny of the homeland henceforth appeared to him indissociable from that of its neighbours, the region imposing itself upon his mind as an organic whole.

In parallel, there took root within him the certainty that the disaster of the 1948 war stemmed in no way from the failings of the army, but indeed from the prevarication and decay of the regime.

The conquest of power

Returning from Palestine, fortified by these certainties, Nasser laid the foundations of the Movement of Free Officers; this clandestine alliance would foment the coup d'état of 23 July 1952. This episode, which Nasser qualified as a revolution, put an end to the monarchy in order to establish the Republic.

In the first instance, the supreme magistracy fell to General Mohamed Naguib (serving only as a substitute or screen for Nasser), the latter being conscious that Egypt, in order to admit this upheaval, required a tested war hero, rather than a junta of anonymous officers.

Promptly, however, irremediable lines of fracture separated the two men: Naguib wished to make himself the representative of a democratic and parliamentary tradition, fortified by his ties with the Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In opposition, Nasser and the Revolutionary Command Council advocated a salvific authoritarianism (a just dictatorship), indispensable in their view for the rapid execution of agrarian and social reforms. This vision led to the creation of the Liberation Rally, erected as a single party.

In February 1954, Nasser crossed the Rubicon and had Naguib sequestered; the audacity was nonetheless premature, since the political forces and the masses mobilised.

Reaching to the very heart of the Council, Khalid Mohieddine broke ranks and deployed his armoured forces to wrest the president from his jailers, conjuring in extremis the spectre of a civil war.

However, Nasser took the opportunity to install himself as Prime Minister, while the state apparatus immediately orchestrated a formidable campaign of denigration, painting Naguib in the features of an old man in thrall to the powers of reaction.

It was the Mansoura attack of October 1954, allegedly fomented by the Muslim Brotherhood against the person of Nasser, which sealed the president's destiny. Accused of connivance with the regicides, Naguib was definitively stripped of his offices and placed under house arrest, leaving the field clear for the Nasserist triumph.

Building the State, forging the myth

From then on, Nasser ensured his grip upon the entirety of the state apparatus. He consolidated the edification of a deep military State, where the army colonised the administrative functions and granted itself a veritable parallel economy.

In so doing, he forged a relationship that would be found in nearly the whole of the Arab socialist regimes, namely the alliance between the military apparatus and the popular classes.

In parallel, Nasser sketched out his own philosophical architecture, supported by Mohamed Heikal. He theorised the situation of Egypt at the confluence of three poles (African, Islamic and Arab), postulating that the Arab fold takes on a highly strategic primacy.

For Nasser, this pole constituted an eminently conquerable sphere of influence, a land of expansion for Egypt, which boldly wagered upon the twilight of the colonial powers and sought to counter the pro-Western alliances then taking shape in Mesopotamia and in Persia.

If the Bandung Conference in 1955 laid the milestones of non-alignment, the absolute masterstroke remains the nationalisation of Suez, since the initial military rout was metamorphosed into a resounding political victory against the colonial powers and Israel.

Nasser was no longer merely the master of Egypt; he raised himself, in the eyes of the then-subjugated Arab peoples, into a providential "Raïs".

Yet this immense stature, if it allowed him to impose himself as a geopolitical mastodon in the Arab world and in Africa, condemned him at the same stroke to becoming the hostage of the mystification he had himself constructed.

It is thus that in 1958, while Syria was darkened by the spectre of a communist coup d'état, the Syrian political staffs offered Nasser, on a silver platter, a project of immediate union.

Faced with this offer, the Raïs nonetheless showed himself most circumspect; he estimated that such an architecture would require at the very least a lustrum of institutional and social maturation.

Nevertheless, pressed by the feverish insistence of the Syrian leaders as to the urgency of barring the way to communism, and conscious that the slightest refusal would be stigmatised as a betrayal in the eyes of the Arab peoples, Nasser saw himself driven into this leap into the unknown.

He thus erected the United Arab Republic and put in place a new single party, within which the Ba'ath party accepted its own dissolution (its leaders then hoped to take rapid control of the new partisan apparatus).

That was reckoning without the Raïs's determination: Nasser without delay ostracised within it any faction not servilely subordinated to him. The elections of July 1959, in this respect, were such that, out of a total of 9,445 seats, barely 250 mandates fell to the Ba'ath candidates.

In parallel, the initial euphoria in Damascus, where Nasser had been acclaimed under the features of a new Saladin, gave way to a bitter disenchantment.

In place of the envisaged federal model there was substituted a centralised unitary Jacobinism; Syria saw itself demoted to the rank of a subaltern province of the Egyptian power. Its economic fabric did not resist the dirigisme of the reforms, notably at the turning point of 1961, marked by exorbitant nationalisations, while the regime's repressive apparatus stiffened.

On 28 September 1961, the experiment was brutally brought to an end: a coalition of Syrian military men and political organisations (foremost among which figured the Ba'ath) broke the experiment sharply by a coup de force and restored Syria's sovereignty.

The second revolution

This failure plunged Nasser into disarray; he saw in it a stinging personal failure, but discerned in it above all the deleterious work of an infiltration by reactionary forces. He then resolved to engage in what is qualified as the "second revolution".

This was inaugurated in 1962 by a radical recasting of the single party, rebaptised the Arab Socialist Union. Henceforth, abandoning the model of the cadre party that characterised the previous organisation.

The new political machine ambitioned to frame the masses directly: the party then aligned itself with the model of the great mass parties of the communist bloc, founded upon the principle of the vanguard.

Thus opened the era of an intransigent state socialism, dictated by waves of massive nationalisations, the consequence being that by 1965, public power captured and controlled 85% of industrial production.

Simultaneously, vast purges were orchestrated against the organisations reputed to belong to the reactionary arc.

Even as the Nasserist factions were swarming across the Arab world, the National Charter of 1962 consecrated the advent of a "scientific socialism".

The text formalised the principle of unity of purpose, which meant that political unification was no longer envisaged in an indiscriminate manner, but was rigorously circumscribed to those Arab States alone communing in the same national and socialist designs, excluding de facto any fusion with monarchical regimes or with anti-Nasserist movements.

1967 and the realist turn

The Six-Day War provoked a new shockwave; it brutally withered the prestige so bitterly conquered by the Raïs and broke sharply the momentum of Arab socialism.

Overwhelmed, Nasser came solemnly to announce his resignation, before performing an immediate volte-face in the face of the surge and refusal of the popular jubilations that had descended massively into the street to support him.

Beyond this episode, the rout plunged the whole of the Arab regimes into a painful phase of self-criticism. Nasser himself saw himself driven to a cruel evidence: the defeat of 1948 could no longer be conveniently imputed to the sole flaws of a decrepit monarchical institution.

In the ideological vacuity created by this ebb, the Marxist currents on the one hand and the Islamist on the other found an unhoped-for space to germinate. Simultaneously, in Palestine, the old Judeo-Arab confrontation progressively faded to give way to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with notably the emergence of the PLO, marking the passage from an ethnic antagonism toward two henceforth resolutely national conceptions.

From then on, Nasser himself resolved to strip his posture of its messianic charge and its revolutionary romanticism. Henceforth adopting the features of a realist head of State, he refocused his ambitions priority-wise upon the sole Egyptian fold.

It is under this pragmatic prism that he subscribed to UN Resolution 242, endorsing the formula of a territorial compromise in exchange for peace (without however abdicating his hostility toward the Hebrew State).

While the Egyptian military apparatus was patiently reconstituted after the disaster, the Manifesto of 1968 sketched out an unlocking of the political system and laid the foundations of a modern State, henceforth seated upon the precepts of science and the authority of reason.

At his death, the presidency fell to his vice-president, Anwar el-Sadat, who inaugurated what he qualified as the "corrective evolution". This process proved to be a methodical enterprise of de-Nasserisation of the Egyptian State, inaugurated by a recasting of the institutions and the incarceration of the barons close to Nasser. Proclaimed the "believing president", Sadat orchestrated a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood, decreeing the amnesty and liberation of several of their militants.

On the regional plane, he consecrated the withdrawal into Egyptianity to the detriment of pan-Arabism and detached Egypt from the Soviet orbit in order to align it with the American bloc. This geopolitical pivot was accompanied, from 1974 onward, by the Infitah, a policy of relative liberalisation of the economy.

Fortified by the political credit acquired during the Yom Kippur War, he deployed a campaign of denigration against the memory of Nasser, imputing to the arrogance of his myth the direct responsibility for the loss of the Sinai.

Consummating the rupture, he normalised relations with Israel and dissolved, in 1978, the vestiges of the Socialist Party in order to found the National Democratic Party.

Although his successors subsequently reintegrated Nasser into the fold of collective memory, the Raïs left an ambivalent posterity among the Egyptians, revealing an abyss between the real complexity of the statesman and the image of the myth frozen in the collective Arab imaginary.

The Ba'ath, the pan-Arab ideal led astray

With regard to the second matrix of Arab socialism, namely the Ba'ath party, history obeys a different genesis.

Paris, matrix of Arabism

If its founders drew inspiration, such as Nasser, from Arab cultural radiance and the gleams of the Nahda, it was singularly during the experience of their years of apprenticeship in Paris that their awakening to pan-Arab ideology took place.

This confessional binomial, associating the Orthodox Christian Michel Aflak and the Sunni Salah al-Din al-Bitar, found within the Union of Arab Students at the Sorbonne a cosmopolitan space of resonance.

Daily contact with their peers from other Arab countries wrested the two men away from Syrian particularism in order to convert them to the universalism of Arabism.

In Paris, they steeped themselves in the Marxist circles of influence, while allowing themselves to be seduced by the mystique of German Romanticism and its organic conception of the nation. However, the year 1936 sounded the hour of disillusion: the victory of the Popular Front in France and Léon Blum's refusal to ratify the treaty of Syrian independence were lived as a betrayal.

This schism pushed Aflak and Bitar to break definitively with the European left, which they thenceforth posited as consubstantially imperialist.

For all that, the emergence of the Ba'ath cannot be reduced to the sole design of its two theoreticians; it is also the consequence of the fusion of pre-existing pan-Arab parties and leagues in Syria and Iraq.

Such is the case, beyond the Euphrates, of the Party of National Brotherhood (Hizb al-Ikha al-Watani), pivot of the military coup de force of 1941, to which Michel Aflak would lend his support, conceptualising it as the just reconquest of power by the Iraqi people in the face of the illegitimacy of the Hashemite dynasty in thrall to British interests.

Ba'ath and fascism: a charge wrongly brought

But this coup d'état of 1941 constitutes, moreover, the original source of one of the most tenacious historiographical misreadings touching Arab socialism: that which abusively assimilates it to fascism.

It is true that, occurring at the paroxysm of the Second World War, this coup de force conveniently served the strategic interests of the Axis. The Iraqi National Defence government did not delay, moreover, in appropriating certain fascistic attributes within its state structures, while tolerating the diffusion of totalitarian manifestos, foremost among which Mein Kampf.

For all that, objective analysis demands that one underline with precision the fundamentally utilitarian, and not ideological, character of this rapprochement. Far from an authentic convergence, this transitory alliance obeyed the cold logic of Realpolitik. The matter, for these movements, was to instrumentalise the support of Berlin and Rome with the sole end of breaking colonisation.

It remains that this misapprehension also draws sustenance from the trajectory of a certain Zaki al-Arsouzi. If it is true that the latter had militated within the League of Nationalist Action (an organisation whose methods and aesthetics borrowed broad elements from the European fascisms), he nonetheless categorically rejected the 1941 coup d'état in Iraq.

Moreover, Arsouzi absolutely repudiated the dogma of a superior race; he conceived Arabity as freed from any ethnic determinism. Arab is whoever wields the Arabic language and communes intimately with the history and spirit of that culture.

Erecting, in parallel with the works of Michel Aflak and Bitar, his own Ba'ath movement, it was in the aftermath of the Second World War, in 1947, that the party was formally founded by the fusion of these competing forces.

Definitive symbiosis was for its part accomplished in 1953, by the adjunction to the Ba'ath party of the Arab Socialist Movement; this alliance infused several thousand highly active militants into the young formation.

It was at the close of this second congress that the organisation consecrated its doctrinal moult and officially took the title of Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. The initial anchoring of the Ba'ath operated in Syria, where from the electoral jousts of 1954 it registered honourable suffrage.

As evoked supra, the organisation took an active part in the coup de force against Nasserist tutelage, whose stifling centralism and autocratic nature it repudiated.

From party to regime: the confiscation of power

The party definitively seized the reins of the State in March 1963 in the wake of a coup d'état. The first cabinet, led by Salah al-Din al-Bitar, then consecrated a sociological mutation: for the first time in the country's history, the executive emanated from an almost exclusively rural terreau.

Although Bitar attempted to open his ranks to the Nasserist factions in order to conjure the spectre of a counter-putsch, it appeared that the epicentre of power had deserted the fold of the party's civil authorities (Bitar and Aflak).

The decision-making core henceforth resided within a clandestine security apparatus, the Secret Military Committee. The latter had methodically infiltrated the army under the impetus of Salah Jadid, Hafez al-Assad and Muhammad Umran. This Military Committee ended up brutally ousting the civil power in February 1966, seizing by force the control of the Ba'ath Central Committee.

This coup d'état consecrated an irreversible schism of the party between a militarised Syrian branch, "neo-Ba'athism", and an Iraqi branch that remained the refuge of the original "old guard".

This schism of 1966 had as its immediate effect a polarisation of power in Damascus, opposing the radical wing of Salah Jadid to the pragmatic and military faction embodied by Hafez al-Assad. The confrontation culminated in November 1970 during the "Corrective Movement" (Al-Haraka al-Tashihiyya), by which Assad definitively ousted his rival and ensured himself hegemonic control of the political apparatus and the armed forces.

This neo-Ba'athist mutation nonetheless drew upon itself the thunderbolts of the founding fathers of the Ba'ath. Impotent witnesses to the denial of their ideal, the first thinkers of the movement denounced a regime no longer having any link with the original model. They castigated the establishment of a veritable state of barbarism and the emergence, under the cover of socialism, of a predatory State bourgeoisie.

More serious still, they accused the power of having instrumentalised the phases of economic liberalisation in order to place close associates at the head of the great private enterprises, and that on the basis of properly tribal and confessional logics at the antipodes of the original Ba'ath's secularism. For the old guard, the pan-Arab mystique had ceased being the horizon of the Syrian government, becoming nothing more than a simple instrument of social control and internal legitimation.

Concerned to establish his respectability, the Assadist neo-Ba'athist nonetheless applied himself after the Six-Day War to normalising his relations with the Egyptian godfather, Nasser, before institutionalising his hegemony by the founding of the National Progressive Front. This façade coalition integrated the Nasserist forces and the Arab left, completing the cooptation of all opposition.

On the side of the Iraqi Ba'ath, whose branch was legally active from 1952 onward, the trajectory proved just as chaotic. If the party supported the Nasserist coup d'état of 1963, its honeymoon with power was of short duration; rapidly ousted, the formation was the object of a virulent campaign of demonisation.

The episode was staged by its adversaries as a liberation of Iraq from the "criminal and atheist Ba'athist gang", while the Iraqi Arab Socialist Union was promptly erected to promote an alternative to the Ba'ath.

Revenge was accomplished in July 1968. Through a new coup de force, the Ba'ath definitively seized the levers of the State. Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr acceded to the presidency, flanked by Saddam Hussein as vice-president. The latter rapidly imposed himself as the éminence grise of the regime, patiently orchestrating the control of the security structures before consummating his total usurpation by officially seizing the presidency in 1979.

If he ensured for himself the unfailing support of the orthodox Ba'athists, notably through the edification of a generous welfare State financed by the petroleum rent, the reinforcement of the partisan apparatus and a vibrant instrumentalisation of the pan-Arab imaginary, Saddam Hussein simultaneously laid the milestones of a dreadful authoritarian machine.

Contrary to the Syrian regime of Assad, the Saddamist power maintained a veritable ideological hypertrophy combined with a repressive apparatus of unheard-of sophistication.

The regime's veneer nonetheless cracked under the weight of the military disasters. In the aftermath of the fiasco of the Iran war and then of the Gulf War, the regime began an economic liberalisation in order to survive the sanctions. The denial often retained came in 1993 with the launch of the "Faith Campaign" (Al-Hamla al-Imaniyya).

A rupture consummated with the Ba'ath's secularism, this religious reorientation of the State favoured an astonishing recuperation of the president by the presses affiliated with the Islamist movements, while in the wings, Arab universalism progressively faded in favour of a policy of tribal and confessional withdrawal, clan allegiance becoming at times necessary in order to accede to public functions.

In sum, the two Ba'athist experiences, Syrian and Iraqi, dramatically turned away from their theoretical model; the eminently emancipatory ideals of Arab socialism foundered in the construction of military autocracies.

For all that, one cannot deny that Damascus and Baghdad preserved, until the end, affinities with this ideology, using it in turn as a vector of social modernisation and at times as the mythological dressing of their regimes.

The other reservoirs: Gaddafi, Ben Bella and the peripheries of the model

We could of course at length decline the avatars of the different Arab socialist models. One could evoke Gaddafi, whose trajectory bifurcated from an initial Nasserism toward what became Gaddafism, which would reorient itself toward pan-Africanism in the face of the constant failures of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism.

One could equally analyse the socialist reforms of Ben Bella in Algeria, or even the case of South Yemen, where the ruling National Liberation Front slid from an Arab Nasserism toward a Marxism-Leninism aligned with the USSR.

No less worthy of interest appears Tunisia, where Destourian socialism, although principally devoted to the affirmation of a coupling between Tunisian particularism and nationalism, nonetheless remained the theatre of ideological confrontations between Nasserists and Ba'athists.

For all that, it proves more stimulating still to examine what this political family has become in our day, and to scrutinise its evolution in the aftermath of the Arab Springs. These upheavals could have, in theory, infused a second chance to these historical formations, in the face of the debacle of the nationalist governments of social-liberal or social-democratic tendency.

What remains of Arab socialism after the Arab Springs?

The shattered legacies: Syria, Iraq, Libya

In Syria, the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime at the close of a long and devastating civil war marked the effacement of the legal representation of the Arab socialisms, concretised by the pure and simple proscription of the Ba'ath party and its allied formations.

However, this collapse was not accompanied by a complete disappearance; several paramilitary groups remain active and maintain hotbeds of tension, at times in direct confrontation with the new power in place.

In Iraq, in the immediate wake of the American invasion of 2003, the proscription of the Ba'ath party combined with the institutionalisation of a political sectarianism precipitated the ascent of the confessional forces to the detriment of the traditional ideological cleavages, enacting the disappearance of the Arab socialist parties from the political scene. Almost everywhere else, most of these movements have undergone a profound invisibilisation.

In Libya, a renewed momentum of the Gaddafist Arab socialist current was indeed sketched out from 2020 onward, carried by the candidacy aspirations of Seif al-Islam Gaddafi; nevertheless, his recent disappearance and the indigence of the military means at his disposal rapidly stripped this attempt of any serious threat in the absence of elections.

It is assuredly in Egypt and in Tunisia that Arab socialism found its most fertile soils after the Springs, and this for two cardinal reasons.

On the one hand, these States were not governed by partisans of Arab socialism on the eve of their respective revolutions; on the other hand, these movements enjoyed there a historical and sedimented development well before the uprisings.

In Egypt, this anchoring drew directly upon the powerful Nasserist memorial heritage; in Tunisia, it leaned upon the combined vitality of the student movement, the trade union apparatus and the heritage of the Socialist Destourian Party.

Egypt: the Nasserist hope and disillusion

In Egypt, first, if the Nasserists accepted to figure on the list of the Democratic Alliance for Egypt led by the Muslim Brotherhood (on the basis of an electoral calculation and in order to conjure the spectre of counter-revolution), it must be acknowledged that they were quickly disenchanted.

In the aftermath of the parliamentary ballot, the Brotherhood totally marginalised the Nasserists, who then weighed only six seats, or even seven if one adds to them the orthodox Nasserists who had left the coalition before the elections in the face of the hegemony of the Islamists.

The Muslim Brotherhood then seized the entirety of the chairmanships of the parliamentary commissions and ensured for themselves exclusive control of the drafting of the new Constitution.

For all that, during the presidential election of May 2012, the Nasserists managed to impose a frontline candidate against Mohamed Morsi (the Muslim Brotherhood candidate); under the banner of Hamdeen Sabahi, they garnered 20.7% of the suffrage and missed the second round by only three points against the candidate anointed by the military junta.

The Nasserists, who had until then set aside their ideological divergences with the remnants of the Mubarak regime in order to preserve the unity of the revolutionary wing, henceforth grew worried at the "Brotherhoodisation" of the state apparatus.

They had increasing difficulties in legitimising a revolution that seemed to be bending into an Islamic revolution.

The coup de grâce came on 22 November 2012 with Morsi's unilateral promulgation of a Constitutional Declaration. By this decree of rupture, the president arrogated to himself quasi-absolute powers, granting himself total immunity from any judicial recourse and armouring the Constituent Assembly against any attempt at dissolution.

For the Nasserists, as for the major part of the secular political forces, the mask had then just fallen. The Muslim Brotherhood's project henceforth revealed itself in broad daylight, tending toward the establishment of an Islamic republic.

In reaction, more than thirty parties coalesced within the Egyptian National Salvation Front, which would in 2013 lend its support to the Tamarod movement as well as to the coup de force of 3 July 2013 led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi.

General Sissi would moreover know how masterfully to instrumentalise the imaginary of one and all, and more singularly that of the Nasserists, who initially discerned in him the incarnation of a new Nasser.

The Nasserist networks then reactivated the iconography of the Raïs's era to his benefit in order to counter the Brotherhood's influence; in this prism, 3 July 2013 was conceptualised as a popular revolution protected by the army, in perfect resonance with the precedent of 1952. El-Sissi did not refrain from exploiting this parallel, borrowing a sovereignist rhetoric with resolutely social accents.

However, disillusion was rapid; many took consciousness that if the new master of Cairo appropriated the aesthetic contours of Nasserism, he in no way adhered to Arab socialism and was detaching himself from it. From then on, the current fractured. One fringe chose to support the new President of the Republic in the name of the existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, while another swung into opposition.

A figure of this resistance, the 2012 candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, presented himself again against El-Sissi in 2014, affirming that Nasserism could not be reduced to the wearing of military attire; he would garner only a marginal score of 3% of the votes. In this same lineage, one notes the emergence of the deputy Ahmed Tantawi who, between 2015 and 2020, embodied alone the Nasserist opposition in Parliament, before being definitively excluded from political life during the electoral sequence of 2023.

Tunisia: resistance through the ballot box

In Tunisia, the situation proves sensibly different. In the first instance, the Socialist Destourian Party systematically obstructed the emergence of Arab socialist movements, forbidding them from acquiring a veritable political apparatus.

No longer succeeding in durably stemming these ideological thrusts, the regime then encouraged the formation of satellite parties, destined to channel and frame the Ba'athist, socialist and Nasserist currents, while ensuring their strict tutelage.

These were notably the Popular Unity Party (PUP) and the Unionist Democratic Union (UDU), which took part in the electoral game under the Ben Ali era; however, these two formations failed to win the slightest seat after the revolution and would be the victims of scissions.

Conversely, it was the clandestine currents, principally structured within the powerful Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), the country's hegemonic trade-union force, as well as in the student milieu, which took on legal and partisan forms in the aftermath of the revolution.

From then on, one can identify at least three sensibilities of Tunisian Arab socialism. The first, of specifically Nasserist matrix, was embodied in the aftermath of the revolution by the Echaab party (People's Movement). This formation was constituted in the wake of the Movement of Nasserist Unionists, itself issued from the Arab National Rally Party close to Gaddafi in 1981. Over the course of its first years of existence, the party merged with a constellation of Nasserist factions, in order to reinforce its electoral anchoring, historically situated in the south of Tunisia.

The second expression of Arab socialism in Tunisia is of Ba'athist sensibility. It was structured first on the margins of the principal political organisations, from militant networks active in the student movement, notably within the General Union of Tunisian Students, where it found a space of implantation. In this same context, certain Ba'athists maintained contacts with currents of the radical left, including Perspectives. Its militants likewise attempted, at certain periods, to influence or to penetrate the structures of the Socialist Destourian Party without ever constituting an important component of it.

After the revolutionary earthquake, this tendency recomposed itself around two principal formations, both attached to the orthodoxy of the Iraqi faction of Ba'athism.

There is distinguished in the first place the Ba'ath Movement, under the impetus of Othman Belhaj Amor, to which is adjoined the Democratic Arab Vanguard Party, the latter, despite a marked affinity with the line of Saddam Hussein, nevertheless knew how to show a relative openness with regard to the Syrian power.

For all that, and contrary to the popular fervour that continued to carry the Nasserist currents, these Ba'athist structures remained confined to the fringes of the Tunisian political scene.

The third declension of Tunisian Arab socialism proves, in truth, more open to question, articulating itself around Marxism-Leninism embodied by the Unified Party of Democratic Patriots, more notoriously known by the acronym Watad or Moupad. If the premises of this article tended to exclude Marxist-Leninist dogma from the fold of Arab socialism stricto sensu, the trajectory of the Watad can only be the exception. If it is true that a preponderant part of its ideology proceeds from exogenous theories, the party deploys a pan-Arab vigour so fierce and so important an attachment to sovereignist doctrines that it proves difficult not to gaze upon it in the mirror of socialist Arabism. This doctrinal synthesis is likewise carried by figures such as Chokri Belaïd, whose political consciousness was fashioned by law studies within Ba'athist Iraq.

Heavily tested by the verdict of the ballot box during the constituent elections of 2011, where the meagre portion devolved to the Nasserist forces and to the Watad (amounting respectively to two and one sole mandates) enacted their marginalisation, these various movements understood the necessity of overcoming their atomisations. It was in this perspective that, at the twilight of the year 2012, a Popular Front intended to federate the forces of the left was born.

This coalition achieved the tour de force of agglomerating an a priori heterogeneous ideological substrate, marrying Nasserists, Ba'athists and Marxist-Leninists, while adjoining to itself the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party, ecologists and several components of social-democratic or democratic-socialist obedience.

Under the rule of Chokri Belaïd, erected as leader of this rally, the coalition affirmed itself as the most strident pole of contestation of the transition, with a frontal, theatricalised and inflexible hostility with regard to Ennahdha (Islamists), as much on societal, economic as geopolitical dossiers; the components of the Popular Front having notably condemned on several occasions the rupture of relations with Syria.

The assassination of Chokri Belaïd, which occurred on 6 February 2013, was the catalyst of a crisis of legitimacy for the transitional regime, instantly provoking gigantic popular mobilisations across the whole of the national territory. In this configuration, the UGTT interposed itself as a veritable counter-power close to the Arab socialists, capable of escorting the wrath of the masses and of driving the government into immediate resignation.

Notwithstanding the replacement of the executive by a new cabinet likewise subordinated to the direction of Ennahdha.

The Popular Front for its part found itself precipitated into a new crisis of orientation, summoned to reinvent for itself a leadership at the precise moment when the secular formation Nidaa Tounes was already applying itself to instrumentalising for its exclusive benefit the anti-Islamist resentment of the middle classes. It was in this context that, faced with the persistent hesitations of the direction of Echaab to integrate definitively into the Popular Front, its secretary general, Mohamed Brahmi, chose to secede in 2013 in order to give birth to the Popular Current.

The Tunisian Arab socialists nonetheless underwent a new tragedy when Brahmi was in turn a victim of Islamist terrorism scarcely eighteen days after his dissidence, liberating a new wave of social movements of great amplitude, of which the UGTT once again took the responsibility of ensuring the political framing and channelling.

It was finally under the banner of Hamma Hammami, leader of the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party, that the Popular Front chose to engage in the presidential race. Although his score of 7.82% revealed the limits of Arab socialism, notably in a bipartisan context, the coalition managed to seize fifteen seats in Parliament (a capital that rose virtually to eighteen mandates if one aggregated to it the three Echaab deputies who had chosen to preserve their autonomy outside the alliance).

Thus affirming itself as the principal opposition force facing the governmental coalition formed between Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdha, this posture nevertheless came up against the question of its lack of representativeness in the face of a coalition which represented more than 60% of parliament, as well as the incapacity to stabilise a coherent discourse capable of conquering the public space.

Undermined by internal dissensions touching on societal stakes, as well as by exacerbated leadership rivalries, the coalition foundered in a scission opposing the partisans of Hammami to the faithful of Mongi Rahoui, issued from the Watad.

The verdict of the ballot box cruelly sanctioned this disunion by reducing the representation of the Popular Front to the meagre portion of a single seat (that of Mongi Rahoui), while Echaab effected a remarkable breakthrough in winning fifteen mandates.

Strengthened by its new political weight, the Echaab movement integrated, despite the refusal of Ennahdha, the ephemeral government formed around a presidential majority led by Elyes Fakhfakh, where it attempted to inflect the social orientation of public policies, before this cabinet was driven to resignation under the pressure of a motion of censure carried by the parliamentary majority.

This crisis of efficacy of the Tunisian transition found its epilogue on 25 July 2021 when President Kaïs Saïed proclaimed the state of exception and suspended parliament.

A broad majority of the Arab socialist currents, foremost among which Echaab, the Popular Current and the remnants of the Watad, chose to bring their unction to these exceptional measures.

This decision was rooted, in the first place, in the rejection of the post-revolutionary institutional order, where the Arab socialist currents were relegated to the periphery of the institutional game and exposed to a heightened political violence, the responsibility for which was largely imputed to Ennahdha.

In the second place, the Tunisian President of the Republic distinguishes himself from the memorial and essentially aesthetic instrumentalisation of the Arab socialist frame of reference observed in Abdel Fattah al-Sissi.

On the contrary, his relationship with the latter appears more authentic; it is translated by a more effective adherence to certain of its pillars, notably the conception of an interventionist and regulating State in the economy as well as a unitary vision of the Arab nation, which do not belong to a simple cosmetic rhetoric. This tendency was displayed in broad daylight during his official visit to Egypt in 2021, during a homage at the mausoleum of Gamal Abdel Nasser, where he proclaimed that Tunisia was following in his footsteps and that his vision was still relevant.

For all that, this discourse, although imbued with a resolutely Arab socialist and revolutionary imaginary, escapes any exclusive belonging; it deploys itself under the features of a vaster syncretism, which broadens its references by hybridising the legacy of socialism with other intellectual and juridical traditions.

In this perspective, the Arab socialist formations probably anticipated that the refoundation thus initiated would turn to the advantage of their own political family. Although the text of the new Constitution aroused reservations within their ranks, the Echaab movement and the Popular Current chose explicitly to call for a vote in favour of the project during the referendum ballot. This insertion into the new order was concretised by their active participation in the legislative elections of 2022-2023.

Despite a uninominal voting method that henceforth proscribed partisan labels, these forces managed to preserve their parliamentary weight (contrary to the other political forces) by obtaining some fifteen seats. They gathered within the assembly under the banner of the Sovereign National League bloc, uniting the deputies issued from the Echaab and Watad movements.

Nevertheless, the durability of this bloc rapidly came up against the test of facts. If the Watad formally maintained its loyalty with regard to the process, internal tensions provoked a scission, fragmenting the movement into two distinct formations bearing the same name, one resolutely loyalist and the other (relatively) anchored in the opposition.

In parallel, the Echaab movement manifested a progressive disenchantment in the face of the orientations of power. The rupture was sketched out during the presidential election of 2024, where the candidacy of its secretary general garnered only a meagre portion of 1.97% of the suffrage. These strains were accentuated over the course of the year 2025, exacerbated by the tensions between the government and the UGTT.

This conflict placed the Arab socialists in an uncomfortable posture, rendering arbitration painful between fidelity to the trade-union centre and support for the head of State.

On the occasion of the recent debates surrounding the finance law of 2026, Echaab's anchoring in the opposition appears henceforth effective; the party even takes up the register of opposition in several cases. The party nonetheless preserves a measured and diplomatic tone, refusing to associate itself with the street mobilisations orchestrated by the oppositions in order to privilege a strategy of opposition that is rather institutional.

The Egyptian and Tunisian trajectories thus show two distinct modalities of survival of Arab socialism in the aftermath of the Arab Springs.

Permanences and limits of an ideology

Arab socialism thus imposed itself, from Nasserist Egypt to Ba'athist Iraq, as one of the most structured attempts of the Arab world to produce a doctrine of national emancipation that was properly its own.

Neither orthodox Marxism nor imported liberalism, it constituted an original synthesis, deeply marked by the colonial experience, the primacy of Arab unity and state voluntarism.

In the aftermath of the Arab Springs, the heir formations of this tradition remain present, though marginalised, in Egypt and in Tunisia, while in Syria and in Iraq, the proscription of the Ba'ath has materially closed the institutional chapter of this history.