Is Arab socialism dead?

AN IDEOLOGICAL FAMILY, NOT A SINGLE MODEL

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

Yet, despite their doctrinal or national divergences, one cannot deny the profound similarities that unite them.

First, these regimes were almost all characterised by the existence of an authoritarian state apparatus, generally structured around a charismatic leading figure. Secondly, they adopted strongly dirigiste economies, imbued with 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 more secular conception of the role of religion vis-à-vis the state.

The whole 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.

FACES AND MATRICES OF ARAB SOCIALISM

Indeed, it is important to clarify here that, when speaking of Arab socialisms, there is no question whatsoever of the socialist doctrines imported into the Arab world (which would notably include Maoism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism or democratic socialism), even though these currents likewise had historical movements in the region.

It is, on the contrary, a matter of socialist doctrines elaborated within the Arab world itself.

When one speaks of Arab socialisms, two words spontaneously come to mind: Nasser and the Ba'ath party.

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

The former represented its first manifestation in power, in all its tenets, while the latter embodied its most structured, most systematised and most ideologically elaborated form.

Notwithstanding, Arab socialism cannot be reduced to this single figure and formation.

One must also mention Gaddafi's Jamahiriya, the National Liberation Front in Algeria, particularly under the presidency of Ahmed Ben Bella, as well as, to a certain extent, certain factions of the Socialist Destourian Party in Tunisia.

Likewise, the Arab socialist movements in both Yemen and Sudan.

IDEAS FROM HERE AND ELSEWHERE: FROM THE NAHDA TO LENIN

Despite all this, they are inscribed within a relatively common historical frame of reference, with most drawing their origins from the Nahda (Arab Renaissance), a period at the end of the nineteenth century marked by intense intellectual, linguistic and cultural ferment in the Arab world, in reaction to the shock of European colonisation.

This cultural revolution was translated, in particular, into a progressive transformation of the Arabic language to facilitate communication, journalism and scientific and intellectual production.

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

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

This linguistic modernisation was also accompanied by the importation and translation of European philosophical and political concepts, such as social justice, class struggle or constitutionalism. It thus paved the way for new lenses through which to read the social and political world.

Within this context several socialist sensibilities also emerged, conveyed by major reviews 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 intrusion of socialist ideas into the Arab world took on a new turn beginning in the 1920s.

The Soviet Union, henceforth a power in search of international influence, exerted a growing influence on 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 helped disseminate a first revolutionary lens through which to read colonised and peripheral spaces, and this in the aftermath of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence breakdown.

It continued in the early 1920s with the creation, in Egypt, of the first socialist party in 1921, followed the year after by the dissemination of Lenin's work The State and Revolution. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, this circulation intensified thanks to translations of Marx's writings as well as the great founding texts of European socialism.

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

Nevertheless, what distinguishes Arab socialists from other left-wing currents lies in their ambivalent, even critical, relationship to the contributions of classical Marxism.

WHY THIS WAS NOT MARXISM

One first observes a rejection of historical materialism, insofar as, unlike Arab socialism (deeply shaped by a nationalist matrix and by the experience of colonialism), Marxism proves to belong rather to an internationalist tradition.

Likewise, Arab socialists generally reject state atheism and the total distancing of the religious fact, favouring on the contrary a more flexible approach, founded on freedom of belief. For many of them, Islam is seen as the very expression of the genius of an Arab civilisation.

From this perspective, several leaders sought to legitimise Arab socialism by invoking a compatibility, or even an affinity, between Islam and socialism. This reading is notably visible in figures such as Nasser and Bourguiba, to name but a few.

Secondly, the rejection of class struggle is particularly marked.

It is explained by the fact that numerous Arab leaders favoured 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 view, the principal opposition is not social but national, namely that of a united and solidary people facing the colonial enemy.

This conception is found, for example, in Gaddafi, who interprets the domination of one class over another as a form of tyranny.

Finally, Arab socialists do not envisage private property as a problem in itself. Unlike 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 end.

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 Arab states. It is a political and economic tool, rather than a fixed ideological doctrine.

It is for this very reason that several thinkers and leaders of Arab socialism did not hesitate, over time, to move away 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 apprehend the substance of Arab socialism, our examination here is circumscribed to the physiognomies of Nasser and the Ba'ath.

NASSER, THE PRAGMATIST OF PAN-ARABISM

The former demands attention: despite his popular fervour as a herald of pan-Arabism, Nasser proves, when tested by the facts, to be a pragmatist of action far more than a fanatical revolutionary.

If his condition of origin draws him close to the Ba'athist cadres (that rising middle bourgeoisie), an intellectual chasm separates him from them.

His youth was not cradled by Arab nationalism stricto sensu, but by a fierce Egyptian nationalism, nourished at the sources of Mustafa Kamel and Tawfiq al-Hakim.

To this substrate are 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 the rigour of Marx to the audacity of Lenin, all the way to the fringes of Trotskyism.

To this is finally added the more muted imprint of British Labour reformism.

One must moreover recall 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 so far as to seal his submission through an oath of allegiance before the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

Whether this rapprochement obeyed strict necessities of military strategy (the brotherhood then having an active paramilitary apparatus operating in the Sinai), the event nonetheless remains a capital milestone of his political itinerary.

It is thus from this constellation of socialist speculations, combined with a religious atavism and a touchy nationalism, that this synthesis was born which would later be called Nasserist Arab socialism.

To this framework is added the verdict of lived experience.

In the first place, his career in the army, and singularly the affront of the siege of the royal palace in 1942 by British cohorts, anchored in him the vision of an exsanguinated monarchy, struck with indignity and incapable of bearing the destiny of Egypt.

This seminal affront nourished a hostility within him toward the throne, completing the maturation in him of a rather revolutionary temperament.

Nevertheless, the baptism of fire was the 1948 war in Palestine, which radically changed his vision of the region.

It tore Nasser from his Egyptocentric insularity to open before him the horizons of the Arab world.

The destiny of his homeland henceforth appeared to him as inseparable from that of its neighbours, the region imposing itself upon his mind as an organic whole.

In parallel, the certainty took root in him that the disaster of the 1948 war did not stem from the failings of the army, but indeed from the prevarication and decay of the regime.

Returning from Palestine, fortified by these certainties, Nasser laid the foundations of the Free Officers Movement.

This clandestine alliance would foment the coup d'état of 23 July 1952, an episode which Nasser qualified as a revolution, putting 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 a screen for Nasser).

Nasser was conscious that Egypt, in order to accept this upheaval, required a totemic figure, a battle-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, strengthened by his affinities with the Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Conversely, Nasser and the Revolutionary Command Council advocated a salvific authoritarianism (a just dictatorship) which they deemed indispensable 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, however, premature, since political forces and the masses mobilised with singular promptness.

At the very heart of the Council, Khalid Mohieddine broke ranks and deployed his armoured forces to wrest the old general from his jailers, averting in extremis the spectre of a civil war.

Nevertheless, Nasser took advantage of the occasion to install himself as Prime Minister, while the state apparatus immediately orchestrated a formidable smear campaign, painting Naguib as a pusillanimous old man, in thrall to the forces of reaction.

It was the Mansoura attack, in October 1954, allegedly fomented by the Muslim Brotherhood against the person of Nasser, that 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 free for the Nasserian triumph.

Thenceforth, Nasser secured the upper hand over the entirety of the state apparatus.

He consolidated the building of a deep military state, in which the army colonised administrative functions and granted itself a veritable parallel economy.

In so doing, he forged a relationship that would be found in nearly all Arab socialist regimes, namely the organic 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), positing that the Arab fold carried a highly strategic primacy.

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

If the Bandung Conference of 1955 laid down the markers of non-alignment, the absolute masterstroke remained the nationalisation of Suez, since the initial military defeat was metamorphosed into a resounding political victory in the face of 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".

Still, this immense stature, although it allowed him to impose himself as a geopolitical mastodon in the Arab world and in Africa, condemned him at the same stroke to become the hostage of the mystification he himself had erected.

It was thus that in 1958, while Syria was darkened by the spectre of a communist coup d'état, the Syrian notables and the political staffs (singularly the Ba'ath party) offered Nasser, on a silver platter, a project for immediate union.

Faced with this offer, the raïs nonetheless showed himself very circumspect, considering 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 regarding the urgency of barring the way to communism, and conscious that the slightest refusal would be branded as a cataclysmic betrayal among the Arab peoples, Nasser found himself compelled into this leap into the unknown.

He thus erected the United Arab Republic, flanked by the National Union party, a new single party within which the Ba'ath party resigned itself to its own dissolution, whose leaders had counted on promptly appropriating the direction of the new partisan apparatus.

This reckoned without the determination of the raïs: Nasser ostracised without delay any faction that was not servilely beholden to him.

The elections of July 1959 administered in this respect, out of a total of 9,445 seats, the meagre portion of barely 250 mandates falling to Ba'ath candidates.

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

The federal model imagined was replaced by a ferociously centralised unitary Jacobinism: Syria found itself reduced to the rank of a subordinate province of Egyptian power.

Its economic fabric did not withstand the dirigisme of the reforms, singularly with the doctrinal turn of 1961, marked by exorbitant nationalisations, while the regime's repressive apparatus stiffened.

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

This failure plunged Nasser into dismay; he saw in it a stinging personal failure, but he discerned in it above all the deleterious work of an infiltration by reactionary forces.

He then resolved to embark on what was qualified as the "second revolution".

This was inaugurated in 1962 with a radical overhaul of the single party, rechristened the Arab Socialist Union.

Henceforth, renouncing the mere party of cadres that had characterised the preceding organisation, this new political machine aspired to directly oversee the masses.

The party then espoused the contours of the great mass parties of the communist bloc, articulated around the vanguard model.

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 Nasserist factions multiplied across the Arab world, the National Charter of 1962 consecrated the advent of a "scientific socialism". The doctrinal text formalised the principle of unity of purpose, which meant that political unification was no longer envisaged indiscriminately, 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 anti-Nasserist movements.

The Six-Day War provoked a new shock wave: it brutally withered the prestige so bitterly acquired by the raïs and broke off the momentum of Arab socialism.

Overwhelmed, Nasser went so far as to solemnly announce his resignation, before performing an immediate volte-face in the face of the resurgence and the refusal of the popular jubilations that had descended massively into the streets.

Beyond this episode, the rout plunged the entirety of Arab regimes into a painful phase of self-criticism.

Nasser himself found himself driven to a cruel evidence: the 1948 defeat could no longer be conveniently imputed to the sole defects of a dilapidated monarchical institution.

In the ideological vacuum created by this ebb, the Marxist currents on the one hand, and the Islamist currents on the other, found an unhoped-for space in which 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 transition from an ethnic antagonism toward two henceforth resolutely national conceptions.

Thenceforth, Nasser himself resolved to strip his posture of its messianic charge and its revolutionary romanticism.

Adopting from then on the traits of a realist statesman, he refocused his ambitions primarily on the Egyptian fold alone.

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 1968 Manifesto sketched an unlocking of the political system and laid the foundations of a modern state, henceforth seated on 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 a "corrective revolution".

This process proved to be a methodical undertaking of de-Nasserisation of the Egyptian state, inaugurated by an overhaul of institutions and the incarceration of the barons close to Nasser.

Proclaimed the "believer president", Sadat orchestrated a rapprochement with the Muslim Brotherhood, decreeing the amnesty and release of several of its militants.

On the doctrinal level, he consecrated the retreat into Egyptianness 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 onwards, by the Infitah, a policy of relative liberalisation of the economy.

Strengthened by the political credit acquired during the Yom Kippur War, he deployed a smear campaign against Nasser's memory, imputing to the haughtiness of his myth 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 Egyptians, revealing an abyss between the actual complexity of the statesman and the image fixed by contemporary history.

THE BA'ATH, FROM IDEAL TO AUTOCRACY

As concerns the second matrix of Arab socialism, namely the Ba'ath party, the history obeys a different genesis.

If its founders were inspired, such as Nasser, by Arab cultural radiance and by the glimmers of the Nahda, it was singularly through the experience of their apprenticeship years in Paris that their awakening to pan-Arab ideology took place.

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

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

In Paris, they steeped themselves in Marxist circles of influence, while letting themselves be seduced by the mystique of German romanticism and its organic conception of the nation.

However, the year 1936 sounded the hour of disillusionments: the victory of the Popular Front in France and the refusal of Léon Blum to ratify Syria's treaty of independence were experienced as a betrayal.

This schism pushed Aflaq and Bitar to break definitively with the European left, which they posited from then on 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 National Brotherhood Party (Hizb al-Ikha al-Watani), pivot of the military coup of 1941.

Michel Aflaq would bring his anointing to this sedition, which he conceptualised, within his own paradigm, as the just reconquest of power by the Iraqi people in the face of the illegitimacy of the Hashemite dynasty subservient to British interests.

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

It is true that, occurring at the paroxysm of the Second World War, this coup de force opportunely served the strategic interests of the Axis.

The Iraqi government of National Defence was, moreover, not long in appropriating certain fascistic attributes within its state and partisan structures, while tolerating the diffusion of totalitarian manifestos, foremost among them Mein Kampf.

For all that, scientific analysis demands that the fundamentally utilitarian, and not ideological, character of this rapprochement be underscored with precision.

Far from an authentic convergence, this transitory alliance obeyed the cold logic of Realpolitik, that which holds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It was a matter, for these movements, of instrumentalising the support of Berlin and Rome for the sole end of breaking colonisation.

It remains that this misunderstanding is also fed by the trajectory of a certain Zaki al-Arsouzi.

If it is true that the latter had militated within the League of National Action (an organisation whose methods and aesthetics borrowed broad elements from European fascisms), he nonetheless rejected in categorical fashion the 1941 coup d'état in Iraq.

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

Erecting, in parallel to the works of Michel Aflaq and Bitar, his own Resurrection (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.

The definitive symbiosis was for its part accomplished in 1953, with the adjunction to the Ba'ath party of the Arab Socialist Movement.

This organic 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 transformation and officially took the title of Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party.

The Ba'ath's initial anchoring took place in Syria, where it registered honourable suffrage as early as the electoral jousts of 1954.

As mentioned supra, the organisation took an active part in the coup de force against Nasserian tutelage, whose suffocating centralism and autocratic nature it repudiated.

The party definitively seized the reins of the state in March 1963 thanks to 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 terrain.

Although Bitar attempted to open his ranks to Nasserian factions in order to ward off the spectre of a counter-putsch, it appeared that the effective epicentre of power had deserted the fold of the civil authorities (Bitar and Aflaq).

The decisional 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 by brutally ousting civil power in February 1966, seizing by force control of the Ba'ath's Central Committee.

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

The 1966 schism 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 secured hegemonic control of the political apparatus and the armed forces.

This neo-Ba'athist mutation nonetheless drew the wrath of the founding fathers of the Ba'ath.

Powerless witnesses to the disavowal of their ideal, the original 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 cover of socialism, of a predatory state bourgeoisie.

Worse still, they accused the power of having instrumentalised the phases of economic liberalisation to place their relatives at the head of large private enterprises, and this on the basis of properly tribal and confessional logics, at the antipodes of the intransigent secularism of the original Ba'ath.

For the old guard, the pan-Arab mystique had ceased to be the horizon of the Syrian government, becoming nothing more than a simple instrument of social control and internal legitimation.

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

On the side of the Iraqi Ba'ath, whose branch was active legally as early as 1952, the trajectory proved equally chaotic.

If the party supported the Nasserian coup of 1963, its honeymoon with power was of short duration: rapidly ousted, the formation was the object of a virulent demonisation campaign.

This episode was then staged by its adversaries as a veritable liberation of Iraq in the face of 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. Thanks to 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 imposed himself from the outset as the éminence grise of the regime, patiently orchestrating control of the security structures before consummating his total usurpation by officially seizing the presidency in 1979.

While he secured the unfailing support of orthodox Ba'athists, notably through the building of a generous welfare state financed by oil rent, the strengthening of the partisan apparatus and a vibrant instrumentalisation of the pan-Arab imaginary, Saddam Hussein simultaneously laid the foundations of a frightful authoritarian machine.

Unlike Assad's Syrian regime, Saddamist power maintained a veritable ideological hypertrophy combined with a repressive apparatus of unprecedented sophistication.

The regime's veneer nonetheless cracked under the weight of military disasters.

In the aftermath of the fiasco of the Iran war, then 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 consummated break with the historical secularism of the Ba'ath, this religious reorientation of the state favoured a surprising recuperation of the president by the presses affiliated with Islamist movements.

Behind the scenes, Arab universalism definitively faded in favour of a policy of tribal and confessional retreat, with clan allegiance becoming at times necessary.

In the final analysis, the two Ba'athist experiences, Syrian and Iraqi, dramatically turned away from their theoretical model.

The eminently emancipatory ideals of Arab socialism were ruined in the construction of military autocracies.

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

THE OTHER BREEDING GROUNDS: GADDAFI, BEN BELLA AND THE PERIPHERIES OF THE MODEL

We could of course at length set out the various avatars of the different Arab socialist models. One could mention Gaddafi, whose trajectory bifurcated from an initial Nasserism toward what became Gaddafism, which would reorient itself toward pan-Africanism in the face of the observed failure of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism.

One could likewise analyse the socialist reforms of Ben Bella in Algeria, or 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 primarily 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 still more stimulating 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 might have, in theory, breathed a second chance into these historic formations, in the face of the debacle of nationalist governments of social-liberal or social-democratic tendency.

WHAT REMAINS: ARAB SOCIALISM AFTER THE ARAB SPRINGS

In Syria, first, the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime at the conclusion of a long and devastating civil war sealed the annihilation of the representation of Arab socialisms, materialised by the outright prohibition of the Ba'ath party and its allied formations.

In Iraq, in the immediate wake of the American invasion of 2003, the proscription of the Ba'ath party combined with the institutionalisation of political sectarianism precipitated the rise of confessional forces to the detriment of traditional ideological cleavages, marking the disappearance of Arab socialist parties from the political scene.

Everywhere else, most of these movements underwent a profound invisibilisation.

In Libya, a renewed surge of the Gaddafist Arab socialist current was admittedly sketched from 2020 onwards, carried by the candidacy aspirations of Seif al-Islam Gaddafi; however, 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 most certainly in Egypt and Tunisia that Arab socialism found its most fertile soil after the Springs, and this for two cardinal reasons.

On the one hand, these states were no longer governed by proponents of Arab socialism on the eve of their respective revolutions; on the other, these movements there enjoyed a historical and sedimented development well before the uprisings.

In Egypt, this anchoring was fed directly by the powerful Nasserian memorial heritage; in Tunisia, it leaned on the combined vitality of the student movement, the union apparatus and the heritage of the Socialist Destourian Party.

In Egypt, first, although the Nasserists accepted to appear on the list of the Democratic Alliance for Egypt led by the Muslim Brotherhood (on the basis of an electoral calculation and to ward off the spectre of counter-revolution), it must be observed that they promptly became disenchanted.

In the aftermath of the parliamentary ballot, the brotherhood totally marginalised the Nasserists, who then weighed in at only six seats, or seven if one adjoins the orthodox Nasserists who had left the coalition before the vote in the face of the Islamists' hegemony.

The Muslim Brotherhood then seized the totality of the presidencies of parliamentary commissions and secured 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 first-rank candidate against Mohamed Morsi; under the banner of Hamdeen Sabahi, they collected 20.7% of the suffrage, missing 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 in the face of the remnants of the Mubarak regime in order to preserve the unity of the revolutionary wing, henceforth grew concerned about the "Brotherhoodisation" of the state apparatus.

They experienced 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 the unilateral promulgation by Morsi of a Constitutional Declaration.

By this decree of rupture, the president arrogated to himself quasi-absolute powers, granting himself total immunity against any judicial recourse and shielding the Constituent Assembly against any attempt at dissolution.

For the Nasserists, as for the majority of secular political forces, the mask had then fallen.

The project of the Muslim Brotherhood now revealed itself in broad daylight, stretched toward the establishment of an Islamic republic. In reaction, more than thirty parties coalesced within the Egyptian National Salvation Front, which would in 2013 bring 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 masterfully instrumentalise the imaginary of each and every one, and singularly that of the Nasserists, who initially discerned in him the incarnation of a new Nasser.

The Nasserian networks then reactivated the iconography of the raïs 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 historical precedent of 1952. El-Sissi did not deprive himself of exploiting this parallel, borrowing a sovereigntist rhetoric with resolutely social accents.

Nevertheless, disillusionment was rapid: many came to realise 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.

Thenceforth, the current fractured.

A fringe chose to support the new president of the Republic in the name of the existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, while another shifted into opposition.

Standard-bearer of this resistance, the 2012 candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, presented himself again against Sissi in 2014, affirming that Nasserism could not be reduced to the wearing of military uniform; he would garner only a marginal score of 3% of the votes. In the same vein, one notes the emergence of the deputy Ahmed Tantawi who, between 2015 and 2020, embodied on his own the Nasserian opposition in Parliament, before being definitively sidelined from political life during the electoral sequence of 2024.

In Tunisia, the situation proves appreciably different.

In the first instance, the Socialist Destourian Party systematically obstructed the emergence of Arab socialist movements, forbidding them to acquire a veritable political apparatus.

No longer able to durably contain these ideological surges, the regime subsequently favoured the creation of satellite parties in order to confine within them Ba'athist, socialist and Nasserist ideologies, which it set about controlling.

These notably included the People's 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 a single seat after the revolution.

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

Thenceforth, one can identify at least three sensibilities of Tunisian Arab socialism. The first, of specifically Nasserian matrix, is embodied in the aftermath of the revolution by the Echaab party (People's Movement). This formation was constituted in the wake of the Nasserist Unionists Movement, itself stemming from the Arab National Rally Party close to Gaddafi in 1981.

In the course of its first years of existence, the party merged with a constellation of Nasserian factions, in order to reinforce its electoral anchoring, historically located in the south of Tunisia.

The second expression of Arab socialism in Tunisia is of Ba'athist nature.

Its genesis is often inscribed at the very heart of the initial structures of the Socialist Destourian Party, before its partisans chose the path of clandestinity to permeate the General Union of Tunisian Students, articulating themselves for a time on the fringes of the leftist movement Perspectives.

After the revolutionary earthquake, this sensibility was centred around two principal formations, both of them moored to the orthodoxy of the Iraqi faction.

In the first place stands out 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 Saddam Hussein's line, nonetheless 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 Nasserian 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 the 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 remains nonetheless singularly instructive.

While it is true that a preponderant part of its ideology proceeds from exogenous theories, the party deploys such a fierce pan-Arab vigour and such a touchy attachment to sovereigntist doctrines that it proves difficult not to mirror it within the looking-glass of socialist Arabism.

This doctrinal synthesis was carried by figures such as Chokri Belaïd, whose political consciousness was shaped during his law studies within Ba'athist Iraq.

Strongly tried by the verdict of the ballot box during the constituent elections of 2011, where the meagre portion allocated to the Nasserian forces and to the Watad (amounting respectively to two and one sole mandates) marked their marginalisation, these various movements understood the necessity of overcoming their historical atomisations.

It was with this in view that, at the close of 2012, a Popular Front intended to federate the forces of the left was born.

This coalitional architecture succeeded in the tour de force of agglomerating an a priori heteroclite ideological substrate, marrying Nasserists, Ba'athists and Marxists-Leninists, while adding to itself the Tunisian Workers' Communist Party, an ecological formation and several components of social-democratic or democratic-socialist obedience.

Under the rule of Chokri Belaïd, erected as the leader of this gathering, the coalition affirmed itself promptly as the most strident pole of contestation of the transition, with a frontal, theatricalised and inflexible hostility toward Ennahdha.

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 entire national territory.

In this configuration, the UGTT interposed itself as a veritable counter-power close to the Arab socialists, capable of escorting the anger of the masses and driving the government to immediate resignation.

Notwithstanding the replacement of the executive by a new cabinet likewise beholden to Ennahdha's direction.

The Popular Front for its part found itself precipitated into a new crisis of orientation, summoned to reinvent a leadership for itself at the very 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 Echaab's leadership in integrating 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 had a new tragedy when Brahmi was in turn the victim of Islamist terrorism barely eighteen days after his dissidence, releasing a new wave of large-scale social movements, of which the UGTT once again took the historical responsibility for ensuring political oversight 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 virtually rose to eighteen mandates if one aggregated the three Echaab deputies, the latter having made the choice to preserve its autonomy outside the alliance).

Thus affirming itself as the principal opposition force in the face of the governmental coalition knotted between Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdha.

This posture nonetheless stumbled on the test of representativeness and on the inability to stabilise a clear message within the public space.

Undermined by internal dissensions touching on societal stakes, as well as by exacerbated rivalries of leadership, the coalition foundered in a split 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, capitalising on its sovereigntist anchoring, made a remarkable breakthrough by securing fifteen mandates.

Strengthened by this new legitimacy, the movement would integrate, despite the refusal of Ennahdha, the ephemeral government of a sort of presidential majority led by Elyes Fakhfakh, deploying within it attempts at a social inflection of public policies before this cabinet was driven to resignation under the threat of a motion of censure brandished 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 large majority of the Arab socialist currents, foremost among which Echaab, the Popular Current and the remnants of the Watad, chose to bring their anointing to these exceptional measures.

This decision is rooted, first, in the rejection by Tunisian society of the post-revolutionary institutional order, a deleterious configuration within which the Arab socialist currents found themselves relegated to the periphery of power and exposed to an acute political violence whose responsibility was directly imputed to Ennahdha's leadership.

In second place, the person of the president of the republic is fundamentally distinguished from the memorial and purely aesthetic instrumentalisation manifested by El-Sissi.

The Tunisian president testifies to a more organic adhesion to several pivots of the Arab socialist frame of reference, whether his conception of the interventionist and regulatory role of the state in the economy or his unitary vision of the Arab nation.

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, he proclaimed the perenniality and topicality of the Nasserian horizon for Tunisia's march.

For all that, this discourse, although imbued with a resolutely revolutionary imaginary, escapes any exclusive belonging; it unfolds under the traits of a vaster syncretism, which enlarges its references by hybridising the legacy of social Arabism with other intellectual and juridical traditions.

From 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 to explicitly 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 mode of ballot that henceforth proscribed partisan labels, these forces managed to preserve their parliamentary weight (unlike the other political forces) by obtaining some fifteen seats.

They rallied within the ARP under the banner of the National Sovereign League bloc, uniting the deputies issued from the Echaab and Watad movements.

Nevertheless, the perenniality of this bloc rapidly collided with the test of facts.

If the Watad formally maintained its loyalty toward the process, internal tensions provoked an irremediable split, fragmenting the movement into two distinct formations bearing the same name, the one resolutely loyalist and the other (relatively) anchored in the opposition.

In parallel, the Echaab movement manifested a progressive disenchantment with the orientations of power.

The rupture took shape during the presidential election of 2024, where the candidacy of its secretary general gathered only a meagre portion of 1.97% of the suffrage.

These tensions accentuated during the year 2025, exacerbated by tensions between the government and the UGTT.

This conflict placed the Arab socialists in an uncomfortable posture, rendering arbitration painful between loyalty to the union confederation and support for the head of state.

On the occasion of the recent debates surrounding the 2026 finance law, Echaab's anchoring within the opposition now appears effective; the party even resumes 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 rather institutional opposition.

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 Nasserian Egypt to Ba'athist Iraq, as one of the most structured attempts in the Arab world to produce a doctrine of national emancipation that was 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 formations heir to this tradition remain present, although marginalised, in Egypt and Tunisia, while in Syria and Iraq, the proscription of the Ba'ath has materially closed the institutional chapter of this history.