#OnThisDay, April 7th, 1947, the Ba’ath Party was founded by Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, with connections to a party of the same name by Zaki al-Arsuzi in #Syria. It’s ideology was based on Arab #nationalism, #socialism, and anti-imperialism.

Early on the party, which name means renaissance or resurrection, was avant-garde for its time, with an emphasis on secularism, progressive views on gender, and anti-sectarianism. Aflaq, as with many other early Ba’athists, was a former communist who studied in France.

The party later merged with the leftist populist Akram al Hawrani’s Arab Socialist Movement, and became the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. In the beginning, the party was actually at the receiving end of political persecution and many of its leaders spent time in exile in #Lebanon.

Following the end of Shishakli’s dictatorship in 1954, which the Ba’ath played a part, the party found success through elections and later pushed hard for a union with #Egypt. The United Arab Republic was founded in 1958 with Nasser as a first step towards Arab unity.

However, the party had to self disband, and Egypt's rule over #Syria became a source of resentment. The UAR ceased to exist in 1961 when a #coup took #Damascus out of the union. The first potential step towards Arab unity had failed.

The 1960s changed the calculus for the Ba'ath, and the party finally secured power in a coup against the "successionist" government on March 8, 1963, an event dramatized with questionable accuracy recently in the Netflix series "The Spy."

After some shuffling and a failed Nasserist coup in July of 63, Amin al-Hafiz led Syria until he was overthrown in 1966 and a much more hard-line leftist faction of the party, headed by Salah Jadid took power. The Ba'ath now looked radically different from when they started.

The party had also set up shop in Iraq. First overthrowing Abd al-Karim Qasim in February 1963, the so-called Ramadan Revolution, but was forced out again by November that same year. The Ba'ath reached power in 1968 in #Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Ba'ath in Syria headed by Jadid forged a close relationship with the Soviet Union and the Palestinians, most notably leading up to the events of the Six Day War in 1967 and Black September in Jordan in 1970, both were miserable failures for the Syrian government.

Finally Hafez al-Assad seized power in November 13, 1970 to steer #Syria back from its hard-left alignment with socialism and the Soviet Union, and sought out a more "moderate" approach to the economy, which was a welcomed relief for many in the country.

But for the Ba'ath, the damage was already done. A split dramatically unfolded with the Iraqi Ba'athists, and many of the party's Syrian comrades found themselves in exile in Baghdad, such as Michel Aflaq and Amin al-Hafez.

Other events during the 1970s diminished the Ba'ath pan-Arab standing, especially the military intervention in Lebanon in 1976 that prevented the PLO and Lebanese leftist from achieving victory over the right-wing forces.

Furthermore, a series of Islamist uprisings in Syria also forced the Ba'ath to rely more heavily on brutal suppression to quell these rebellions, especially in 1982. This set the secular party on a long cycle of confrontation, suppression, & reconciliation w/ religious politics.

The party also transformed dramatically with the hereditary succession of power from Hafez al-Assad to his son, Bashar, in the year 2000. The "republic" headed by the Ba'ath was now something resembling an Arab monarchy.

But Bashar, at least in the beginning was popular, young and beloved by many...and reforms appeared to open up the country with the Damascus Spring, before it was quickly reversed. Furthermore, the Ba'ath's socialism was largely done away with to allow for a neoliberal economy.

Flash forward to 2020, nine years into a brutal and complicated civil war. How does the Ba'ath Party in Syria, move forward? Is there anything like a "socialism for the 21st century" for the party? Hounded and reviled in Iraq, what can the Ba'ath do once the Syrian conflict ends?

Can the Ba'ath party take advantage of its influence over #Lebanon, + #Syria's relations with #Russia and #Iran? How does it revive its ideology and make pan-Arabism or its brand relevant to the region again? To sum up this already long thread, I see two potential avenues...

1st, is to position itself as a modern, secular bulwark against political Islamist, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood, as Egypt has done. It can do this by positioning #Syria with the #UAE and #SaudiArabia. This will take many years and won't be easy, but will be one option.

The other, will be to take advantage of the so-called "Deal of the Century" and revive the Palestinian issue, which has largely been sidelined in the West. Mahmood Abbas is 84 yrs old and the succession process might yield some opportunities for #Damascus.

In conclusion, how the Ba'ath move fwd as a party will be monitored closely as Assad re-establishes control over the entirety of Syria in the future, especially in regards to confronting Turkey & drawing the Kurds back in through a mix of force & acquiescence. Thanks for reading.