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Rural Politics in Ba'thist Syria: A Case Study in the Role of the Countryside in the Political Development of Arab Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Raymond A. Hinnebusch
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Extract

The importance of the countryside (rief) for the social and economic development of Arab societies whose populations are still greatly peasant in composition and whose wealth is still based on agriculture seems incontestable. Less obvious, but equally important, is the political role of the peasantry and the rural areas in the process of transition from traditional to more modern types of social and political systems in the Middle East. There is plenty of evidence that political modernization cannot take place without a solution to the peasant problem — without their incorporation into the political system. Huntington holds that in modernizing countries where the bulk of the population is rural but where politics remains a predominately urban game, governments are likely to be ephemeral, unstable and ineffective. He argues that the establishment of stable and effective regimes requires bridging the urban-rural gap through some coalition of urban and rural forces which will bring the peasantry into the system. Furthermore, both Huntington and Barrington Moore argue that the particular type of leadership under which the peasants are brought into the political system greatly shapes the whole subsequent development of the system. The countryside, according to Huntington, plays a crucial swing role and this role varies from very conservative to very revolutionary. Three possibilities seem to be typical. One outcome is where peasants are brought into the system by upper-class leadership, sometimes through a formally liberal type electoral system, informally based on patronage and traditional symbolism, sometimes through a conservative authoritarian system.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 110 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1982

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References

1 For theoretical discussions of the role of the peasantry in social and political modernization, see Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968), especially pp. 72–78Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966)Google Scholar; and Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

2 Arudki, Yehya, al-Iqtisâd al-Sûriyya al-Hadîth [The Modern Syrian Economy] (Damascus, 1972) pp. 213–29Google Scholar.

3 For a theoretical discussion of patrimonialism and neofeudalism see Sjoberg, Gideon, The Pre-Industrial City (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Marx's, discussion of the division of labor in The German Ideology (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, 1964) pp. 346–58Google Scholar.

4 See, e.g., Weulersse, Jacques, Paysans de Syrie et du Proche Orient (Paris, 1946)Google Scholar; and Warriner, Doreen, Land and Poverty in the Middle East (New York, 1948)Google Scholar.

5 Dusen, Michael H. Van, “Syria: Downfall of a Traditional Elite,” in Political Elites and Political Modernization in the Middle East, ed. Tachau, Frank (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) p. 139Google Scholar.

6 Statistics on education rely on discussion in “Development Planning and Social Objectives in Syria,” United Nations Studies on Selected Development Problems in Various Countries in the Middle East, 1971 (New York, 1971), pp. 8–16Google Scholar.

7 Analysis and data regarding the new political institutions in the rief rely on fieldwork done in Syria, including some at the village level, 1973–4.

8 These figures are derived from officially published materials on the agrarian reform and on the recent agricultural census. They should obviously be taken as mere “guesstimates.”

9 See UN Statistical Yearbook 1975 (New York, 1976), e.g., indices of agricultural production, p. 111Google Scholar.