The Syria That Looked Stable

Memory is remarkably good at tidying things up.

This is particularly true of countries that subsequently endure catastrophe. Once a place has experienced war, displacement and destroyed cities, almost anything that came before can acquire a certain glow. Streets had lights. Shops opened. People went to work. You could drive from Damascus to Aleppo without consulting a map of front lines.

By those standards, Syria before 2011 can look almost enviable.

But that is the trouble with comparing peace with war. Peace will usually win.

The more interesting question is what Syria actually looked like before the uprising began.

That matters now because the country is once again trying to decide what should be recovered from its past and what should be left there. The fall of Bashar al-Assad ended a political order that had lasted for more than half a century. It did not answer the more difficult question of what should replace it.

To understand that problem, it is useful to return to 2000, when another new president arrived promising change.

Bashar al-Assad was 34 when his father, Hafez, died after three decades in power. There was one constitutional inconvenience: the president was required to be at least 40.

Parliament solved it quickly. The constitution was amended to lower the minimum age to 34, and Bashar was subsequently confirmed as president in a referendum in which he was the only candidate.

There was nevertheless genuine optimism about him. He was young, had spent time in Britain and spoke about modernisation, transparency and reform. After 30 years of Hafez al-Assad, even the vocabulary sounded different.

Then something unusual happened.

Syrians began talking politics.

Writers, academics, activists and professionals gathered in private homes and discussion groups. They debated democracy, civil society, political prisoners and reform. Statements circulated. Intellectual forums appeared.

The period became known as the Damascus Spring.

It was a lovely name for something that lasted roughly as long as an actual spring.

By 2001, the government was closing political forums and arresting prominent activists. The brief experiment in openness had encountered the limits of a system willing to discuss reform so long as nobody attempted very much of it.

That contradiction would characterise much of Bashar al-Assad’s first decade: the language of modernisation alongside the preservation of an extraordinarily restrictive political system.

Syria remained under emergency law. Security agencies possessed sweeping powers. Political opposition was dangerous, independent organisation severely constrained and the Baath Party remained constitutionally entrenched at the centre of political life.

There were elections, but not in the sense that normally makes elections interesting.

Assad’s presidency was confirmed by referendum in 2000 and again in 2007, without an opposing presidential candidate.

This was one version of Syrian stability.

The economic story was more complicated.

Assad inherited an economy shaped by decades of state control and cautiously opened parts of it. Private banks appeared. Investment rules changed. Mobile phones spread. Consumer goods became more plentiful. Damascus acquired fashionable restaurants, cafés and shops.

To someone visiting certain parts of the capital, Syria could appear to be loosening up.

The problem was that countries are considerably larger than their capital-city cafés.

Economic liberalisation produced new opportunities, but they were distributed unevenly. State employment became less able to absorb a growing population, subsidies were reduced and corruption remained deeply embedded in economic life. Market reforms also unfolded within a political system in which proximity to power could matter enormously.

A more private economy was emerging without a corresponding opening of political life.

Away from the capital, other pressures were accumulating.

From 2006, Syria experienced a severe multi-year drought, with agricultural communities in the northeast particularly exposed. Crops failed, livestock herds suffered and families dependent on farming faced increasing hardship.

It is tempting, knowing what happened next, to draw a straight line from drought to migration to uprising.

History was not so obliging.

The role of drought in the events of 2011 remains contested. Researchers have challenged both estimates of drought-driven migration and attempts to treat environmental stress as a direct cause of the uprising. What is clearer is that drought struck communities already vulnerable to poverty, water scarcity, agricultural mismanagement and uneven economic reform.

The distinction matters.

Rainfall did not produce a revolution. Nor did farmers displaced from the northeast simply arrive in cities and begin one. Environmental pressure interacted with decisions about water, agriculture, subsidies and development, as well as with much older problems of inequality and political exclusion.

By the end of the decade, Syria contained a peculiar combination of political immobility and social change. Its population was young and growing. Satellite television and the internet had widened the world visible to Syrians. Economic reforms had made wealth more conspicuous without making opportunity equally available. Some rural communities were under severe pressure.

And politics offered remarkably little room in which dissatisfaction could be expressed.

There had already been warnings.

The Damascus Spring demonstrated an appetite among some Syrians for political reform. Kurdish unrest in Qamishli in 2004 exposed another fault line and was met with lethal force and arrests. The Damascus Declaration of 2005 brought opposition figures together around demands for democratic change.

The government responded largely as it had before: restrictions, pressure and imprisonment.

None of this meant an uprising was inevitable.

That is one of the traps of reading history backwards. Once we know demonstrations began in 2011, every arrest, drought and economic statistic starts looking like an arrow pointing helpfully towards Daraa.

People living through those years had no such map.

They went to work, raised children, opened businesses, attended weddings and planned futures. Some supported the government. Some opposed it. Many lived somewhere in the enormous territory between political enthusiasm and political resistance.

Ordinary life continued.

So did the pressures beneath it.

Then came 2011.

The uprisings that began in Tunisia and spread through Egypt, Libya and elsewhere altered what seemed politically possible across the Arab world. In Syria, demonstrations followed the detention and mistreatment of schoolchildren in Daraa accused of writing anti-government graffiti.

The government’s response helped turn a local confrontation into something much larger.

Security forces fired on protesters. Funerals became demonstrations. Deaths produced more funerals, and more demonstrations. Demands for reform widened as repression intensified.

The stability that had defined Syria’s political image was beginning to break down.

What followed was so destructive that it inevitably changed how everything before it would be remembered.

That is where nostalgia becomes understandable.

If the comparison is between Damascus in 2008 and Damascus during the worst years of war, 2008 wins without difficulty. Electricity was more reliable. The currency had value. Families had not yet been scattered across continents. Ancient cities had not become battlefields.

Millions of Syrians remember ordinary lives from those years because they really did have ordinary lives.

But remembering that normality is not the same as concluding that the political and economic order beneath it was healthy.

That distinction matters for Syria now.

The country faces the immense task of rebuilding homes, power stations, roads, schools and businesses. It needs investment and jobs. It needs functioning institutions. It needs to persuade at least some of the millions of Syrians who left that there is a future worth returning to.

Reconstruction naturally encourages attention to things that can be counted: megawatts generated, kilometres of railway restored, houses built, investment agreements signed.

The Syria of the 2000s offers a reminder that those things are not enough.

A country can open banks and still have cronyism. It can attract investment while opportunity remains concentrated among people with the right connections. It can build infrastructure while neglecting communities far from the capital. It can speak constantly of reform while leaving meaningful political participation somewhere over the horizon.

And it can be stable until, rather abruptly, it isn’t.

The years before 2011 therefore deserve something better than either nostalgia or caricature.

Syria was not a paradise destroyed without warning. Nor was ordinary life under Assad an unbroken catalogue of misery. The normality many Syrians remember existed alongside political exclusion, corruption, inequality and mounting economic pressures.

That is what makes the period worth examining now.

The fall of Assad has given Syria an opportunity to build something different. Whether it does so will depend on more than reconstruction, investment or the restoration of institutions. It will depend in part on whether the new state understands what was already failing long before the old one collapsed.

Rebuilding what Syria lost will be difficult enough.

Rebuilding the conditions that helped it fall apart would be easier.