page_title: Ba'athism
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Ba'athism / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The philosopher Zaki al-Arsuzi
context_page_description: Baathism is an Arab nationalist ideology that promotes the development and creation of a unified Arab state through the leadership of a vanguard party over a progressive revolutionary government. The ideology is officially based on the theories of the Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar.
  A Baathist society seeks enlightenment, renaissance of Arab culture, values and society. It supports the creation of one-party states and rejects political pluralism in an unspecified length of time – the Baath party theoretically uses an unspecified amount of time to develop an enlightened Arabic society. Baathism is based on principles of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, and Arab socialism, as well as social progress. It is a secular ideology. A Baathist state supports socialist economics to a varying degree and supports public ownership over the commanding heights of the economy, but opposes confiscatory policies with regard to private property. In Baathist ideology, socialism does not mean state-socialism or economic equality; rather, it has a strong current of modernization to it.
context_section_description: The origins of Baathism began with the political thought developed by Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq. While Aflaq, Bitar and Arsuzi were never members of the same organization, they are considered the founders of Baathism. The closest they ever came to being members of the same organization was in 1939, when those three together with Michel Quzman, Shakir al-As and Ilyas Qandalaft, tried to establish a party. This did not happen because Arsuzi personally disliked Aflaq and Aflaq seemed to have reciprocated the feeling.
  Arsuzi formed the Arab Baath Party in 1940 and his views influenced Aflaq, who alongside junior partner Salah al-Din al-Bitar founded the Arab Ihya Movement in 1940 that later renamed itself the Arab Baath Movement in 1943. Though Aflaq was influenced by him, Arsuzi initially did not cooperate with Aflaq's movement. Arsuzi suspected that the existence of the Arab Ihya Movement, which occasionally titled itself "Arab Baath" during 1941, was part of an imperialist plot to prevent his influence over the Arabs by creating a movement of the same name.
  Arsuzi was an Arab from Alexandretta who had been associated with Arab nationalist politics during the interwar period. He was inspired by the French Revolution, the German and Italian unification movements and the Japanese economic "miracle". His views were influenced by a number of prominent European philosophical and political figures, among them Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler.
  When Arsuzi left the League of Nationalist Action (LNA) party in 1939 after its popular leader died and the party had fallen into disarray, he founded the short-lived Arab National Party in 1939 and dissolved it later that year. On 29 November 1940, Arsuzi founded the Arab Baath. A significant conflict and turning point in the development of Baathism occurred when Arsuzi's and Aflaq's movements sparred over the issue of the 1941 coup d'etat by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and the subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War. Aflaq's movement supported al-Gaylani's government and the Iraqi government's war against the British and organized volunteers to go to Iraq and fight for the Iraqi government. However, Arsuzi opposed al-Gaylani's government, considering the coup to be poorly-planned and a failure. At this point, Arsuzi's party lost members and support that transferred to Aflaq's movement.
  Subsequently, Arsuzi's direct influence in Arab politics collapsed after Vichy French authorities expelled him from Syria in 1941. Aflaq's Arab Baath Movement's next major political action was its support of Lebanon's war of independence from France in 1943. The Arab Baath Movement did not solidify for years until it held its first party congress in 1947, when it merged with the Arab Socialist Party led by Akram al-Hawrani to establish the Arab Socialist Baath Party.
  In 1966, the Baath movement split in half: one Syrian-dominated and one Iraqi-dominated. Scholar Ofra Bengio claims that a consequence of the split was that Arsuzi took Aflaq's place as the official father of Baathist thought in the pro-Syrian Baath movement while in the pro-Iraqi Baath movement Aflaq was still considered the de jure father of Baathist thought.
caption: Zaki al-Arsuzi, politician who influenced Baathist thought and that after the Baath Party splintered became the chief ideologist of the Syrian-dominated Baath Party
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