One of the few constants of Syria’s long civil war has been the regularity with which European leaders were taken by surprise by new developments on the ground whose causes and consequences they failed to anticipate. From the first protests against the tyrannical rule of former President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 to his flight into exile as rebel armies marched on Damascus earlier this week, the European Union has repeatedly found itself scrambling to respond to a devastating conflict whose wider impact nearly destabilized European integration.
As the last remnants of the Assad regime now transfer power to the rebel coalition, it is crucial to explore why the efforts of EU institutions and member states to influence these dynamics so regularly failed, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes in building relations with a new post-Assad Syria.
This chronic misreading of Syrian society was already visible in European responses to Assad’s assumption of the presidency in July 2000 after the death of his predecessor and father, Hafez al-Assad. The sudden thaw in relations between Damascus and European states in the years after the younger Assad took power stood in stark contrast with how his father had relied heavily on Moscow’s support and built a close relationship with Tehran after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, both based on shared hostility to the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, and amid cautious efforts at European rapprochement with Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, hopes grew in EU capitals that Bashar’s purported support for political and economic reform could provide an opportunity to pull Syria toward a closer relationship with Europe once his father left the scene.
Upon taking power, Bashar was indeed willing to develop contacts with European leaders such as former French President Jacques Chirac and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair in the early 2000s. But the greater openness to European investment that followed did not lead to any deeper change in the Assad regime’s structures or in its partnership with Tehran and Lebanese Hezbollah. Throughout the 2000s, a systematic public relations campaign in Europe paid for by the Syrian state presented Assad as a young reformer struggling to dislodge supposed hardliners from his father’s generation, even as his close family and friends distributed privatized state assets among themselves.
To get more in-depth news and expert analysis on global affairs from WPR, sign up for our free Daily Review newsletter.
Things were not any better when it came to Syria’s impact on regional security. Mass protests in Beirut forced Damascus to withdraw Syrian troops from Lebanon in 2005. But despite continued EU efforts to court Assad, Syrian security services continued to allow jihadists to cross the border into Iraq to fight U.S. forces there, while intensifying assistance to Hezbollah in its war against Israel in 2006.
The Assad regime’s cynical exploitation of Western fears of jihadists meant that many EU governments were initially reluctant to cut ties with Damascus even after Assad’s violent suppression of mass protests demanding change in March 2011 triggered an armed revolt. Though the devastating brutality the Syrian regime displayed toward rebel communities escalated to include the use of chemical weapons, the prominent role of radicalized Islamists and jihadists within rebel militias enabled Assad to portray himself as a defender of secular values to EU and member state leaders, who ultimately pulled back from actively seeking to topple him.
The subsequent rise of the Islamic State alongside the refugee crisis that overwhelmed the EU’s borders in 2015 increased desperation in Europe to secure a swift resolution to the conflict, which was driving a substantial proportion of the refugee flows. Even as Russia’s intervention strengthened the hand of policymakers in Brussels who wanted to isolate Assad, subsequent rebel defeats meant that efforts to prod the EU toward re-establishing official relations with his regime began to see increasing success by the early 2020s.
An exclusive focus on Syria’s emerging new political class would repeat the same pattern of mistakes that has defined EU strategy toward the Middle East during the Assad era.
Given the growing pressure to restore links with the Assad regime once it regained control of the city of Aleppo in 2016, it is remarkable that European institutions managed to sustain sanctions as long as they did. European policymakers did manage to slow momentum toward bringing Bashar back into the diplomatic fold as a legitimate actor, largely due to the regime’s horrific brutality, its role in enabling Iran to supply arms to Hezbollah and Hamas for their wars with Israel, and its close alignment with Russia. But if the lightning rebel offensive launched just two weeks ago had not toppled Assad’s hollowed-out regime, it is likely that most EU states would have soon begun to seek out the kind of deals with Assad that defined European policy toward Syria before the civil war erupted in 2011.
The fact that Brussels came so close to abandoning even the pretense of upholding basic moral principles toward the Assad regime reflected two sources of dysfunction in European policy toward Syria and the wider Middle East, both exacerbated by the rise of far-right populist parties across Europe in recent years.
First, the Assad regime successfully exploited the EU’s obsession with finding quick short-term solutions to security and migration crises disrupting European politics. Whether it was regional turmoil caused by the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, the breakdown of the Israel-Palestine peace process in the late 1990s or the devastation unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the 2000s, both Hafez and Bashar Assad regularly used proxy militias and terror networks to stoke chaos, which they would then offer to bring back under control when seeking deals with European counterparts. Once the Syrian uprising gained momentum, Bashar’s intentional practice of using civilian casualties to fuel sectarian rebel radicalization was designed to convince external powers there were no viable alternatives to his system, a long-established tactic the regime had deployed since Hafez rose to power in the late 1960s.
That so many European policymakers were so easily suckered by Assad’s claims that Syria would burn without his use of crushing violence flowed out of the second source of Europe’s dysfunctional approach to the conflict: a frequently racist tendency within parts of the EU to assume that the Arab world cannot cope with democratic forms of government. These prejudices are particularly prevalent among European far-right populists, many of whom openly cultivated contacts with senior figures in the Assad regime in ways that flaunted a lack of concern over the mass imprisonment, torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of people by Syria’s security services. Yet the conviction that Arabs can only be ruled by a “strong hand” also lingers in center-right and center-left political networks whose attitudes toward the Middle East are still influenced by neo-imperial legacies from the formative years of European integration in the 1950s, defined by figures such as Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy adviser Jacques Foccart or the founding chairman of Eni—Italy’s state oil corporation—Enrico Mattei.
Though European think tanks and universities regularly produce high-quality analysis of social trends among wider populations in the Middle East, high-level policymakers remain primarily focused on relations with narrow elites that dominate the governance of Arab states. In the decades leading up to the 2011 uprising in Syria, desperation to gain insight into the internal workings of the Assad family led European diplomats to obsess over the machinations of the ruling clan at the expense of a more comprehensive understanding of Syrian society as a whole. Without such a wider network of contacts to ensure a flow of information from all levels of Syrian life—including from even the more peripheral provinces—EU institutions and member states found themselves blindsided as the civil war broke out and progressed, as the sudden emergence of new powerbrokers among both the rebels and the regime often pulled the civil war in unexpected directions.
These deeply-rooted structural dysfunctions in EU strategy formulation also explain why Brussels is struggling to process how jihadist commanders like Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, movement, which led the successful rebel offensive—were able to topple the Assad regime in two weeks. Focused as they were on Assad and his great-power backers in Russia and Iran, many senior officials in Brussels ignored warnings from frontline diplomats and intelligence analysts about the seriousness with which Jolani was pursuing a rebel state-building project. Only after the fall of Aleppo and Hama last week, which made clear that the regime’s collapse was imminent, did European leaders begin to engage with the painstaking work many low-level officials in EU institutions and member states had undertaken to develop lines of communication with HTS and other rising social groups that are on the cusp of becoming key players in a new Syria.
Yet an exclusive focus on an emerging new political class epitomized by figures such as Jolani or Raed Saleh—director of the White Helmets civil defense organization—would repeat the same pattern of mistakes that has defined EU strategy toward the Middle East during the Assad era. To understand societies as complex and diverse as Syria, let alone influence them, EU institutions need to look beyond ruling elites in Damascus and build a visible presence in regional cities. Only that will demonstrate that Brussels takes the concerns of all Syrians seriously in its efforts to help them overcome the upcoming challenges that will inevitably affect Europe too. Most importantly, a strategic effort by European institutions to help Syrians rebuild their shattered country would also repay a moral debt toward them that the EU should never have incurred.
In prioritizing short-term stability over the foundations needed for a sustainable regional order since 2011, EU policymakers remained trapped by assumptions that proved to be profoundly flawed. Unless they re-examine those assumptions, they are likely to repeat the mistakes that grew out of them today.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.
The post Europe Needs to Update Its Thinking for a Post-Assad Syria appeared first on World Politics Review.
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6759d92613af4ffab3a9f25aa32f60d2&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2Fnews%2Feurope-needs-thinking-post-assad-145046914.html&c=14628292423198068588&mkt=de-de
Author :
Publish date : 2024-12-11 06:50:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
