Syria today is the most dynamic diplomatic venue in the Middle East because it is the most strategically contested one – as it has been for millennia. The outcome of the competition to control Syrian governance and alliances will define political trends in the Levant and the wider Middle East for years to come.
Three concentric circles of domestic, regional, and global actors compete for power and influence in Syria because of the country’s unique position and status. It is a rare complete and consequential Arab country, due to its human and natural resources, strategic geography, and political, cultural, and ethnic ties in the Middle East and the world.
Syria today, even in its dilapidated state after half a century of autocratic abuse and 13 years of war, hosts hundreds of diplomats, businesspeople, civic activists, and carpetbaggers. But this is not new.
The people and rulers of the land of Syria have experienced this throughout the last 5,000 years, ever since Damascus and Aleppo emerged as productive, vibrant, and strategic urban centres in the third millennium BC. Throughout recorded settled human history, the land and people of Syria have consistently generated knowledge, value systems, food, wealth, culture, technology, and identities that have made their land a strategic and coveted global crossroads.
A trip by land across Syria reveals overlapping networks of roads, forts, farms, water systems, and urban centres that have long serviced the east-west and north-south trade routes linking Asia, Europe and Africa. Along them stand Syria’s major entrepot cities – Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Deir az-Zor, Palmyra, Deraa, Latakia, and others – that have played prominent roles in the country’s history. Diverse ethnic and religious groups coexisted in these strategic urban centres – Sunnis, Shia, Alawites, Druze, Christians, Armenians, Jews, Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, and a few others. Throughout history, they lived together by negotiating differences through formal and informal mechanisms based in these cities.
Syria has always been and remains special because it is the most complete Arab country that enjoys all the assets of genuine statehood and nationhood. These include fertile land and water resources; mineral and agricultural wealth; an industrial base; human wealth in skilled citizens, proficient managers, and entrepreneurial businesspeople; a pluralistic citizenry across vibrant and creative urban centres, alongside deeply anchored villages and rural settlements; a strong national and cultural identity; and, access by land and sea to the wealth and trade routes of three continents.
It is also a consequential country because of its intrinsic wealth and its strategic geography. Ancient and modern empires – from Greece, Rome, Persia, Byzantium, and India to Britain and France, not to mention Russia and the United States – have fought to control Syria in order to secure access to its resources and important cross-continental routes that traverse it. If you want to get a feel for how that works, go spend a few days in the Damascus Sheraton Hotel.
More than any other Arab land, including modern Egypt and energy-rich Gulf states, Syria is also consequential because it emits across the region waves of emotion and identity that reflect what ordinary Arabs seek in order to fulfil both their human and civic aspirations. At various moments in the past century, these sentiments emanated from the realms of pluralism, constitutionalism, Islamism, anti-colonialism, and Arabism.
Syria is also important for people around the world to grasp because its experience reminds us in a single stroke of the entire modern Arab region’s strengths, weaknesses, failures, identities, and aspirations.
For millennia, “Syria” meant the bigger Greater Syria, or Bilad-el-Sham (“The Land of Sham”), which comprised most of the Levant and parts of the Fertile Crescent territories that are now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Turkey and Iraq.
It was truncated after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by Franco-British imperial militarism that prevented the birth of a constitutional monarchy anchored in an elected assembly in 1920. The subsequent colonial-engineered state predictably suffered the same troubles and vulnerabilities that define most Arab countries today.
These include: anti-colonial resistance and a struggle for independence that never achieved full sovereignty; non-stop foreign military interventions; attempts at consultative and participatory decision-making that always ended in dictatorships and military rule; bouts of genuine development in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and economic growth that ultimately stagnated and deteriorated, due to corruption, mismanagement, and lack of accountability; and pluralistic societies that often succumbed to sectarian wars, stoked by external forces.
Today, many Arab and other citizens across our region follow Syria’s transformation with hope and admiration. We all want Syria to become the modern Arab world’s first self-determinant, citizen-validated, and truly democratic and sovereign state.
It is not lost on any of us that Syria’s current leadership emanates from Islamist groups who were battle-hardened in US-occupied Iraq and overthrew the regime of Bashar al-Assad with US, Israeli, Turkish, and other non-Syrian assistance. This only heightens our cheering on Syrians to achieve their ambitious goals.
Regional and international powers that work overtime to influence the new Syrian leadership will use bribes, weapons, and subterfuge to ensure that the new Syria that emerges will align with them. If the new authorities resist, they will certainly face foreign-inspired and funded attempts to overthrow them, as has happened so often in the past across this region.
In a way, Syria’s struggle for dignified, stable statehood today is the delayed culmination of the historic but quashed decade of mass Arab uprising for democracy, pluralism, and equal rights for all. As in 1920, Syria today also tests whether external powers can allow its citizens to define themselves, and set an example for the rest of the region. If there is any Arab citizenry that can achieve this, it is the Syrians, because they have been practicing for this moment for 5,000 years.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.