Ba'ath Party - Ideology

Ideology

The motto "Unity, Liberty, Socialism" (Arabic: وحدة، حرية، اشتراكية‎ Waḥdah, Ḥurrīyah, Ishtirākīyah) was inspired by the French Jacobin political doctrine linking national unity and social equity. Unity refers to Arab unity, or Pan-Arabism; liberty emphasizes freedom from foreign control and interference (self-determination); socialism refers to Arab socialism, rather than to European socialism or communism. The idea that national freedom and the glory of the Arab Nation had been destroyed by Ottoman and Western imperialism was expounded in Michel Aflaq’s works On the Way of Resurrection and The Battle for One Destiny. Aflaq is commonly considered to be the father of Ba'athism.

Arab nationalism was influenced by 19th Century mainland European thinkers, notably conservative German philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte of the Königsberg University Kantian school, and French Positivists such as Auguste Comte and professor Ernest Renan of the Collège de France in Paris. Ba'ath party co-founders Aflaq and Salah al-Bitar both studied at the Sorbonne in the early 1930s when Positivism was still the dominant ideology among France’s academic elite.

The Kulturnation concept of Johann Gottfried Herder and the Grimm Brothers also had an impact. Kulturnation defines a nationality by its common cultural traditions and popular folklore, rather than by national, political, or religious boundaries. It was considered by some to be more suitable for German, Arab, Ottoman and Turkic countries.

Germany was seen as an anti-colonial power and friend of the Arab world; cultural and economic exchange and infrastructure projects such as the Baghdad Railway supported that impression. According to Paul Berman, early Arab nationalist thinker Sati' al-Husri was influenced by Fichte, a German philosopher famous for his conception of the nation-state and his influence on the German unification movement.

The Ba'ath party had a significant number of Christian Arabs among its founding members. For them, especially Aflaq, a resolutely nationalist and secular political framework was a way to evade faith-based Islamic orientation, prevent the marginalization of non-Muslims, and get full acknowledgment as citizens. During General Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's short-lived anti-British military coup in 1941, Iraq-based Arab nationalists (Sunni Muslims as well as Chaldean Christians) asked the Nazi German government to support them against British colonial rule.