"The Arab Baath (formed between 1943 and 1947) as opposed to the Islamic Baath of yesteryear, was a significant development. It revitalised the idea of Arab nationalism and gave it a secular frame of reference.

More importantly, however, the Baath tied the idea of Arab unity with the concept of socialist humanism and placed socialism anew on the agenda of the Arab nation. The slogans of Baath were liberty, unity, socialism.

Unfortunately for Baath, it did not inherit the mantle of the Arab revolution because its ideologies did not take into account the contradiction between liberal democracy and socialism,

because they glossed over the relationship between socialism and mass mobilisation and organisation, and because the leadership preferred individualist theorising and rulers to relevant social theory and mass work.

Since Baath was born an adolescent intellectual, it was unable to surmount that condition and integrate itself in the society it purported to represent.

In the sixties, its military leaders became putschists and incapable of relying on the masses; the colonels depended on their fellow colonels and the civilians on their tribal associations, the intellectuals on their salon audiences.

Baath became only a party in name in the 1970s, not a revolutionary instrument for the transformation of Arab society."

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