Alawite statement raises questions about autonomy [THE NATIONAL]

April 7, 2016Last week, a group of Alawites in Syria released a statement around identity. The document contained a great deal of religious content, in which the authors tried to carve out a space for Alawite religion as the “third” approach in Islam after Sunni and Shia. The religious and historical aspects of that aside, the document raised a much larger issue – that of citizenship and belonging in the Arab world. The authors may not have realised, but it is also the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot and the two issues are not unrelated.There is a great deal of revisionism around the treaty between Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, two European diplomats. In some narratives, the present borders of the region are fundamentally the same as those that Sykes and Picot specified, dividing the region into British and French spheres of influence. Of course, any comparison of the maps shows that to be demonstrably false. But that isn’t to say that Sykes-Picot was irrelevant.Sykes-Picot was part of a process that had everything to do with autonomy and the freedom of individuals and societies in the Arab world to decide what they did or did not want to do. Sykes-Picot wasn’t the first decision that disabused the peoples of the region of their autonomy, nor would it be the last – but it certainly was an incredibly significant attempt.A century later, Arabs would descend on the streets demanding their autonomy – which is why so many historians and analysts in the Arab world have no problem in seeing the Arab uprisings as deeply connected to a long-running response and reaction to the Sykes-Picot phenomenon, if not Sykes-Picot itself.Sykes-Picot was about foreign powers colonising the region and engaging in imperial activities therein. Of course, colonialism did end. But the autonomy of individuals and communities in those societies did not become the building block of any of those societies. In many countries, colonial enterprises were exchanged for nationalism – which, ironically, often had the autonomy of the “nation” at its basis. But “nation” was not always well thought out and in practice individuals and communities found their own autonomy rather circumscribed. Those power elements were indigenous, but the dynamics of statehood they set in place would create the conditions decades later for communities insistent on change.When we consider the underlying political message of the Alawite statement, there are two interesting themes that continually come up.The first is an emphasis on the Alawites of Syria not being considered a minority, though of course demographically they are. Rather, and this is the second theme, they are to be considered simply as citizens – and there is no such thing as minority citizenship. Either one is a citizen, or one isn’t.Membership of various ethnic or religious groups notwithstanding, the concept of citizenship doesn’t admit of majority and minority status.Citizenship is often presented as the “solution” within the Arab world to problems around good governance and what Arabs protesting in 2011 were really all about.There is some value in viewing 2011 through that prism, but citizenship in this sense is a 20th century phenomenon, rooted in a particular worldview and a particular philosophy. Perhaps protesters had that in mind, but one suspects that there is something far more basic and fundamental involved here. And that is the notion of belonging and rootedness, which brings us back to Sykes-Picot.A hundred years ago, foreign powers, involved in adventurism within the region, often using the notion of minority rights as excuses to be involved in their imperial activities (a word which they had no shame in explicitly using), decided to override those notions of belonging, and rootedness.The British Empire had no belonging in the region, nor did the French. When it came to rootedness, the entire colonial project depended on the creation of a colonial class that would administer the colonies alongside the foreign power. That colonial class would be trained to be as much like the colonisers as possible – and in so doing, their rootedness would be questionable. And once that dynamic was put into place, it was difficult to break.A hundred years ago, Arab autonomy was overridden, and continued to be as such. In the aftermath of the Arab revolutionary uprisings, the most successful examples of genuine stability are those places where rulers recognised that the building blocks of society, individuals and communities, had the right to demand more autonomy.The Alawite declaration may or may not prove to be a watershed for Syrian Alawites – only time will tell, against the backdrop of this brutal war.But the questions the document raised in terms of belonging and autonomy are real questions that will outlast the Syrian conflict, and will continue to trouble the Arab world until they are finally dealt with.Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a non-resident senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DCOn Twitter: @hahellyerSource: The National