The End of the Arab Bismarckian Era

Tony Badran translated (from Arabic) Ali Hamade’s most recent column from Beirut’s An Nahar newspaper about the winding down of Syria’s imperial project in Lebanon.

Regardless of the results of the Saudi-Iranian summit, there is an essential constant that will not change anytime soon: the era of the Arab Bismarck is over. The Arab Bismarck is of course a reference to the late Syrian president Hafez Assad, who was dubbed by some in the press as the would-be Bismarck of the Arabs, in reference to the Prussian statesman who unified the three hundred feuding German principalities, and led a unified Germany to victory over France under Napoleon III in the war of 1870, stripping it of the Alsace and Lorraine.
Hafez Assad got the title the Bismarck of the Arabs in a decisive and final manner after his total overtaking of Lebanon in 1990, and after getting exclusive mandate to implement the Taef Accord.
At the time, some extremists went as far as considering that Assad managed after 75 years to shred the Sykes-Picot agreement and avenge for Greater Syria, which was stripped of the four districts and Mount Lebanon itself. And in the fits of extremism in those days, it was said that the train of Arab unity had taken off starting with Syria’s de facto annexation of Lebanon and from Assad’s success in gathering several regional cards in his hands to cement the “imperial” basis of Assadist Syria. In other words, he managed to launch his imperial stage beginning with his “crown jewel,” Lebanon.
When president Bashar Assad inherited Syria and Lebanon from his father in 2000, after the Israeli withdrawal, he did not inherit a “unified Germany,” à la Bismarck, as it seemed. Rather, he inherited from his father a dominion similar to the Austrian empire of the early 20th century, which was comprised of Austria and Hungary, and whose separation was a matter of time. The first World War came to hasten that separation and mark the end of the empire.

Read the rest at Across the Bay.