Between Democratic Hope and Centrifugal Fears. Syria’s Unexpected Open-ended Intifada CARSTEN WIELAND T he Arab Spring has plunged some of the most notorious police states into turmoil. The secret services(mukhabarat) of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, and Libya’s Ghaddafi have long been regarded as invincible and sometimes even as stabilizing factors by Western strategists. Furthermore, these are the more secularist states in the Arab world. The same is obviously true of Syria where one of the toughest regimes(with a secularist ideology) is struggling for survival. President Bashar al-Assad’s grip on the Syrian people was seen as particularly effective because there seemed to be enough soft power to keep rulers and ruled on some sort of common ground. Perceived stabilizing factors included the personality of the 45-year-old president himself, a notorious security apparatus, calm and stability inside the country, peaceful coexistence of minorities, a – albeit diminishingly so – tolerable gap between rich and poor, and, above all, shared ideological assumptions between the regime and the population, including major parts of the domestic opposition. Baathist Syria, as the last pan-Arab mouthpiece and frontline state against Israel, seemed to have enough ideological resources and more political leverage during times of crisis than pro-Western Arab authoritarian regimes. This is why President Bashar al-Assad felt relaxed for far too long, although Syria’s socio-economic frustrations, extremely poor governance and high levels of repression are comparable to the Arab states in which revolutions have succeeded in toppling the autocrats. In a notorious interview with the Wall Street Journal at the end of January, Assad as­sured the interviewer:»Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates dis­turbances.« 1 Opposition figures have attributed to Assad an increasing 1. Interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in: Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011; http://online.wsj.com/article/ sb 100014240527487038332045761147124411228 ipg 4/2011 Wieland, Syria’s Open-ended Intifada 45