Situating the Syrian State: Nation and Education 1914–2014

Abstract

Belonging is a fuzzy concept that captures a vast range of private and public human social interactions. Citizenship is a little more tangible, particularly in the cases of excluded citizens. Traditional approaches to these two concepts have pointed, reflex-like, to the role of the nation-state in crafting them. As Craig Calhoun (2007) said, “nationalism helps locate an experience of belonging in a world of global flows and fears” (Calhoun 2007: 1–2). Discussions of belonging and citizenship, which are too easily approached from a normative standpoint in both popular and academic discourses, can sometimes overlook the importance of coherent and coercive power in shaping not only the flows, but the fears (Butenschøn 2000). This merits the extended disentanglement of the “theoretical” approaches to nations and the state. Looking at sentiments of belonging and nationalism and working backward in time should be buttressed by analysis that starts in the past. This can reveal the role of the state as the prime forger of citizens, national belonging and itself being an outcome of social antagonisms. The Syrian state’s intervention in education over the past century, as it was forged out of colonial abruptness and now finding itself in an equally crude and exposed fight for its survival, presents an interesting case study.