Does Syria Dare to Be Permanently Neutral?

On 15 May 1955, in the Marble Hall of Vienna's Belvedere Palace, Austria's foreign minister, Leopold Figl, declared: "Austria is free!" The words became part of the nation's memory. He then held up the State Treaty from the palace balcony to the crowds below.

For ten years Austria had been split into four occupation zones and its capital into four sectors. Jeeps crowded with American, British, French and Soviet soldiers patrolled the city. None of the occupiers would leave Austria to its rivals. Leaving alone meant handing a gift to the enemy. Staying meant a slow drain with no end in sight.

That, almost to the letter, is Syria's equation today.

As I have argued before, Syria is no longer merely a state in collapse, nor one left to its people to heal. It has been put into deep freeze until the region's quarrels are settled. Its foreign heirs keep it alive because its death would upset their calculations. They keep it sick because its recovery would threaten to reclaim what they have cut from its body.

Ankara wants strategic depth in the north. Tel Aviv wants a south stripped of military capability. The Gulf capitals want a stable, prosperous Levant held at arm's length from Tehran. Moscow sees a cheap foothold on the Mediterranean. Washington sees a regional platform against its adversaries that costs it neither troops nor resources. Tehran has not gone away. It is waiting at the door.

Each foreign heir keeps a paid client inside the country: a movement, a network, a faction, or a community afraid for its survival. The cure the intervening powers offer is therefore made of the same stuff as the disease. Is there any way out other than death or tutelage?

History offers a third answer, one rarely heard in the Syrian debate: full and permanent neutrality.

This does not mean the neutrality of the weak, imposed by bargains struck abroad. It means the neutrality of a state whose people choose, deliberately, to step off the board on which others play, and to declare that Syria is nobody's pawn.

In February 1934 Social Democrats and Christian Conservatives fought a bloody civil war in the streets of Vienna. Yet after many of them walked out of Nazi camps, they quickly sealed a common social contract, the "spirit of the Lagerstrasse", and formed a broad national coalition. They shared the state instead of fighting over it.

Reconciliation at home came before neutrality abroad. Without it, every occupier in Vienna would have found a party or a community to invite it in.

Austria did not win independence because its occupiers took pity on it. Khrushchev wanted a communist Austria less than he feared an Atlantic one, which would link West Germany to Italy and cut into the Eastern bloc's flank. The West wanted nothing more than the Red Army out of the heart of Europe.

Neutrality was an Austrian national decision that anchored the regional balance of power. Each side lost the Austrian card, but each gained the certainty that its rival would not win it.

In the Moscow Memorandum of April 1955, the Austrian delegation pledged neutrality. Parliament wrote it into law that October, alongside an inclusive national compact. Neutrality was not imposed on the Austrians. They declared it among themselves first, by their own will, and then imposed it on the world. That day became their national holiday.

The dividends came quickly. Vienna became home to the International Atomic Energy Agency, then to OPEC, and later to the UN's third headquarters after New York and Geneva. Under Bruno Kreisky, Austria became a broker whose door East and West both knocked on.

Neutrality was not isolation. It was diplomatic and economic capital, there to be invested. That is exactly what Syria needs, choked as it is by a lack of trust: to turn the geography that drew armies to it into a resource that draws investment.

Switzerland's story was much the same. It, too, was a battlefield for other people's wars. In 1799 the armies of France, Austria and Russia fought on its soil, and the Russian general Suvorov forced his way across its forbidding Alpine passes in pursuit of the French. At Paris in 1815, the European powers finally recognised its permanent neutrality. A neutral Switzerland was cheaper for all of them than a dependent one left open as an arena of conflict.

The deeper Swiss lesson is domestic. A country of four languages and two confessions fought a civil war in 1847. Within a year it had produced a federal constitution that made diversity a national compact rather than a pretext.

But history also warns that neutrality without national consensus and civil peace soon collapses, as it did in Laos and Lebanon. Hizbollah asked no one's permission before going into Syria. Neutrality became a pretext, a prelude and a cover for the wars that followed.

For neutrality to be more than a scrap of paper, three conditions must hold. First, it must be declared from within, not imposed from without. International guarantees should recognise a national will, not replace it. Second, reconciliation at home must come before neutrality abroad. Every Syrian force tied to a foreign patron is a breach in the wall. The jihadist project, which wants Syria as a launch pad for exporting its model, is by definition the opposite of neutrality. The oligarchy that lives off brokering between patrons has no stake in it. Its natural champion is an alliance of returning capital, the state apparatus and civil society: the forces that want a state, not a share of one. Third, every foreign intervener must gain more from neutrality than from its current share.

This is less impossible than it sounds. A neutral Syria would be no platform against Turkey, no Iranian corridor to Israel's border, no forward base for Tehran against the Gulf, and no base for anyone against anyone.

Everyone loses Syria as a card. Everyone gains certainty. And Syrians regain Syria itself. It is the same equation, carried from Vienna to Damascus.

One crucial difference remains. Austria's heirs were great powers that could go home. Syria's are neighbours who are not going anywhere. Some of them hold occupied Syrian land and armed clients inside the country.

Syrian neutrality therefore cannot be a declaration issued in Damascus. It must come as a package of border and security settlements with every neighbour, Israel included.

Neutrality without peace with the neighbours is a deferred truce. Peace without neutrality is simply a new alignment.

In Vienna in 1955 the deal very nearly fell through. Syria today is treated as though it belongs to everyone except its own people.

States, like patients, do not recover at the table of meddling heirs. They recover when blood flows back to their limbs from their own heart.

So who will stand on a balcony in Damascus and declare, as loudly as Figl did: "Syria belongs to no one!"?

Annahar editorial link https://annah.ar/352855