Syria: Before Capital Comes Trust

By Samir al-Taqi

I read the conclusions of the economic conference held recently in Damascus, and I could not stay silent.

Money is not the fundamental problem in rebuilding Syria. The states of the region and the wider world hold vast financial surpluses; the international institutions hold the loans, the grants, and the bureaucratic expertise. Syria itself holds the Syrian spirit, an authentic longing, an appetite for calculated risk, deep experience, and a venerable art of management. What all of this is searching for is somewhere to invest that rests on credibility. For there is a currency rarer and more dangerous than money, one the ideologues never understand: trust.

Trust must be built into the bureaucratic apparatus, the financial system, the legal order, and the political-economic model—and it is built through the state's willingness to help good currency drive out bad, to help a productive national bourgeoisie stand against the encroachments of the brokers and parasites who have surged back to drain the sap of the economy.

To this we must add a ministry still performing like an orchestra without a conductor—worse, like an orchestra still in rehearsal, its players yet to agree on the tune they will play or the audience they are playing for.

Before an investor asks about the return on his money, he asks who will levy a toll on him. He does not fear the rubble and the ruin; he fears those who slip through the rubble to seize the opportunities. He fears a weak and ignorant judge, an opaque land registry, the local checkpoint that extracts protection money, the well-connected partner who muscles in, the ministries that grant a license today and revoke it tomorrow.

In this sense, the economic revival will not be a mere engineering project. It must be an arena of social and political settlement as much as one of economic prosperity.

When a port, an airport, or a residential quarter is rebuilt, stone is not the only thing raised; a new class of winners rises with it. The question is not how many cranes stand against the Damascus skyline tomorrow, but who gets the land, who wins the contract, who holds the concession, who sits between the investor and the state.

Syria knows this game well.

Assad once called his policies the "social market economy." The name was elegant; the result was a catastrophe of corruption—a selective market, with privileges reserved for those who knew the back doors of power.

Baathist socialism will never return. But crony state capitalism is trying to shed its skin into modern vocabulary: partnership, green recovery, strategic investment—and, once again, "social market economy"?

Syria may look like a house gutted by fire. Cement, timber, and glass are easy enough to buy. But what about the foundations—legitimacy, legislation, the rule of law? Anyone who comes to repair the house needs to know who owns it, who holds the key, and who is capable of selling the roof twice. Without that knowledge, he simply will not come.

There are three kinds of capital.

External recovery capital can repair an airport, finance a power plant, modernize a port, or build an industrial zone. But like any large investment in a fragile country, it will demand guarantees, concessions, land, and a local partner. This is understandable—and necessary at any price, lest society collapse. Yet it does not create an economy, and it does not defer the explosion of the contradictions of unemployment and poverty. This money is like a ventilator keeping the patient alive; the heart still beats in the minds, hearts, and hands of Syrians themselves.

The money of the parasitic bourgeoisie and the brokers, who live off patronage and the state budget and drain the sap of the people and of development. It is incomprehensible that such privileges should be handed out in the shadows, through veiled and murky contracts, with no financial accountability to society and the public. Pouring money into flimsy institutions only turns that money into fuel for the next fire.

Productive national capital. This is a workshop in Aleppo, a farm in Hama, a clinic in Homs, a transport company in Daraa, a food factory on the coast, a digital service run by a young man who has returned from exile. Here lies the heart of the Syrian homeland; here economic life begins—not in the communiqués of conferences. The diaspora bourgeoisie is no naïve, sentimental donation box. It has been tested long and hard by the parasites and the brokers: a lost home, confiscated land, a vanished deed, a deferred right, a warlord who treats land and people as objects to be commandeered. It will not gamble twice—once when it left, and again now.

Even the Marshall Plan set its condition: the right legislative, investment, and legal climate. Money was fuel for the engine, but the engine had a trusted driver. In Lebanon, by contrast, through war and repeated reconstruction, Beirut glittered with a dazzling shine and the real-estate market boomed—yet the economy stayed brittle, people grew poorer, and agriculture, industry, and public services all declined.

Imagine a Syrian merchant in Istanbul returning to open a garment factory in Aleppo. The man does not need a patriotic speech. He needs a lease he can trust and enforce, reasonable electricity, customs he can make sense of, a municipality that will not shake him down, fair competition against imported goods, and a judiciary that will protect him from a thuggish partner trading on local influence. If these conditions are absent, his longing will stay in his heart and his money will stay in the banks of Turkey.

Syria does not need a facelift for downtown Damascus. It needs a local market that functions, an independent judiciary, and small enterprises that recirculate income among ordinary people.

By far the most dangerous question is property rights—they will be the single most important test and measure, for they are the heart of the conflict, present and future. Who proves ownership of a destroyed home? Who returns to his land? Who is compensated? Who decides where investment goes? If the real-estate boom outpaces the entrenchment of justice, that boom becomes a soft expropriation dressed in the language of the market—and it will only hasten the coming crisis.

More troubling still, there is no single, unified Syrian economic model. The economy of Aleppo differs entirely from that of the coast, which differs from the Jazira, from Daraa, from Suwayda—and all of them differ from the model of Damascus. Each region has its own intermediaries, its own risks, its own memory of grievances and its own land disputes. A license issued in Damascus solves neither a local road, nor the authority of a former faction, nor an ownership feud, nor the fear felt by any one community.

In the end, the national vision for reconstruction is national; but the moment it is implemented, the decision becomes local.

We are not waiting for a perfect state. That is a luxury we simply do not have. The solution is to build islands of trust: local funds to support small enterprises, diaspora investment instruments tied to specific projects, escrow accounts, external auditing, credible commercial courts, a public registry of tenders and reconstruction works. And, above all, to stay the hand of every thug who would turn the economy's takeoff into a scramble for spoils.

Some will profit from the ruin precisely because they sit closer to power. But authentic Syrian capital is pious, daring, and shrewd; when the law is absent and the thugs ascend, it withdraws—and it grows angry. I would argue its withdrawal and its anger run very deep.

The indispensable precondition for reconstruction, then, is political settlement, national reconciliation, a legitimacy built from the bottom up, and a tested, honest judiciary. Cement builds walls—but trust alone can build Syria.