Michel Aflaq

Michel Aflaq was born in 1910 CE in Damascus into an Orthodox Christian family. He studied history at the Sorbonne in Paris (1929–1934), where he read Marx and Lenin and encountered European nationalist and socialist currents.

In 1940 he met his later friend and rival Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and together they began drafting the Ba'ath Letter in 1943. On 7 April 1947 they officially founded the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in Damascus — the party was initially named the Arab Ba'ath, and "Socialist" was added in 1952 after a merger with the Arab Socialist Party.

The party slogan: "One Arab nation with an eternal mission — unity, freedom, socialism." It embraced a mix of Arab nationalism and socialism as an alternative to secular communism.

After the 1963 coups in Syria and Iraq, Ba'ath became the ruling party in both countries. But Aflaq himself was ousted in the 1966 coup led by Salah Jadid — he was exiled and sentenced to death in absentia.

He lived most of his exile in Baghdad after the Iraqi Ba'ath coup of 1968, and died in Paris on 23 June 1989 CE while undergoing medical treatment.

In Arab memory Aflaq is the founder of a renewed Arab nationalism, but the party's application after his death produced authoritarian regimes — a gap between "theory" and "practice" that has haunted Ba'athist discourse ever since.