One of the few constants of Syria’s long civil war has been the regularity with which European leaders were taken by surprise by new developments on the ground whose causes and consequences they failed to anticipate. From the first protests against the tyrannical rule of former President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 to his flight into exile as rebel armies marched on Damascus earlier this week, the European Union has repeatedly found itself scrambling to respond to a devastating conflict whose wider impact nearly destabilized European integration.
As the last remnants of the Assad regime now transfer power to the rebel coalition, it is crucial to explore why the efforts of EU institutions and member states to influence these dynamics so regularly failed, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes in building relations with a new post-Assad Syria.
This chronic misreading of Syrian society was already visible in European responses to Assad’s assumption of the presidency in July 2000 after the death of his predecessor and father, Hafez al-Assad. The sudden thaw in relations between Damascus and European states in the years after the younger Assad took power stood in stark contrast with how his father had relied heavily on Moscow’s support and built a close relationship with Tehran after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, both based on shared hostility to the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, and amid cautious efforts at European rapprochement with Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, hopes grew in EU capitals that Bashar’s purported support for political and economic reform could provide an opportunity to pull Syria toward a closer relationship with Europe once his father left the scene.