Although inspired by Western socialist thinkers, early Ba'athist theoreticians rejected the Marxist class-struggle concept, arguing that it hampers Arab unity.

[20] Both Ba'athist regimes were ousted from power as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the renewed rebel offensive in Syria amid the Syrian civil war in 2024.

[24] His views were influenced by a number of prominent European philosophical and political figures, among them Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler.

[22] A significant conflict and turning point in the development of Ba'athism occurred when Arsuzi's and Aflaq's movements sparred over the 1941 Iraqi coup d'etat by Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani and the subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War.

Taking advantage of the chaotic years of the 1950s and 1960s, the Military Committee of the Syrian Ba'ath party, led by its civilian leadership, launched a coup in 1963 that established a one-party state in Syria.

[29] In 1966, the military wing of the Syrian Ba'ath initiated another coup which overthrew the Old Guard led by Aflaq and Bitar, resulting in a schism within the Ba'athist movement: one Syrian-dominated and one Iraqi-dominated.

The Al-Assad family and Saddam Hussein emerged dominant in the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties, respectively, eventually building personalist dictatorships in the two countries.

For more than 2 decades, Michel Aflaq's 1940 essay compilation, titled, "Fi Sabil al-Ba’ath" (trans: "The Road to Renaissance") was the primary ideological book of the Ba'ath party.

In Aflaq's view, Bismarck's unification of Germany established the most repressive nation the world had ever seen, a development which could largely be blamed on the existing monarchy and the reactionary class.

[47] We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need ... for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period.Socialism is an important pillar of the Ba'athist programme.

[64] During his vice presidency, at the time of the Shia riots, Saddam discussed the need to convince large segments of the population to convert to the party line's stance on religion.

[76] Following its violent seizure of power, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 400 people,[77] the neo-Ba'athist military committee purged the classical Ba'athist leaders of the old guard, including Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar.

As American scholar John F. Devlin writes, the "Ba'ath Party, which started with unity as its overwhelming top priority, which was prepared to work within a variety of Middle Eastern political systems, which wanted social justice in society, had pretty much disappeared by the early 1960s.

In its place rose Ba'ath organisations which focused primarily on their own region, which advocated, and created where possible, authoritarian centralised governments, which rested heavily on military power and which were very close to other socialist movements and were less distinctively Ba'athist".

[80] Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a member of the Ba'ath old guard, agreed, stating that the 1966 Syrian coup d'état "marked the end of Ba'athist politics in Syria".

"[80] The coup left Salah Jadid in power, and under him, the Syrian government abandoned the traditional goal of pan-Arab unity and replaced it with a radical form of Western socialism.

[83] The government supported a more radical economic program including state ownership over industry and foreign trade, while at the same time trying to restructure agrarian relations and production.

[79][85][87] In 1968, Al-Bitar left the Ba'ath movement, claiming that "these parties had ceased to be what they set up to be, retaining only their names and acting as the organs of power and the instruments of regional and dictatorial governments".

A tense power rivalry existed between Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad, with the former as the leader of civilian Ba'athists while the latter increased his control of the military-wing of the party and various army units.

Assadism (Assadiyah) is a neo-Ba'athist ideology based on the policies of Hafez al-Assad after his seizure of power in the 1970 coup, described in official Ba'athist history as the Corrective Movement.

[90] Through this apparatus, also known as the "Ba'atho-Assadist system", the Ba'ath party instrumentalized its control over Syria's political, social, economic, cultural, educational and religious spheres to enforce its neo-Ba'athist ideology in the wider society and preserve the Assad family's grip on power.

[93] Jamal al-Atassi, co-founder of Zaki al-Arsuzi's early Arab Ba'ath Party and later Syrian dissident, stated that "Assadism is a false nationalism.

He also expressed admiration for other communist leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hồ Chí Minh, and Josip Broz Tito due to their spirit of asserting national independence rather than their communism.

Both countries endured clan-based autocracies wielding ideological absolutism, malignancy of a different order from the standard republican and monarchical authoritarianism of the late twentieth-century Arab world.

[107] According to him, the Ba'ath movement shared several characteristics with the European fascist movements, such as "the attempt to synthesize radical, illiberal nationalism and non-Marxist socialism, a romantic, mythopoetic, and elitist 'revolutionary' vision, the desire to create a 'new man' and restore past greatness, a centralised authoritarian party divided into 'right-wing' and 'left-wing' factions and so forth; several close associates later admitted that Aflaq had been directly inspired by certain fascist and Nazi theorists".

[109] Arsuzi did not support the Axis powers and refused Italy's advances for party-to-party relations,[110] but he was also influenced by the racial theories of racialist philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

[110] He was associated with the League of Nationalist Action, a political party which existed in Syria from 1932 to 1939 and was strongly influenced by fascism and Nazism, as evidenced by its paramilitary "Ironshirts".

[113][114] The Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that Nazi war-criminal Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichman and a key participant in the Final Solution, had died in Syria in 2010 under the asylum of Bashar al-Assad.

Under the alias "Dr. Georg Fischer", Brunner assisted former Syrian rulers Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez for over 30 years, serving as an instructor on torture techniques, combating internal dissent, and purging Syria's Jewish community.

[115][116][117][118] Bashar al-Assad's Ba'athist regime received support from Western neo-Nazi and far-right extremists, who became aware of him during the European refugee crisis that was mostly brought on by the Syrian Civil War.