[27][better source needed] In the mid-nineteenth century, Butrus al-Bustani was one of the first to assert the existence of a natural Syrian nation that should be accommodated in a reformed Ottoman Empire.

An influential follower of al-Bustani was the Belgian Jesuit historian, Henri Lammens, ordained as a priest in Beirut in 1893, who claimed that Greater Syria had since ancient times encompassed all the land between the Arab peninsula, Egypt, the Levantine corridor and the Taurus Mountains, including all the peoples within the Fertile Crescent.

It is to stand before the towers of New York and Washington, Chicago and San Francisco saying in your hearts, "I am the descendent of a people the built Damascus and Byblos, and Tyre and Sidon and Antioch, and I am here to build with you, and with a will.

"[32]The SSNP was founded by Antun Saadeh, a Lebanese journalist and lecturer from a Greek Orthodox family who had lived in South America from 1919 to 1930[7]: 43  who secretly established the first nucleus of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in November 1932, which operated underground for the first three years of its existence;[7] in 1933, he started publishing the monthly journal Al-Majalla, which was distributed in the American University of Beirut and developed the party's ideology.

At that time, the Party joined ranks with other nationalist and patriotic forces including the National Bloc, whereas it began militating, in secret, for the overthrow of the Mandate.

[36] On 4 July 1949, a year after the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight (the Nakba), and a response to a series of aggressions perpetrated by the Kataeb-backed Lebanese government, the SSNP attempted its first revolution.

A decision was taken by King Farouk, Riad el Solh and Husni al-Za'im to eliminate Antoun Saadeh, under the patronage of British Intelligence and the Mossad.

[39] After Saadeh was executed and its high-ranking leaders were arrested, the party remained underground until 1958 when it sided with the pro-Western president Camille Chamoun against the Arab nationalist rebels.

[41][37] In the scholarly literature, the coup has been explained as stemming from the party's ideological preference for violence ("bullets over ballots"), its frustration at exclusion from the Lebanese state, and both political and military criticism of the rule of Fouad Chehab.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation blames the SSNP for the assassination, in 1982, of Bachir Gemayel, Lebanon's newly elected president supported by the Israelis besieging Beirut.

The SSNP remained an outlawed group in Syria for decades, with the party's image being tarnished by the Malki affair as well as its alignment with Western interests and anti-Arab stances resented by the Syrian populace.

In 2015, journalist Terry Glavin wrote, "But for a brief and friendly interregnum during the Baathist regime's phoney national elections of 2012, the SSNP has been a member of Bashar al-Assad's ruling coalition since 2005.

According to Syrian analyst Samir Akil, SSNP cadres mostly came from the Christian, Alawite, and Shi'ite communities, posing a direct threat to the Assad regime, which was seeking to monopolise control over minorities by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party.

[26] Lebanese fighters were included in their ranks, even though the party claims that "their proportion within the group's total fighting force has decreased steadily, as more Syrians sign up".

[55][56] In 2016, party officials claimed that its membership had increased "by the thousands" since the start of the war as a result of its alleged "reputation as an effective fighting force in Syria".

[26] However, starting from 2018, these gains began to be reversed, as Bashar al-Assad initiated an intense Ba'athification programme in regime-held territories, which sought the stronger amalgamation of the Ba'athist-state nexus and the tightening of the grip of the state.

As part of its attempts to strengthen the one-party state, the Ba'ath party has also cemented its monopoly over military forces, student activism, trade unions, youth organizations, and other social associations.

The elections showcased the absolute dominance of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party in the political system by increasing the Ba'athist share to two-thirds of the total, or 167 seats.

[59] The anti-SSNP clampdown was also part of Bashar al-Assad's feud with his cousin Rami Makhlouf, who headed the SSNP (Amana) faction and was widely reviled as a symbol of corruption in the regime.

"[40] Christopher Solomon states that SSNP's persistent backing of the Ba'athist government since its occupation of Lebanon, has positioned the party in the left-wing side of political spectrum.

[71] Some scholars have made comparisons of SSNP's ideological and organizational resemblances with European fascism, and of its external symbols to those of German Nazism, although these criticisms are not accepted by the party itself.

[73] According to researcher Wissam Samia, Saadeh defined the policy of the SSNP in a newspaper he founded in 1947 called 'Suriah al-jadida' (New Syria) in a letter to its board of directors.

The boundaries of the historic environment in which the Syrian nation evolved went much beyond the scope usually ascribed to Syria, extending from the Taurus range in the north-east and the Zagros mountains in the north-west to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian desert and the Persian Gulf in the east.

When he applied this model to the case of the Fertile Crescent, the conclusion he reached was straightforward: the natural geographical factors of the basin lying east of the Mediterranean is what has allowed it to become the cradle of civilizations, what has driven throughout the course of human history movements seeking to unify it, what has allowed it to establish, through ethnic, religious and cultural assimilation and mixing, a high culture and civilization, and what has made it the prize coveted by all imperialist powers.

[citation needed] In Saadeh's vision of "harmony" among the country's ethnic and religious communities through a return to a so-called Syrian "racial unity" which was itself in fact a mixture of races, neither Islam nor pan-Arabism was important, and therefore religion wasn't either.

[41] Saadeh's concept of the nation was shaped mainly by historical concrete interactions amongst people over the centuries in a given geography, rather than being based on ethnic origins, race, language or religion.

[citation needed] The first of these principles is the abolition of feudalism and of the rule of the traditional notables and landowners, which the Party deems responsible for the "desolate state of things to which the country had gotten to", including maintaining educational levels at an all-time low and being instrumental in the loss of Palestine.

This is coupled with the need to establish mandatory education, universal healthcare, the nationalization of vital areas of the economy such as the production of raw materials, and a strong centralized state that is able to give economic directions.

The Zawba'a represents the blood of the SSNP martyrs bound together as Muslims and Christians through freedom, duty, discipline and power as a hurricane to purge the Dark Ages and spark their nation's rejuvenation and renaissance.

He asserted that SSNP was a violent fascist movement; noting its irredentist ambitions of creating "Greater Syria", a project that sought the annexation or partial conquest of numerous nation-states in the region.