Damascus is not the capital of Syria alone. It is historically and geographically known as the capital of the Levant. It played a political role before and after the Ottomans, and had great influence in its neighborhood, before and after it got its' independent from France. Syria, with its political borders as they are known today, is not just one of the countries of the Levant or of the Middle East. It is rather the keystone of the entire Arab Levant region, whatever its regime or its ruler may be. And it has been, ever since its independence from the Ottoman Empire, open to profound geopolitical transformations, and so has its neighborhood, which the Sykes-Picot Agreement turned into entities that have rarely known stability, and have all failed to turn into nation-states. Syria's southern borders with Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon are primarily political, in the sense that inhabitants on the two sides of the border are administratively connected to the capitals of their respective countries. However, they are still living, at the social level, as if in a single country. Indeed, relations between the inhabitants of the Hauran, half of which is located in Jordan and the other half in Syria, were only affected by the lower borders, after the two countries' borders were delineated. There, affiliation to a clan represents a much stronger form of social cohesion than that of affiliation to the state. In the 1950s and 1960s, the center (Damascus) was able to attract different parties to pursue efforts towards unity, as those ruling in Amman were unable to turn such social cohesion (“asabiyyah" as defined by Ibn Khaldun) into a national Jordanian one. This failure has contributed to neglecting the countryside economically, and to abstain from developing it, to help it turn from its local social relations to civil citizenship. The situation is not much different at the Lebanese borders. In the 1960s, the clans of the Hermel and Homs formed a council to settle disputes that would arise on both sides of the borders. This council had such little care for religious or sectarian affiliation that it chose to head it a Lebanese Maronite clan leader, while it was formed of a majority of Sunnis or Shiites. And in Wadi Khaled, there are still many families that live in Lebanon while being stateless and not bearing Lebanese citizenship. As for the clans that live on the borders between Syria and Iraq, they form a single social unit, which has in the past had a major role to play in the wars that have taken place in Mesopotamia, and now represents an essential part of the war on Syria's soil. This is why the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was able to easily take control of some border crossings, as its fighters and those of Al-Qaeda can move with relative freedom between the two countries through Mosul and Anbar. On the Turkish side of the Syrian borders, Kurdish populations are spread from the Aleppo countryside to Southern Anatolia, and represent a special case in both countries. While Damascus has been able to take control of the situation in the regions they inhabit, the Turkish army has been the target of continuous gang warfare since the 1980s. So far, it is has not been able to quell the rebellion, which has forced the government to offer major concessions, aiming at achieving a historical reconciliation that is still taking its first steps. In the hope to spare it the repercussions of the war in Syria, it is using religious ideology and confessional fanaticism, in order to stir up enmity on the part of the Kurds towards the Arabs in general, and the Syrian regime in particular, in addition to kindling the dreams of the separatists in Northern Iraq. We have not spoken of the Syrian-Palestinian border, because its situation is a very special one. This is a result of the Israeli occupation and the continuous wars since the establishment of the Zionist entity and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who found no better safe haven than Syria, in view of the historical relations between the two peoples and of Damascus's particular outlook on the Palestinian issue. Today, after the war has been raging for two years in Syria, Levant country borders have nearly been erased, despite the stance taken by governments to dissociate themselves from what is happening. Families and clans are uniting again, within entities that are different from the national states which were established after World War II. But these are entities that belong to the pre-state period, being established on confessional and tribal bases, and forming the scene of a new Middle East that the Neoconservatives dreamt of and that the Neo-Islamists are realizing today. The fall of Syria signifies the fall of political borders and the spread of chaos throughout the entire Levant and its neighborhood.
