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Conventional wisdom holds that economic and political reforms are directly linked. With regard to sequencing, the debate within the development community has been dominated by two schools of thought: The first argues that economic reforms ought to precede political liberalization on the grounds that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to carry out economic reform. The second insists that only by altering the political logic that sustains authoritarian regimes — moving from a base built on the discretionary distribution of patronage to one grounded in the legitimacy that comes with procedural legality and political accountability — will political elites ever be persuaded to undertake economic reform.

In the Syrian context, that debate is heavily skewed in favor of those pushing for economic reform first — the political will to redistribute power, or at least to share it, being absent. The recommendations that the tenth Ba‘th Party Congress advanced this summer reaffirmed the Syrian political elite's determination to maintain the political status quo. Some examples: The idea of a constitutional amendment to level the political playing field was ruled out; and the Ba‘th Party is to remain the vanguard party, in accordance with Article 8 of the constitution. Among the political parties that will soon be licensed, only those that appear to be the least threatening to Baathi dominance will be allowed to organize. Emergency laws, in effect since 1963, will not be lifted; they will be relaxed. What the term relaxation means, according to the "can do" list put out by the authorities, is that Syrian citizens will now be allowed to, among other things, erect falafel stands and open hair salons without the prior approval of the dreaded secret police, the mukhabarat. In these circumstances, it is safe to assume that those in Syria who stress the need to prioritize political liberalization must be very lonely people.

Bashar Assad and his reformist cohorts, on the other hand, are of the view that economic reforms must precede political reform. Assad's reasoning is that Syrian citizens are more in need of jobs and higher incomes than they are of new political arrangements. In this, the young Syrian leader may be right: when over a fifth of Syria's labor force is unemployed and per capita income is as low as $1,000, only a handful of citizens would give Lockean liberalism the priority. The problem is that Syria's political elite has not yet engaged in the kinds of painful economic reforms that are requisite to restoring the Syrian economy to even its pre-Ba‘th levels. Privatization of the bloated and highly inefficient public sector remains a taboo subject, and talk of a shift to a market economy was deliberately diluted during the Ba‘th Congress to "social market economy" — a catch phrase intended to appease the powerful labor unions and the bureaucracy, the regime's power base.

This is not to say that Syria has not experienced change during the past five years. Assad introduced private banking, drafted more business-friendly investment laws to create jobs, reinvigorated the private sector, and overhauled an important segment of the public sector, giving its managers greater say in day-to-day operations. Moreover, in order to reduce market distortions, Assad eliminated some subsidies and reduced others.

Nor were his reforms limited to the economy. Assad allowed the establishment of private universities. He promoted the demilitarization of society by reducing the length of military conscription and by lifting mandatory high school military uniforms. In administration, Assad replaced hundreds of Ba‘th apparatchiki with younger, more educated and reform-minded elements. Moreover, senior appointments were made according to merit, not to Ba‘th affiliation. Syria's ambassadors to Washington and to London and its deputy premier for economic affairs are cases in point. Finally, Assad freed hundreds of political prisoners and, in an effort to promote national reconciliation, allowed the return of a number of exiled pre-1963 politicians, including a former Syrian president. In short, five years into his rule, Bashar Assad made positive changes.

These measures, welcome as they are, do not amount to much, however. As the noted expert on democratization Marina Ottaway warns, it is important not to confuse positive change with democratization. The transition from an authoritarian to a democratic system, Ottaway notes, requires a political paradigm shift — an abandoning by those controlling the government of old assumptions about the fundamental organization of the polity, the relation between the government and the citizens, and thus the source, distribution and exercise of political power. As long as changes are benevolent acts of the ruler rather than the recognition of inalienable rights of the citizens, no paradigm change has taken place. In this context, the reforms that Assad made in the past five years appear to be more benevolence than paradigmatic shifts.

In the final analysis, some measure of economic reform seems necessary, even though it does not point a clear-cut path to rapid success. After all, democratization is not an event but a process, and democratization may start with seemingly insignificant changes.