The societal cohesion of the Syrian people and its ability to properly assimilate newcomers, minorities, and migrations, is essential to its survival to its progress, and any movement that seeks to assert ethnic, religious, or racial separatism within the Syrian homeland is one that ought to be met with outright hostility. The answer to these threats, according to the Party, lay in the rebirth of the Syrian people, the Renaissance. The Renaissance The Syrian people, as outlined above, is, according to Saadeh, among the first people to have historically moved from the tribal phase into the settled agricultural phase and towards the establishment of private property and social classes. This first transition allowed the Syrian people to prosper exponentially and to excel in most of the crafts of the ancient world. Saadeh and the party espoused the belief that a new transition has to take place, a transition to the modern age, which ought to have two prerequisites: the secular unity of the Syrian people and its renaissance. The unity of the Syrian people firstly implies debarring the clergy from interfering in state affairs, and enacting a full separation between Church-Mosque and State. This would inevitably allow the Syrian people to regain its unity and social cohesion. The second task of the party is to work towards the Renaissance, which the party leader described as being a dynamic undertaking that would shatter what he described as the old regime. The Renaissance ideal, which Saadeh traces back to the ingenuity of the first Syrians – the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, among others, lies in the mastery of the Syrian people over the sciences and the crafts, which he eulogizes in The Genesis of Nations while attacking what he deemed as the antiquated notions of religious fatalism. In order to regain its mastery over the crafts and over its own destiny, Saadeh underlines the need for intellectualism, education, and the pursuit of knowledge as cornerstones of the future Syrian society, a notion he summarizes in his famous quote, "Society is knowledge, and knowledge is power". Social nationalism While the Renaissance is underlined as a romanticized notion of spiritual, intellectual, and patriotic elevation, the SSNP elaborated a simple yet straightforward doctrine pertaining to how the Syrian People ought to organize itself once the Renaissance has begun, albeit the fact that Saadeh had not developed the idea completely. The social-nationalist model elaborated by Saadeh