Ahmad Barqawi
Western leaders, whenever they wished to intervene in the affairs of our countries, have consistently maintained the discourse of protecting minorities, particularly in the Levant. These compassionate and benevolent Western leaders, deeply concerned about the lives of minorities, supposedly lose sleep worrying about their fate and defending them against anyone who might harm them.
The matter went so far that the foreign minority, different in face, hand, and tongue—the occupying power in Palestine—claimed to defend the Druze minority by seeking assistance from one of the religious sheikhs of the community. For the first time in the Levant, the enemy’s flag and the image of a war criminal wanted by international justice were raised in an Arab city.
There is no doubt that this false ideological pretext does not deceive anyone capable of thinking realistically and ethically. Allow me to address the concepts of majority and minority in general, and in our countries in particular.
Minorities and majorities are objective historical realities. The problem does not lie in this form of social existence, but rather in the consciousness surrounding this existence.
The concepts of majority and minority belong to the field of the humanities: political science, sociology, culture, and ethnology.
They indicate a qualitative quantity. Majorities and minorities are not merely a quantitative number of individuals; rather, they are quantitative-qualitative concepts that point to a particular form of consciousness, identity, and belonging.
In the Arab world, for example, Arabs are not merely a numerical majority. They share a language, customs, values, a sense of belonging, a collective memory, and common aspirations. Kurds, meanwhile, constitute a minority that likewise possesses its own language, customs, values, consciousness of belonging, and objectives.
Kurds and Arabs may share many characteristics, but what matters here is self-consciousness of belonging. Belonging to a majority or minority creates a particular form of self-consciousness within each.
Almost every state in the contemporary world experiences a situation involving a national majority and one or more national or religious minorities. In the Arab world, however, the concepts of majority and minority are considerably more complex. There is a Sunni majority and religious and sectarian minorities, yet most religious or sectarian minorities also belong to the Arab majority.
They are therefore minorities from one perspective and a majority from another. An Arab Christian, for example, belongs to the Arab majority while simultaneously belonging to a religious minority.
There are also national minorities that belong to the religious majority. Kurds and Amazigh, for example, are national minorities, but most of them belong to the Muslim majority. Armenians, meanwhile, are a national minority that, for the most part, belongs to a Christian minority.
There are even more complex structures: the tribe and clan, which remain present. A clan, through its own self-consciousness, constitutes a minority belonging to a majority. At times it acts as a minority, and at other times as part of the majority.
A single clan may be divided between two sects, or even between two different religions. In Iraq, for example, there are clans divided between Sunnis and Shiites. In Syria, particularly in Hawran, we find tribal and social extensions distributed among Christians and Muslims.
We are therefore not dealing with simple identities, but with overlapping identities. The same person may belong to a majority from one perspective and to a minority from another.
For this reason, transforming one of a person’s identities into their entire essence is not a neutral description of that person; it is an ideological and political act.
What is important is that the modern state has given the concepts of majority and minority an essential political dimension connected to government.
In a contemporary democratic society—European, Japanese, or American, for example—political distinctions between people are not, in principle, based on ethnic or religious affiliations. The governing majority is a political majority, and it may later become a political minority after losing an election.
A political minority may become a majority. Therefore, being a majority is not destiny, nor is being a minority an eternal prison.
Once society produces a governing party or coalition, power becomes, in principle, the power of society as a whole, not merely the power of those who elected it.
Here precisely lies the value of citizenship: it moves a person from their primary affiliation to their general political affiliation—from being a member of a sect, nationality, or clan to being a citizen with full rights.
Yet the Arab world experiences a very particular phenomenon related to majorities and minorities.
Some ruling authorities have made enormous efforts to eliminate the reality of the political majority, replacing actual majorities with imaginary ones, while continuously suppressing every possibility for the emergence of a genuine political majority, until society ultimately becomes a collection of minorities.
Here we arrive at Assadism.
The Assadist regime, outwardly, belongs to the Arab majority. Yet in its actual structure, it was built upon an authoritarian solidarity with a cohesive sectarian core, allied with groups from the religious, social, and economic majority and minorities alike.
Therefore, it is incorrect to reduce Assadism to a single sect, just as it is incorrect to ignore its use of sectarian solidarity in constructing structures of power and loyalty.
A sect is one thing; transforming some of its members into an authoritarian power bloc is another.
Lebanon is a special case, and a poor model of relations among affiliations when primary identities become the foundation of the political system. Sects then become political entities competing over shares of power in the name of their communities, while the citizen disappears behind sectarian representatives.
The Assadist regime, in its outward affiliation, belongs to the majority; in its behavior and self-consciousness, however, it behaves as a minority.
In this sense, it constitutes an authoritarian minority that includes the worst elements of minorities and majorities alike.
Thus, we arrive at the rule of an authoritarian minority that outwardly belongs to the majority.
When the majority loses its presence, when its material world is seized and its spiritual world destroyed, it becomes—through the loss of its power of presence—a minority in its own consciousness, even if it remains a numerical majority.
A majority that fears the authorities, loses its ability to gather, organize, and speak, develops the illness of taqiyya. Taqiyya is essentially a minority consciousness, and it tends toward hypocrisy as a means of survival.
Here we reach one of the most dangerous consequences of authoritarianism: minority authoritarianism is not merely the rule of a minority over a majority; it is the process of transforming the entire society into fearful minorities.
Thus, in the absence of political concepts of majority and minority, we arrive at a caricature-like fragmentation of society based on the following characteristics:
First: The ruling minority is not necessarily a religious or national minority. Rather, it is a ruling minority with diverse affiliations, united by authoritarian solidarity, interests, and fear of losing privileges.
Because it fears above all the emergence of a majority opposed to it, it becomes hostile to political society as a whole.
By destroying politics as a social practice and preventing every form of independent political, trade-union, or civil organization, it effectively eliminates the possibility of a political and civic majority emerging.
A society without political and civil organization is no longer a society of citizens capable of producing a general will. It becomes a collection of regional, sectarian, tribal, and family groups seeking security through narrow identities.
By destroying politics, the authorities create a party that is not truly political, but rather an ideological and populist cover for the regime, while leaving society to seek security in sect, tribe, region, and family.
The ruling authoritarian minority requires, at the same time, a discourse affirming its belonging to the majority.
Thus, we arrive at a practice characterized by minority rule and a discourse characterized by majority rhetoric: a discourse that speaks in the name of the entire people, while the authorities fear the entire people.
Second: The ruling minority, possessing sectarian and authoritarian solidarity, develops a particular image of itself based on the principle of possessing power—brute force in particular.
As it senses the weakness of genuine loyalty to it, it relies on a narrow circle of loyalists and semi-loyalists, because this group—or gang—receives privileges in exchange for its loyalty.
As the gap between the ruling minority and the amorphous majority of the governed widens, the authorities begin to act as a force alien to society, much like an external occupying power.
At a certain point, their consciousness becomes little different from that of an occupier: society becomes, for them, an object of control, surveillance, and punishment rather than the source of their legitimacy.
Thus laws multiply as instruments for subjugating the governed rather than rules to which both ruler and ruled are equally subject.
Military power, security forces, hidden surveillance, the plundering of resources, violations of the local moral order, and the occupation of public space become permanent tools of rule.
Sometimes special spaces emerge for the authorities, their children, and their associates, while the laws imposed upon ordinary people never apply to them: traffic laws, accountability, the judiciary, travel, the economy, and so on.
When the law does not apply to those in power, it is no longer law. It becomes an order issued by the master to his subjects.
Third: The ruling minority’s constant fear of losing power causes the feeling of being a fearful minority to spread through its own ranks over time. Its primary concern becomes how to preserve itself.
Here the most dangerous conceptual reversal occurs: national sovereignty becomes the sovereignty of the regime; preserving the security of the homeland, its territory, and resources becomes preserving the security of the regime; and the interests, freedom, and dignity of human beings become subject to the highest levels of repression and brute force.
The state becomes the regime, the regime becomes the ruler, and the ruler becomes the homeland.
Thus emerges the phenomenon of the State of Power instead of the Power of the State.
The two terms “State of Power” and “Power of the State,” which I formulated from objective reality, are highly useful for understanding the actual authority that expresses the State of Power.
What is the State of Power?
It is a state that possesses all the forms and attributes of a state without the rationality of the state, operating instead within a framework of monopolizing power and preserving power that is not the product of the state and society.
When the homeland is reduced to the regime, the idea of national sovereignty dies, and with it the idea of citizenship.
The citizen is no longer the end toward which the state is directed; rather, the citizen becomes a potential threat to it.
The State of Power resembles an occupation state, except that the occupation here is carried out by an internal force.
Fourth: The constant fear for the regime’s survival keeps it in a state of continuous apprehension toward external actors with global influence, because of their ability to overthrow it, protect it, or pressure it.
Since influential external powers—Europe, America, and others—may find it useful to maintain such regimes as long as they guarantee their interests, the ruling minority often becomes more concerned with the approval of the outside world than with the approval of those inside the country.
In its consciousness, the domestic population can be subdued by force; the outside world cannot.
Hence arises the tragic paradox: a regime that raises slogans of sovereignty, independence, and resistance internally, while its own survival becomes dependent on external calculations.
The external power that protects it at one moment may abandon it at another. Once it becomes convinced that the regime is close to collapse, it begins searching for its place in what comes next.
Fifth: Through the continual fragmentation of the majority by means of permanent repression, and through its belief that it has deprived the majority of its social, political, and moral cohesion, weakened its sense of belonging to the nation as a whole, and returned it to a state of tribalism, sectarianism, regionalism, inward retreat, and indifference to the dangers confronting the homeland, the ruling minority becomes convinced that it has secured itself against the threat and evil of the majority.
It comes to believe that it is a minority ruling minorities, rather than a minority ruling a majority.
This is the moment when the blindness of power reaches its peak.
The regime fails to recognize that, through repression, impoverishment, corruption, and humiliation, it is recreating the majority it had long worked to destroy—but this time as a national political majority whose fundamental enemy is the regime itself.
Fear, which once divided people, can turn into anger that unites them.
Humiliation, which pushed each individual into isolation, can turn into a shared sense of violated dignity.
Corruption, which for a time appeared to be an unavoidable fate, can become a common cause for rebellion against it.
Thus, without realizing it, the State of Power creates the spark society: a society that accumulates anger, hatred, and disgust, storing within itself a determination to reclaim its violated dignity and suppressed national consciousness until it ignites in a form the regime is unable to confront.
Yet the most dangerous legacy left by the authoritarian State of Power is not the authoritarian minority itself, but the minority consciousness it planted within society.
By destroying politics, citizenship, and trust among people, it leaves behind not only free citizens, but also groups that fear one another.
Each group invokes its own memory, its own fear, and its own sense of grievance, seeking security in its own solidarity.
Here Assadism achieves its most dangerous victory even as it is defeated: it makes its victims think about one another in the very way the regime wanted them to think.
The sect that fears another sect; the nationality that sees another nationality as a threat; the tribe that retreats into its own solidarity; the numerical majority that behaves with the consciousness of a fearful minority; and the minority that sees every majority as a potential project of persecution—all of them reproduce the world created by authoritarianism, even while declaring their opposition to it.
Therefore, escaping Assadism cannot be achieved merely through the disappearance of the Assadist regime. It requires the disappearance of the Assadist consciousness of relations among people.
It requires moving from the State of Power to the Power of the State.
That means moving away from majority and minority as fixed identities and toward majority and minority as changing political conditions within a state of citizens encompassing diverse social and cultural groups.
A Christian does not need a state to protect him because he is Christian. A Kurd does not need a state to protect him because he is Kurdish. An Alawite does not need a state to protect him because he is Alawite. A Sunni does not need a state to grant him privileges because he is Sunni.
They all need one state that does not ask a person, when granting them their rights: What nationality are you? What religion? What sect? What tribe?
They need the Power of the State and citizenship.
The only guarantee for a minority is not minority rule. The only guarantee for a majority is not majority rule.
Rather, it is a state that prevents the majority from persecuting the minority, prevents the minority from seizing the state, and prevents a person’s particular identity from becoming their political destiny.
Ultimately, the essence of Assadism was the killing of politics and the revival of solidarities; the killing of the citizen and the revival of sectarian identity; the killing of society and the revival of fearful groups.
Therefore, the opposite of Assadism is not merely another form of authority.
The opposite of Assadism is the citizen.
That is what existed, and that is what remains for us to overcome.
The opposite of the State of Power is the Power of the State.
Restoring the concept of the state in its real meaning is the foremost objective now.
