Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba‘thist Syria: Army, Party, and Peasant

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• Ba'th regime rests on three overlapping structures of power

• The party apparatus, the military police establishment, and the ministerial bureaucracy

• The president has control over all three

• The party apparatus has a dual role: approve public policy and to mobilise popular support for such policy

• These structures have not only concentrated on decision making but also attained a considerable ''mass-incorporating'' capacity, permitting and expansion of regime power without which the survival of Ba'th rule in so volatile a society as Syria can scarcely be imagined

The Army: Leading Force, Regime Shield

• The reasons for the central role of the military in the Syrian state are multiple and mutually reinforcing but the consequences of the military’s role are increasingly ambiguous; they can be evaluated assng three dimensions, state-building, social change, and national defence (Picard 1988).

• First, military-politicians took the lead in the founding of the state. Salah Jedid forged the Leninist core of the Ba‘th state and Hafiz al-Asad created the powerful presidency at its apex. But as long as the regime’s legitimacy remains precarious, the military will remain the central pillar of state power.

• Second, the coercive power with which the military endowed the Ba'th regime gave it the autonomy of the dominant classes necessary to launch the Ba'th revolution and to sustain its statist variant of modernization. But, increasingly, politicized officers have become a conservative obstacle to reform and a burden on development.

• Third, as a champion of nationalism and the main guardian of the integrity of the state in a dangerous inter-state environment, the military has turned Syria from the plaything of regional forces into a powerful actor. But as long as the conflict with Israel remains the central preoccupation of Syrian politics, the military, the core of a formidable garrison state, is certain to remain at the center of power.

• What, ultimately, is the role of the military in the Syrian state? To say, as many do, that the main feature of Syrian politics is military domination is to assume that the main cleavage in Syrian politics is civil-military. It seems clear, however, that the more important and active cleavages have been ideological, urban-rural, state vs. private sector, and rivalries over patronage. In these conflicts it is more correct to say that military politicians lead various civil-military factions inside the regime and that the military buttresses the regime against the opposition. Needless to say, such a central role is quite compatible with the long history of the state in the Middle East; but it is equally clear that in an age of mass politics, officers must be politicians or share power with them, and an effective, durable state cannot dispense with mass incorporation, and particularly the modern vehicle of participation, the political party.

The Ba'th Party Apparatus

• Yet the ideal “objective relations” defined by the nizam (party rules) have in practice been so distorted that the party has turned out to be but a pale copy of the Leninist prototype.

• vulnerable to stultifying bureaucratization from above

• Simultaneously, the party has been subverted by traditionalization “from below.”