Syria’s Future Depends on Pluralism

Isaiah Berlin and Leszek Kołakowski offer a blueprint: Only inclusive, pluralist statecraft—not imposed power—can bring Syria back from the brink. The international community must insist on it.

Pluralism as the Grammar of Politics

If we have to take one critical concept from Isaiah Berlin, it is that societies are not built on harmony but on the management of conflict among irreconcilable values. Liberty, equality, faith, security, belonging—all are legitimate, yet none can fully contain the others. “The world that we encounter in ordinary experience,” Berlin wrote in Two Concepts of Liberty, “is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute.” To him, the most dangerous illusion in politics was the dream of a final harmony in which all contradictions dissolve. In The Pursuit of the Ideal he called that dream “not merely unattainable… but conceptually incoherent.” Attempts to impose such unity—through fascism, communism, or religious absolutism—produced tyranny. The only antidote was pluralism: institutions that acknowledge conflict and allow competing ways of life to survive side by side.

Kołakowski’s Realism

Leszek Kołakowski, who endured the broken promises of communist Poland, reached a parallel conclusion. In his essay How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist he wrote that “there never have been and never will be improvements that are not paid for with deteriorations and evils.” Reform always extracts a price. In In Praise of Inconsistency he argued that true political wisdom lies in tolerating contradictions rather than forcing life into rigid systems. And in Modernity on Endless Trial he reduced this to a single sentence: “The price of our freedom is permanent tension.” Together, Berlin and Kołakowski provide not just theory but a grammar of statecraft for fractured societies: accept trade-offs, design for diversity, and distrust anyone who promises perfect solutions.

Syria as a Mosaic

Few countries illustrate these insights better than Syria. Its identity has always been plural: Christians, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis, Kurds, Turkmen, Armenians, Sunnis, and Shi’a all contributed to its cultural fabric. Maaloula’s Aramaic still connects today’s Syria to the earliest centuries of Christianity. Salamiyah’s Ismailis preserved centuries of Shi’a scholarship. Turkmen villages added their own language and traditions to the Syrian mix. These identities coexisted, sometimes uneasily, sometimes in harmony, but they were the essence of the country.

And yet, the modern Syrian state never created institutions capable of sustaining such diversity. Under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, minorities were courted as symbols of tolerance while being politically subordinated. Christians and Druze could worship but not dissent. Kurds were long denied citizenship. Turkmen remained politically invisible. This was not pluralism, but authoritarian patronage: a brittle equilibrium that collapsed in 2011. Once protests began, repression deepened divisions, Islamist militias exploited sectarian fear, ISIS enslaved Yazidis and terrorized Christians. By 2025, Syria’s Christian population—once near ten percent—had dwindled to a fraction. Communities that survived for centuries found themselves on the edge of extinction.

Sharaa’s Illusion of Reform

The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 did not end this cycle. Ahmed al-Sharaa, once a jihadist commander and now self-styled president, imposed his own vision of central authority. In March 2025 he introduced a provisional constitution granting sweeping presidential powers. One-third of parliamentary seats were reserved for presidential appointees, the rest filtered through indirect electoral colleges. The first elections under this system, scheduled for September 2025, have already excluded Kurdish and Druze regions on “security” grounds. In practice, the groups most in need of protection are the least represented.

These reforms are marketed as a return to normalcy. In reality, they are hollow. Sharaa’s government rests on force and foreign sponsorship, not legitimacy. His constitution is a framework for control, not inclusion. The massacres of Alawites in Latakia and Tartus in March 2025, killing more than 1,400, and the shelling of Druze in Sweida in July and August, leaving hundreds dead, demonstrate the danger of a central state blind to pluralism. Salamiyah’s Ismailis report neglect; Turkmen leaders complain of being erased from constitutional drafts. These are not incidental failings but the product of a system that imagines unity through exclusion. Berlin’s warning in The Crooked Timber of Humanity applies with chilling clarity: “The conviction that there is one true solution… is the most dangerous illusion of them all.”

Minority Resistance and the Hassakeh Platform

Despite fear and violence, Syria’s minorities have not surrendered. In August 2025, more than 400 representatives of Druze, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Ismailis, Turkmen, and Sunnis gathered in Hassakeh to demand decentralization and constitutional guarantees for pluralism. Their declaration was striking: “Syrian identity includes all Syrians.” For them, pluralism is not a Western import but survival. In Arnah, a Druze town near Mount Hermon, residents speak openly of their mistrust in Sharaa’s promises. They define safety not by central control but by local solidarity and international recognition. As analyst Haid Haid observed, “Only time, major engagement and effort build trust.” This is Berlin’s pluralism in practice: no grand harmonies, only slow compromises built through bargaining and restraint.

From Philosophy to Statecraft

The challenge now is to turn these demands into statecraft. Philosophy points the way, but institutions give it life. Syria needs a constitutional bill of rights guaranteeing religious freedom, language rights, and cultural protections. It needs grand-coalition governance, proportional representation in cabinet and security, and devolved authority for local communities: Druze in Sweida, Ismailis in Salamiyah, Kurds in the northeast, Turkmen in the north. Veto powers must be carefully delimited—strong enough to prevent forced displacement or cultural annihilation, weak enough to avoid paralysis. And any settlement must be co-authored through dialogue, building on the Hassakeh platform, with international safeguards but Syrian ownership.

Comparative cases illuminate the path. Lebanon shows the dangers of freezing pluralism into rigid quotas. Bosnia, though fragile, proves that imperfect power-sharing can still halt war. Switzerland demonstrates that pluralism, if carefully engineered, can sustain prosperity. Syria will not become Switzerland overnight. But it can avoid becoming Lebanon or Bosnia again only if it embraces pluralist design as the foundation of peace.

The Responsibility of the International Community

For the international community, the implications are direct. Recognizing Sharaa’s government as legitimate would be a grave error. Military victories do not produce legitimacy. Aid and reconstruction funds must be conditioned on pluralist milestones: decentralization, enforceable rights, proportional institutions. Minority councils and civil society groups must be empowered, not sidelined. Accountability for sectarian massacres must be enforced. These are not optional add-ons—they are the minimum conditions for stability.

Pluralism is not only a moral cause but strategic common sense. Plural states are harder to hijack, less prone to radicalization, and less likely to generate refugee flows. Economically, they attract diaspora capital and expertise. Syria’s minorities carry networks vital to rebuilding. Without them, reconstruction will fail. Culturally, they are Syria’s essence. To lose them would hollow out the country itself.

The Only Kind of Peace That Can Endure

Kołakowski’s realism reminds us of the cost: “The price of our freedom is permanent tension.” Syria’s future will never be perfectly harmonious, but it can be decent. Berlin’s injunction against “final solutions” is the lesson: every time Syria has tried one—Assad’s authoritarian secularism, Islamist monism, foreign-backed hegemonies—it has ended in ruin. What remains is pluralism: compromise, tension, and negotiation institutionalized. Sometimes awkward, sometimes unstable, but always better than the alternative.

The question is no longer whether pluralism is desirable, but whether Syria and the international community will admit that nothing else will work. Monism has failed. Patronage has failed. Force has failed. What remains is the only kind of peace that can endure: pluralism as statecraft.