Has the Lebanese Republic Ever Truly Wanted Greater Lebanon?

The centenary of the Lebanese Constitution and the Republic is now prompting a series of conferences and debates.

Very well.

Perhaps it is better to regard this initiative as a healthy reflex, a desire to engage in some soul-searching from the very depths of the abyss, rather than as a pathological urge to finish off an already tottering edifice.

So be it.

A hundred years on, what assessment can be made of the Lebanese experience? What has become of the institutional project that was supposed to give this country substance? And why do its elites seem to have devoted more energy to fighting over its possession than to making it viable?

The debates now proliferating, particularly in Christian circles, are taking a different direction.

Greater Lebanon is once again being called upon to justify its very existence.

Federalism is returning as an almost inevitable response to communal anxieties.

As though questioning the Lebanese formula had become the only possible way of interpreting a crisis that has dragged on for so long.

The contrast is striking between the disparaging lens through which the Lebanese microcosm views itself and the efforts, at least those made in good faith, from various quarters to show it that what it regards as defects might well be virtues.

The Vatican, for instance, has just beatified Patriarch Elias Howayek, one of the architects of Greater Lebanon.

At the very moment when the Church is honoring the man who championed Lebanon's expansion beyond its mountain heartland, some of his political heirs seem more concerned with redrawing its internal borders, or even bringing its experiment in living together to an end.

One might almost think that the Holy See's gesture, and the message it carries, was something of an embarrassment to its intended recipients!

These anxieties deserve to be heard.

Christians indeed carry the memory of violence endured since the Ottoman era and of the gradual erosion of their influence.

The wounds of that memory have never truly healed, even after Greater Lebanon was established and Christians exercised clear political predominance within it until 1990.

Regional instability now feeds a persistent fear of becoming a vulnerable minority, further aggravated by the hold of an armed organization, Hezbollah, over decisions of war and peace. And in Syria, the return of authoritarian Sunni Islam, carrying with it neo-Ottoman expansionist overtones, hardly improves matters.

Added to this fear are declining status, emigration and the persistent feeling of having lost all control over their future. A feeling, moreover, deliberately cultivated by some of their political leaders to strengthen partisan solidarity built around communal identity.

It goes without saying that the Shiite community, now facing the destruction of its ancestral land and the collapse of its own political and military supremacy, likewise finds itself with its back against the wall, despite its numerical superiority over Christians, with all the rage, frustration and sense of exclusion that entails. This inevitably recalls a history of persecution and exclusion that is hardly distant, even if, this time, the community can essentially blame only the choices made by its political representatives.

The Sunni community itself, despite its indisputable numerical predominance in the Arab-Muslim world, has not been spared the crisis. The Gulf, its political and financial point of reference, now finds itself exposed to military attacks for the first time. Years of Iranian expansion in the Levant have left deep scars on the community's collective psyche. And within Lebanon, from the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 to the erosion of Sunni leadership beginning in 2019, a bitter sense of humiliation has taken deep root.

As for the Druze, caught between Israel's siren calls in the Hawran, the hammer of the unitary state in Damascus, Shiite encroachment and Christian withdrawal in Mount Lebanon, their predicament increasingly resembles a Gordian knot.

Against this backdrop, one question keeps returning: since when has anxiety been enough to form the basis of a political project?

Power Before the State

Perhaps it would be useful, at the risk of offending certain sensibilities, to begin with a premise that current debates seem to sidestep because it is liable to prick a few consciences. And for good reason: it concerns a notion that the political sphere, let alone ordinary people, is hardly fond of.

Responsibility.

Since 1920, Lebanon's elites, with a few exceptions, have largely continued to operate as tribes. They have rarely considered developing the project of Greater Lebanon institutionally, except when doing so served their communal predominance or their particular interests. Worse still, they have frequently subordinated the country's interests to the calculations of their regional or international political patrons.

The birth of Greater Lebanon, the product of genuine Lebanese aspirations within the context of the French Mandate, was hardly inevitable. Competing projects abounded, and support for the new state was far from unanimous. Independence in 1943 opened the possibility of overcoming these divisions by patiently building the institutions of a Republic. Yet the leaders who claimed that legacy all too often treated the compromise as an arrangement of convenience among chieftains, liable to be revoked whenever the balance of power shifted.

How else can one explain the frenzy with which, since 1943, each camp in turn has insisted on spitting on the Lebanese formula, vilifying it and stabbing it in the back?

The 1975 war provides glaring proof.

Several of those who had held the Republic's highest offices, followed by their heirs and spiritual descendants in military fatigues, often even more nihilistic, thus took part in devastating the very state they claimed to defend.

Admittedly, regional factors and the Palestinian question weighed heavily on that war.

But they absolve none of Lebanon's leaders of responsibility for their choices.

There have been exceptions. Chehabism sought to equip the state with a stronger administration, with its well-known limitations, particularly regarding civil liberties. Political movements attempted to transcend the communal reflex. The Taif Agreement subsequently provided for institutional reforms that, to a large extent, still await implementation.

At every stage, the same obstacle has resurfaced, and it must be said: communal power, and the leaders who live off it, have difficulty tolerating institutions capable of outlasting them and resisting their influence.

The Temptation to Dominate, Then to Leave

For a century, Lebanon has thus seemed to function according to a tribal model that perpetuates itself under changing guises. Each political group cherishes the dream of dominating the others, politically or culturally. It seeks to take control of the state, impose its conditions and turn a temporary advantage into lasting predominance.

And, to cap it all, despite their threats of rupture, its leaders never quite manage to leave.

How can they abandon a country they still hope to control?

Such an archaic mechanism can certainly work for a while.

Then the balance of power shifts.

The predominance of one awakens the ambitions of the others, and everyone eventually comes to grief in a game conceived as zero-sum; in the end, the sum is negative for everybody.

Institutions grow weaker, and society foots the bill for the fleeting victories of its leaders.

It is often when this urge to dominate fails that ihbat, a deep sense of frustration and disillusionment, emerges, accompanied by its procession of anxieties, and the desire to withdraw begins to take the shape of a political program.

The temptation of divorce then follows from the inability to retain the position one believed was secure, or to obtain the one to which one felt entitled.

Of course, such an interpretation cannot account for all the motivations of today's advocates of federalism.

Some demands for protection are sincere.

Others arise from very real experiences of coercion.

The question remains what political leaders do with these fears, and what solutions they claim to derive from them.

The Trappings of Federalism

One need only look around, well beyond Lebanon: the desire for divorce is in the air.

Societies are fragmenting under the pressure of profound political and identity-based divisions.

The temptation to seek refuge among one's own kind is gaining ground everywhere.

Populism, demagoguery, authoritarianism and racism have spread over the ruins of globalization, and sometimes, insidiously, thanks to globalization itself.

One might almost think the world has become considerably more Lebanized in recent years.

Lebanon, with its long experience of fearing the other, naturally finds in this enough to feed its old demons.

But is divorce, even when dressed up in the trappings of federalism, the answer?

Some will argue that the word "divorce" is used in bad faith. Yet, given the sectarian hatred of the other that seeps through the honeyed rhetoric and political projects, it would be bad faith to pretend that even "divorce" is anything other than a mild, politically correct term for what almost amounts to barely concealed fantasies of deportation… or worse.

The desire for supremacy and domination dies hard.

Federalism has its own constitutional logic.

It is a system of organizing the state and its territory that is widely used around the world.

It presupposes clearly distributed powers and common institutions governed by rules binding on everyone.

There is certainly nothing shameful about advocating it.

But why should it not be discussed in Lebanon according to the very logic of living together, as a system for organizing power agreed upon by all?

Why this insistence, in certain discourses, on giving it an identity-based and sectarian character, when the issue should first and foremost be constitutional and concerned with national unity?

Partition is an entirely different matter.

If divorce is to take place, it would require the agreement of the parties concerned, lest it turn into a trial of strength that would serve nobody's interests.

And what would it look like in a country where populations are so closely interwoven?

Who would draw its borders?

What would become of citizens who found themselves minorities within the new entities?

How would resources and debt be divided?

Who would assume the responsibilities of the state?

Who would hold the weapons?

Of course, the champions of projects inherited from the war have ready-made answers to these questions.

Those answers, however, must rest on realistic considerations rather than wishful thinking.

Advocates of federalism know what they no longer want.

Have they measured the consequences of the divorce they sometimes seem to be calling for?

Do they imagine that they will thereby return to a golden age that vanished long ago, when Christians held the upper hand in the country's affairs (an age, moreover, whose loss they themselves helped bring about through the actions of some of those who represent them today)?

There is no point in hiding the truth.

A certain condescension and sense of superiority toward other communities persist in some circles. This is hardly exclusive to Christians; it exists within every communal grouping. It deserves to be examined as lucidly as the hegemonic ambitions of the other camps.

After all, are all the problems Christians face really caused by living together?

Their community suffers from the same endemic ailments as the others: delusions of grandeur, the temptation to ally with foreign powers on sectarian grounds, defective elites, corruption and the cult of leaders.

Nor did the former Christian predominance prevent the system's excesses or the crises that eventually brought it down.

What would become of these practices in a federal framework?

Who can seriously believe that they would disappear simply by virtue of a new territorial division?

The Unfinished Work

The centenary of the Constitution could have brought the debate back to questions left unresolved for decades.

Balanced regional development and the decentralization envisaged by Taif deserve better than to be relegated to the status of promises made in speeches.

So do the institutions responsible for guaranteeing citizens' rights.

The same applies to sovereignty and the monopoly on the use of force: no political formula can function sustainably as long as an armed force can decide the country's fate on its own.

And the question of renewing the elites should be raised, following the failure of March 14 in its civic dimension and of the 2019 thawra.

The tribal model of sectarian and charismatic chieftaincies has given way to a return of the traditional notables, poorly concealed behind the mask of sanitized neo-reformers and other hypocritical, narcissistic manipulators. NGOs, far more presentable, yet ultimately backed by the same regional and international political and financial networks, are gradually replacing political parties.

Yet the underlying logic remains irredeemably the same: a tribal and mercantile mentality, at times even sectarian, concealed beneath a veneer of pseudo-modernity.

And a determination to evade all responsibility, to hope that equality in rights and duties will never exist, and to refuse to entrust anything to the state.

Unless the state is me: the leader, and through him, the clan and the community.

How can one be surprised, in the face of this disaster, that the Republic has become a federation of streets run by the owner of the neighborhood generator, who supplies electricity at a price he sets himself, by virtue of his absolute, and thoroughly nihilistic, sovereign power?

Fortunately, the picture is not entirely bleak: at every level, decent people continue, individually or collectively, to take initiatives that give substance to the coexistence others are bent on destroying.

To finally break the vicious circle of communal domination, democratic competition would have to rest on genuine rivalry among new, pluralistic, cross-communal parties capable of advancing political projects for the country as a whole. Otherwise, the same practices will continue to reproduce themselves under different labels.

More than a hundred years after the proclamation of Greater Lebanon, is it viable, amid such an accumulation of existential crises, to go on endlessly reconsidering its very existence?

The Constitution can evolve, and the Republic and its institutions must be open to discussion. That goes without saying.

One can only hope, however, that any new project will not actually serve as a means of evading responsibility for what people have failed to preserve and develop, by taking refuge in the illusion of a fresh start that would reset the counters, and the guilt, to zero, while concealing the underlying problem: the mediocrity of decision-makers co-opted by the mediocrity of voters.

For it is easier to blame others and the Lebanese political formula for the failures of one's supposedly infallible historic leaders, and for one's own failures.

But one would still need to know what kind of country is to be made to function, in whose interest, and for whom.

Instead of expending so much energy pursuing an illusory supremacy and, when it slips away, dreaming of divorce, would it not be far more realistic and sensible to finally begin working together to make this Greater Lebanon a viable country, as a few wise figures, among them Patriarch Howayek and Michel Chiha, one of the principal architects of the 1926 Constitution, had hoped it would one day become…?