State and Communities in Lebanon: a Long History of Love and Hate (2/2)

From the rubble of March 14, 2005, nothing emerged but further rubble, embodied most symbolically in the debris of the atomized port of Beirut on August 4, 2020.

Hollowed out by wars, occupations and relentless waves of corruption, the Lebanese state has been transformed into a platform, its sovereign power usurped in turn by various de facto forces.

With the state structure — even in the bygone time of its glory and splendor — Lebanon’s communities have all maintained a phantasmatic, almost libidinal relationship, shot through simultaneously with contempt, violence, something approaching BDSM.

The Shiites, or the Journey to the End of De-statization

The Shia community has always maintained, for its part, a relationship of hainamoration with the Lebanese state. Marginalized since the founding of Greater Lebanon, insurgent within the communist left and secular parties, then behind Moussa Sadr, its traditional project — that of Sadr, Shamseddine, Fadlallah, in the tradition of Jabal Amel — was nonetheless that of wilayat al-umma: statist in orientation, for whom Lebanon is a definitive homeland for all its sons (proof of which is that he who wielded this formula as a profession of faith was a Shiite, the former Speaker of Parliament Hussein Husseini), and the Lebanese state an end in itself — as against the Khomeinist innovation of wilayat al-faqih and Hezbollah’s pan-Iranian ambitions. But the culture of the Amilite Shia territory was progressively supplanted by a culture of space distilled by the Pasdaran and subordinated to Tehran.

Hezbollah then acquired, under the compulsion of arms after 2005, progressive control of the state’s mechanisms — on top of Amal’s systematic institutional investment since the 1990s, under the Assad umbrella. The collapse of the Iranian empire, from Damascus to Tehran, has however marginalized the party and returned it to its original para-statal status, back below the Weberian line, in open war against a Lebanese state that now struggles, as best it can, to recover its authority in a particularly complex context.

Nabih Berri, politically absorbed by the Hezb since March 8, 2005, finds himself fully responsible for the fate of the Shia duopoly within the institutions — in a position that is at once uncomfortable… and gratifying. If Berri continues to innovate in tightrope-walking, Hezbollah openly declares war on the state. But neither loses its compass when it comes to mulk — to power — charging against the institutions… while participating in them. The Amal leader solicits the Iranian ambassador to disregard an executive decision aimed at expelling him, while Hezbollah pulls off the feat of unleashing its attack dogs against the Salam cabinet… while keeping its ministers in it. It boycotts, but does not surrender its portfolios. The politics of the empty chair, since 2005, has always been its preferred instrument — causing damage without ever clearing out.

The Shia community has thus reached the apex of its journey to the end of the de-statization into which Hezbollah has been dragging it since the 1980s. The myth of exporting the revolution has collapsed. The status of vanguard resistance guard has evaporated. There is no longer any special status. Psychically, political Shiism is in existential crisis.

Sunni Ihbât and the Risk of the Border

The Sunni community, originally hostile to the creation of Greater Lebanon owing to the pan-Arab dream, evolved undoubtedly toward Lebanism from the defeat of 1967 and the end of the Nasserist dream. Looking inward within the national borders and recognizing the injustice of the absence of Muslim-Christian parity, it anchored itself in the Palestinian resistance and the National Movement to obtain reforms and equitable participation within the institutions. This re-inscription in territorial culture occurred, however, in pain. First the pain of the Israeli siege of 1982, when, abandoned by the Arab world, it witnessed — after the fall of the pan-Arab dream — the departure of Arafat from Beirut: a double myth collapsing at once. Then the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The liquidation of Hariri completed this process of territorialization and gave rise to the Beirut Spring and the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — the result of a cross-communal and proto-civic coalition gathered under the slogan Lebanon First.

Since then, and especially with Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the institutions after May 7, 2008, the Sunni community has been passing through a deep ihbât. Its traditional leaders are disgraced or marginalized, its representation fragmented, its relationship to the state diffuse. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam represents an aspiration toward renewal, but an embryonic and fragile one, without a solid parliamentary or popular base. In this void, a familiar mechanism risks reactivating itself: the attraction exerted by Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa as a symbol of a politico-communal reconquista, or the temptation of Erdogan’s protective shadow — signs of confusion and an existential quest for internal anchorage. If the Lebanese state does not recover its authority and restore substance to its national project, this drift could consolidate, reproducing in a different context the mechanics of 1967: when the border of the state no longer suffices to contain the passions, those passions end up escaping outward. One can wager that Tom Barrack, the voice of the great decision-maker, did not let slip his negationist remark regarding Lebanon through ideological inclination alone.

The Temptation of Little Lebanon: The Christian Community

The Christian community, above all the Maronites, was Greater Lebanon’s pampered child until the civil war. After the war — and above all the inter-Christian fratricidal wars that accelerated the Syrian stranglehold — the Christians entered a deep ihbât, all their popular figures having been marginalized and exiled until 2005. But since then, the discourse of the deep Christian hinterland has drifted. It is no longer that of the Lebanese state and of Greater Lebanon — the function the community had always assigned itself, from Patriarch Howayek to Sfeir. There is a resurgence of the temptation of identitarian federalism — the old separatist discourses of the civil war dressed up in the pragmatics of administration. A portion — a particularly vociferous one — of Christians no longer wishes so much to defend the perimeter of Greater Lebanon’s sovereignty as to live in a small, well-administered Lebanon: homogeneous, Europeanized and tension-free, ignoring the fact that even a federated identity wishing to live in a haven of peace cannot coexist in tranquility with neighbors locked in permanent war. That is, should they not themselves be seized by the Mephistophelian impulse toward self-annihilation in the name of the pseudo-sacred unity of the community, as occurs cyclically.

The irony is cruel: holding the Presidency of the Republic, command of the army, a Muslim-Christian parity respected by their Muslim partners despite demographic realities, Christians have lost faith in the state, and wish to ratify this disillusionment through another formula. A mirage.

The Orphaned State

At the moment when the Lebanese state is attempting, for the first time since the end of the civil war, to fully restore its sovereignty and authority, it has never been so orphaned of father and mother. The forces of fait accompli within the Shia community — committed to resisting any recentralization and to unconditional allegiance to a project of permanent imperialist war — want nothing of it. The Sunni community, in a state of perdition, looks upon it with the disabused and powerless eyes of the left behind. The Christian community, tempted by silent secession into an imaginary haven, lets itself be lulled by the poisoned call of the sirens. Even the United States and Europe seem to treat it as a pariah. And that is precisely, no doubt, because for once it truly belongs to no community or dominant component.

The former Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam had a phrase of staggering cynicism: “We governed the Lebanese because they are tribes that hate one another.” Horrible as it was, the formula was not entirely false. But it was true at a time when each tribe sought in foreign tutelage the guarantee of its superiority over the others — not today, when each community is simultaneously orphaned and exhausted.

There is a truth that generations of Lebanese politicians and thinkers from all communities have discovered, each on their own, at the end of different and often painful — sometimes broken — paths: Greater Lebanon is the only guarantee, the only salvation for all. It has been spoken by men who came from Arab nationalism and arrived at Lebanism, by men who came from the Islamic project and chose citizenship, by men who came from a Christian particularism and understood that isolation was a slow death. And these words were almost always, for those who spoke them publicly and without calculation, their last. This sacrifice deserves to be preserved.

If the Lebanese — individuals and groups — finally wish to live in peace, there is no better moment than now to rally to the state, to surround it and recreate a Lebanist center of gravity — not to plunge into nihilism out of weariness or despair.

But for that, the state too must cease — beginning with its Prince, guardian in principle of the Constitution and the Republic — to disappoint all its sons through omission, and must at last believe in itself.

Orphaned of father and mother? So be it. It is high time it became the father itself.