Torn Asunder

That the various factions in Lebanon should be directly concerned by the existential battle currently unfolding there is entirely natural.

The contrary would be unhealthy.

Yet between apathy and unbridled enthusiasm, or even blind enlistment, there lies a whole emotional spectrum which, as usual, is obscured in favour of alignments that are deadly for the country — alignments with a conflict that inhabits it, but that utterly surpasses it.

As has always been the case, for that matter.

The Lebanese body is immunodeficient. It attracts every virus, every disease. Hence its propensity to flirt permanently with death.

And, contrary to the traumatic notions of identitarian supremacism that resurface with remarkable convenience at every period of crisis, the source of Lebanon's ontological weakness is not pluralism, but an archaic political culture. A confederation of tribes governed by charismatic leaders who, a hundred years after the founding of Greater Lebanon, still baulk at building a state and managing public affairs in a sound and rational manner, and who persist in aligning themselves with the strongest power in accordance with regional and international shifts.

That is not the question.

Mimetic reactions have invariably destroyed this country since its creation. They are precisely the product of a race for domination, even hegemony, in which individual anxieties carried over to a communal body are superimposed on the search for an external force to compensate for an inability to establish total domination within.

Two logics have been proposed to break this vicious circle. The first is a divorce between the communities or between the different regions — a kind of return to pre-Greater Lebanon formulas. This presupposes above all a common will to separate, and no doubt population movements if the underlying nature of the project is communitarian. The second is the construction of a national legitimacy respectful of pluralism, founded on five fundamentals: freedom, justice, equality, coexistence, citizenship. But this too presupposes a will — one that must be vast, individual, and transversal. Otherwise the communal reflex will never be broken, and the tribal chiefs will continue to govern the country like a loya jirga dependent on regional upheavals, playing, as skilled seismologists within, on the tectonic plates between Lebanon's communal groups.

These two projects have been competing in Lebanon since 1920, the third — that of fusion into a larger whole — having been abandoned.

The Taëf Constitution nonetheless stipulates in its preamble that Lebanon in its current borders is a definitive homeland for all its sons.

Are the principal Lebanese political formations of today, after the failure of 14th-of-March transversalism, of that mind?

The question deserves to be asked and answered, without pretence.

But the most alarming thing is not the debate about the fate of Greater Lebanon itself, but the way in which Lebanon's constituent parts have chosen to conduct it — in the worst possible circumstances on the ground — in a manifest hatred of one another, compounded by a will to vengeance that resonates like the cataclysmic return of a deep repressed.

In this context, it is difficult not to return to this will toward mimetic 'reprisals' or 'revenge,' and to the mechanism that governs it: a return to a fantasmatic mythic age when one was the strongest, which one has lost and which is once again within reach.

This is the expression of a profound pathological delusion. History may repeat itself in appearance, but times have changed, and in the Near East, equilibria are fragile. Partial, supremacist or separatist projects are tenuous, if not mad — not because they are risky, but because they depend on factors that are never in the hands of those who defend them tooth and nail.

In Lebanon, one does not decide, or very little.

Especially if one is not united transversally — and this is not a matter of a few dissident figures willing to 'step out' of their communal positions, out of interest or conviction, to join the opposing camp in an illusion of a trans-communal front.

The 14th of March 2005 is proof of this. The United States did not want — David Satterfield had said so openly — a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. It took place because of that enormous demonstration which was the work of a plural political and civic will.

In Lebanon, one attempts to adapt as best one can, to navigate by sight to prevent the vessel from sinking entirely.

This vessel needs a steady and moderate captain to manage the navigation through troubled waters.

And that captain is the State — notwithstanding all its failings — because today it is the only compass, the only space that can bring us together.

And it deserves to receive the broadest possible support in its perilous mission, without being battered and torn asunder by the ambitions, the euphoria and the frantic nostalgic fits of one faction or another.