"Zaamat", "Jamaat" and the War Against Weber in Lebanon (1/2)

At a time when large swaths of Lebanese society are plunging into the hateful pitfalls of the friend-enemy divide, there is more reason than ever to reread Michel Seurat. The Barbarian State — his posthumous collection of articles devoted to the deconstruction of Assad's Syria — remains the most rigorous analytical landmark for anyone seeking to understand the deep structure of Arab politics, Lebanon's included.

Drawing on Ibn Khaldun, recast here within a Deleuzian tradition, Seurat evokes the zaamat-state (the state of chiefs) and the jamaat-state (the state of communities) as constructions intrinsic to the Syrian stato-national model.

Diametrically opposed, however, to Assad's tyrannical model, Lebanon is also the superimposition of both: the state of chieftaincies and the state of communal bodies — organized, however, into autonomous and rival entities — which makes it simultaneously… too much of a state and not enough of a state…

"The Douweylat-State"

To this must be added a third layer, inherited from the Eastern Question and the system of millets and capitulations: the absurd oxymoron of the douweylat-state — the state of micro-states with international ramifications, para-statal structures that recognize in the central state only what it can offer them, while disputing its monopoly on legitimate violence, which has been, since Max Weber, one of the very elements of the definition of the state itself.

And this is where the struggle is knotted. Lebanon is the territory of dialogue under constraint — as in Geneva, Lausanne, Taif, Doha — which yields "agreement" only under the pressure of collapse or foreign tutelage, and relapses into mistrust the moment that constraint is relaxed, as witnessed by the failure of the national dialogue conference in 2006, barely a year after the Syrian withdrawal.

It is also the terrain of mimetic rivalry for power as a sign of communal superiority, and of the caste consciousness of chieftaincies confronting any challenge to their authority. Revolutions there occur only through violence and within each community separately — and even then. Popular uprisings manage to coalesce against a common foreign oppressor, but struggle thereafter to produce a political contract, because the multiplication of allegiances and the persistence of residual legitimacies prevent any lasting centralization.

The War Against Weber

Political modernity rests in principle on a simple and revolutionary Weberian proposition that Lebanon has never truly traversed. It has produced Constitutions, institutions, ministries and embassies, while maintaining beneath the surface — in a state of quasi-organic preservation — pre-state residual legitimacies: charismatic chieftaincies, historical feudalities, militias, which have claimed and obtained an existence parallel to constitutional legitimacy. The demand for a politics of the countryside and the mountains against urbanization, of particularism against stato-national construction, anticipated by half a century the global identitarian movement we witness today — lending Lebanon's fate a significance that exceeds it.

So long as the state has not been invested by a community through its party-force, it remains an object of distrust. The rivalry for power obeys a mimetic mechanics: it is coveted because another holds it, and becomes, consequently, far more a sign of communal superiority than a program of governance… Lacanian hainamoration in all its splendor…

March 14, 2005, or the Royal Abortion

There was, however, a singular moment in Lebanon's contemporary history… March 14, 2005. A superimposition of the new and the old, the modern and the archaic, of an authentic sovereigntist impulse and the communal apparatuses which, threatened by the emergence of a transversal civic dynamic, immediately set about recuperating it — to drain it of all reformist substance and re-communitarize it. A million and a half people in the streets of Beirut, moved by a demand for sovereignty, who were not responding to the summons of a zaim but to something stranger and more fragile — it was at once fascinating and unsettling. The zaamats had stepped back, and the movement was running on autopilot — or nearly so, led essentially by intellectuals, civil society cadres and students. As for the jamaat, its frame was overflowed. For a moment, the aspiration to a rational and national legitimacy had crossed communal lines rather than folding back within them. Only Hezbollah, loyal to Assad and quite content to inherit his legacy, had openly positioned itself in confrontation with the movement. It too saw in the stato-national construction that had become possible a threat to its weapons and its hegemony over its community.

The moment was thus quickly smothered by its own bearers. The inability of March 14 to choose between its passage toward the state and the continued existence of enclaves within the state stems from the very nature of the movement — simultaneously a desire for a sovereign state, subsequently transmuted into a gathering of communities that wanted nothing of the other's state.

Though real and exhilarating, the grace — that of a last chance? — was brief. Fleeting. A dream.

And it is on the ruins of that singular adventure — deconstructed both under the hammer blows of the Assad-Hezbollah axis and by the petty power stakes of its own leaders — that Lebanon's current tragedy is now playing out.