The Two Lebanons

We hear that the French have a plan for the presidential stalemate in Lebanon: a Syrian puppet for president (Sleiman Frangiyeh) and a Saudi puppet for prime minister (Nawaf Salam). Nice balance, but no, thank you, Mr. Macron, because this means continued obstruction and impasse. You may have so many other problems to deal with that you have no time for the Lebanese cesspool. But it is time for the Lebanese to come to terms with real democracy, i.e. field as many candidates for president as there is, go to parliament and vote on the basis of the existing rules and laws. And whoever wins gets to serve for the next 6 years. If the cerebral density of the Lebanese people is beyond repair, then they get who and what they deserve.

Unfortunately, there are two Lebanons on this tiny piece of useless real estate, each the result of hundreds of years of history and cultural development. These two Lebanons occasionally seem to fuse into one homogeneous country, but the religious phantoms of our archaic past have a long shelf-life and continue to undermine such a convergent evolution.

One Lebanon, which I'll call, for lack of a better term, Patriot-Lebanon, is based on a sense of self-identity. This Lebanon is heir to a nucleus of former leaders who, since the mid 1500s, sought and managed to snatch independence from the Ottoman Turks, with important milestones in 1840, 1860 and up to 1919. This is the Lebanon that strove for accommodation and power-sharing, and that remained faithful to the National Pact by dissociating itself from Western custody and becoming a country with one self-defined identity. This is the Lebanon that gained independence in 1920, then kicked out the French in 1943 with the same vigor it displayed in previously kicking out the Ottoman Turks.

The other Lebanon, which I'll call Anti-Lebanon, views itself primarily as part of the wider Islamic Arab world, and sees Lebanon only as a temporary transitional identity definer. This is the Lebanon that originally did NOT want to be part of the independent Lebanon born after WWI, preferring instead the rule of King Faysal's fantasy Arab Kingdom of Syria. Although it reluctantly joined the post-WWI Lebanon, it eventually agreed - or seemed or pretended to agree - to the National Pact according to which it said it would dissociate itself from the Syrian/Arab world, in exchange for Patriot-Lebanon rejecting a western-leaning identity. It was hoped that, together, these two dissociations would by default establish a neutral country, develop over time a strictly Lebanese identity, and keep this small and diverse country stable and prosperous. 

While Patriot-Lebanon demonstrated goodwill - though grudgingly and under Arab pressure - by reaching out to Anti-Lebanon and adopting most of its political platform, becoming a full-fledged Arab country with no Western affiliations, in the hope of forging a common identity, Anti-Lebanon did not reciprocate and did not follow the same convergent path of seeking a unique Lebanese identity. To the contrary, it saw in Patriot-Lebanon's wilful compromise posture a weakness to be further exploited. Instead of rewarding Patriot-Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon dug its heels deeper and instead of neutrality it adopted a hardline posture of further arabization, islamization, and alienation from the West. For example, while Anti-Lebanon never complained about the 400 years (1516-1918) of harsh Muslim Turkish Ottoman occupation, yet it continues to date to nag about the 20-year-long French mandate as an imperialist colonialist enterprise. The reality is that Lebanon was a Turkish colony for 400 years, but it was never a French colony like, say, African French colonies. In fact, Patriot-Lebanon led the charge during WWII to evict its French protectors: the Vichy French first, then the Free French, bringing an end to the French Mandate and gaining full independence in 1943. But no sooner had Patriot-Lebanon chased its French protectors out of the country to demonstrate its thirst for genuine independence and its goodwill for compromise and neutrality, that Anti-Lebanon began reneging on the National Pact and driving the country further into a pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Western posture. Every time an Arab cause raised its head in the region, Anti-Lebanon waged a domestic war against Patriot-Lebanon: 1958 with Egypt's Abdel-Nasser Arab unionist movement; 1961 with the coup d'état fomented by the fascists of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the SSNP; 1965 with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO of Yasser Arafat, that devastated the country; 1979 with the Hezbollah terror organization as the military arm of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. 

This history of the country in the second half of the 20th century clearly shows that Lebanon's Muslims never really intended to build a cohesive neutral country with the Christians. Their occasional "nationalistic" stances (e.g. Rafik Hariri's pretenses) were lies behind which was a hidden, then with time overt, objective to turn Lebanon into a primarily Muslim country that tolerates its Christians as second class Dhimmi citizens, to be used as mere powerless storefront dummies with which to pretend to be multicultural and inclusive.

Patriot-Lebanon has been on the defensive since the inception of the country, while Anti-Lebanon has been on the offensive to violate the agreed-upon National Pact. Patriot-Lebanon managed to steer the country to prosperity between 1943 and the early 1970s, yet the continued assaults of Anti-Lebanon against the National Pact and against Patriot-Lebanon eventually succeeded in dismantling that prosperity and openness. Today's failure and collapse of Lebanon as a state and the stalemate it faces in electing a president are the direct result of the cumulative victories of Anti-Lebanon. The chasm between these two Lebanons continues to widen to the point where the experiment of attempting a fusion appears by all measures to be headed for an utter failure. 

The French proposal for a "cohabitation" of the two camps as a way out of the crisis will only prolong the crisis and continue the disintegration of whatever is left of the country. I don't think the French deliberately seek this path for Lebanon, but theirs is a "I have no time for this pathetic tiny piece of shit called Lebanon" posture, and its proposal is an off-the-cuff idea without any serious consideration for long-term consequences. In fact, this has been the western modus operandi vis-à-vis Lebanon for the past 5 decades. It's just too complex and too uninteresting (no oil, no rare earth metals, etc.) for the mercantile and Cartesian western mind to comprehend and deal with. So nothing serious was ever undertaken by the West to lift Lebanon out of its miseries, a good measure of which is externally caused.

Georges Naccache understood the deep chasm between the two constitutive elements of modern Lebanon that were forcibly joined together in 1920, when he said, "Deux négations ne font pas une nation" (Two negations do not a nation make). By attempting to build a nation out of two rejections (Patriot-Lebanon rejecting Western references and Anti-Lebanon rejecting Arab references to identity), the two Lebanons never really converged and it is time to admit that they failed to become a nation. Unless the Lebanese abandon their religious references in the constitution and in the conduct of their public affairs, there is little hope that the long-desired convergence will materialize. Like in a bad marriage, it is perhaps better to separate, at least for a while and until the two sides are mature enough; if only to save the children from further abuse.