Lebanon marked its 81st Independence Day two days ago. However, the “celebrations” were cool, reserved, and almost apologetic; or rather, there was no celebration. Just one week earlier, mind you, the people of Lebanon had shown, with everything they wrote and said in celebration of Fairuz’s ninetieth birthday, that they have not lost their capacity to celebrate. The term "independence," in light of this horrific war, resembles the surrealist works of Salvador Dali and his friends, a scene of contradictions whose true nature is not revealed like it is in dreams. The surrealism is heightened by nostalgia for the French mandate, a sentiment that, for several years now, has been increasingly echoed by the public, as well as intellectuals and educated people who have become less constrained by the dictates of "political correctness,” or maybe sacred taboos.
Defending these sentiments, and that is what they are, remains challenging. Nonetheless, it is equally challenging to ignore or dismiss them, as they are born of stark contrast between where the Lebanese had been before independence and what they have gone since. Today, many are saying that they do not seek Lebanese unity, which independence is supposed to be a major milestone for. They voice their opinions openly and frankly, calling for alternative frameworks for administering the country's affairs.
The current state of affairs neither favors independence nor presents evidence of its utility. It is the latest and strongest of many indications: we are embroiled in a destructive war that our elected parliament had not decided on, and the presidency remains vacant as parliamentarians remain silenced amid negotiations to end this devastating war, which have been tasked to the head of this legislative body, not in that capacity but as a representative of the party that had dragged itself and the country into the conflict.
When Lebanon gained independence in 1943, it was said that this independence was born of two intertwined commitments: the Christians would stop demanding the continuation of the French mandate, and the Muslims would stop demanding unity with Syria. Both parties did stop making these demands- France was no longer in a position to seek to maintain the mandate in the first place, nor was Syria in a position to annex Lebanon. Nonetheless, the monster of our failure to build an independent state has arisen many times, under different names and slogans, suggesting that failure is almost a destiny.
"Two negations do not make a nation," as the late writer George Naccache famously said, and they are not confined to abandoning these two demands. Indeed, "negation," which has manifested in various forms, lies in an extremely fertile womb, while the womb of the Lebanese failure to reach consensus is sterile and barren. We know how our capacity for negation has repeatedly surpassed our capacity for affirmation. We also know, and this is the result of this disparity, that intra-Lebanese conflicts have defined over half of the 81 years that have gone by since we attained independence- wars that were either continuous or intermittent, and either on a national scale or only in specific places and regions. Based on this tragic experience, we can deduce that every Lebanese has a Lebanese enemy whom he either thinks of becoming independent from him or thinks of imposing unity (that amounts to little more than the subjugation of the other and depriving him of their rights) on him.
Worse still, the prevailing "cultural" narrative, as is usually the case, either fails to keep up with public perceptions born of lived experience or denies them all together, finding comfort and reassurance in rhetorical and even televised consensus born of ideological and state discourses that revolve exclusively around animosity for the "Israeli enemy."
This is precisely where the real practical and theoretical question emerges: if independence is what peoples and countries gain, or what is given to them, then what are we to do when the people are not a people and the country is not a country? This question goes beyond Lebanon, whose problem has been translated into civil wars, and subsequently and in parallel, into the current conflict with Israel, and also applies to other Levantine countries like Syria and Iraq. In both, the problem was translated into military coups, though after the death of the founders of modern tyranny in these two countries they have transitioned into civil wars whose intensity ebbs and flows.
Today, the bankruptcy of Lebanese independence, and the bankruptcy of others across the "Third World," is no longer hidden or covered up under anything but the principle of independence and the principle of the people's right to it. That obliges those arguing for the righteousness of independence to extol this sound and absolute principle, and then fail to provide even one practical argument proving that it is indeed a sound and absolute principle.
Colonialism and its era have ended, and European and Western paternalism has lost its battle after the loss of its old distinction between the "civilized" and the "uncivilized." However, many peoples who have gained independence, first among them the Lebanese, have not won their battle to show that they are worthy of the independence they had obtained decades ago. With this chasm, we experience independence as a dead ritual, going through the notions half asleep, forgetting it, or laughing at it and making fun of it.
