A striking phenomenon has been observed over the past few weeks: the extreme elation of most Syrian and Lebanese citizens has been conjoined with extreme caution. Without the elation disappearing, caution has entered the frame - coupled with suspicions in some cases, criticism in others, and negation tinged with despair in others still.
Behind these sentiments stand legitimate questions about communal relations in both societies, and whether the new political elites can mend the cracks or defuse the explosive potential of these social schisms. It is as though, in this part of the world, we are condemned to apprehension looming over our joy and disconcertion permeating our attempts to perceive developments, making the temporary permanent and turning wary anticipation into a national sport.
If the Assad family had firmly sealed off politics in Syria, the Lebanese have had two (March 14, 2005, and October 17, 2019) practice runs of mixed expectations and the betrayals of hopes.
However, the more cautious, and less trusting of appearances, among us worry because of some past events in neighboring countries that reinforce their caution. In Iraq, for instance, celebrations of Saddam’s overthrow were short-lived; some even went as far as mourning his horror-ridden era. As for the Libyans, their country was swept by a civil war almost immediately after they put Gaddafi under the dust.
There are certainly many differences that distinguish each of the cases above from the others - some are tied to the countries themselves, others to the phase in which the events unfolded or the scale of the setbacks. Nevertheless, it might be time to plainly assert that our countries do not have a reliable interior, or that they have several inherently conflictual interiors that all dismiss the others. That is the reason for the exceptional significance of (both negative and positive) external powers’ roles. In this sense, the "struggle for" our countries renders the talk of "sovereignty" nothing more than lyrical prose.
These countries’ experiences are largely defined by the collapse of national loyalties at the hands of two opposing forces: military-security regimes and Islamist movements - or, in Lebanon’s case, the alliance between spoil-sharing and the containment of political life through militias and the magic of "resistance." With these sickles, national identities were nipped in the bud, and consensus on every question of what the homeland stood for was debilitated.
"Who are we?" continues to elicit a multitude of divergent answers in each of these countries. Even when there is broad consensus on nominal identification with the country, as a functional fait accompli, the essence of this national identity and the direction it should take remain subjects of dispute.
Is "Lebanese identity," for instance, defined by fighting Israel or steering clear of conflicts? Is suspicion of Iran inherent to "Iraqi identity," or does this identity encourage aligning with Iran? In Syria, the reemergence of the debate over whether the republic is simply "Syrian" or "Arab Syrian" speaks volumes - to say nothing about the battle over which of the two flags represents the country.
Of course, the frailty of our countries’ national fabric - even before this problem was exacerbated by military regimes, militias, and rampant corruption - has fed on several factors. One is the profound legacy of rejecting the "Sykes-Picot statelets" without presenting alternatives, except the two miserable experiments of Faisal’s Kingdom in Damascus and the "United Arab Republic."
For a number of reasons, nothing ever came of the kernels of modern and modernist politics; these forces never grew into influential political actors capable of transcending sectarian and ethnic divisions or forging bonds that cut across communities. This state of affairs is especially apparent during moments of intense polarization when the need for political forces grows but such hopes are swiftly dashed. As a result, vengeance has become a powerful feature of our debates, in which distant origins and histories are prominent themes that are accompanied by rivalries of rural roots, over "heroism,manhood," and "martyrdom."
Our societies, therefore, do not gain much from simplistic modernist narratives built on the dichotomies like "the people" versus "the regime" or "society" versus "the authorities," or the poor dichotomies propelled by this narrative ("patriotic" and "unpatriotic,corrupt" and "un-corrupt,bourgeois" and "toiling masses") with the expectation that a revolution or reforms will do away with the bad guys and ensure the good guys’ victory. Putting such oversimplification aside, the middle ground between the opposite sides of the binary is not necessarily destined to disappear in the way European Marxism had predicted, with the petty bourgeoisie eventually "sorted" into one of the two camps, joining either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
This does not imply that no faction can address typical political questions better than another, be it in terms of having more of a national consciousness or less of the radical consciousness embodied by military and resistance movements. However, it does mean that our problem extends beyond politics in the conventional sense. Our society is multiple societies, and its culture is multiple cultures, just as even the unity of authority is itself constantly threatened with fragmentation under the weight of communal, sectarian, ethnic and regional discord.
If we were to use the language of art, we could say that those societies are three-dimensional rather than two. Their surface is determined not by their height and width, but height, width, and depth at the same time... This deserves a share of our intellectual attention, which today remains overwhelmingly focused on political politics.
