A Tale of Two Cities

In a fragile Republic, that is Lebanon, two distinct projects of a nation are boiling at very high frequencies. Cohabitation has become an ideal irreconcilable with the reality shaping the country. The current system, be it in the form of a dubious Lebanese Constitution or the duplicitous factional power sharing scheme in Government, is no longer apt to contain these rough dynamics. It is in terrible need of a revision. As the two conflicting factions respectively boycott each other’s demands, the country is plummeting into its demise.

When a malfunction occurs in a defective product, companies tend to instantly proceed to a product recall. This is the standard approach to limit liability for corporate negligence. After the sequence of perilous events that ravaged the country, in the form of political deadlocks, fatal explosions and armed clashes, one would expect a sense of urgency to question the sturdiness of the Lebanese “political product”. However, as centuries of civil turmoil have repeatedly proven, in Lebanon this is not the case. Those who seize the reigns of power prefer to uphold defects rather than challenge a status-quo that might endanger the preservation of their faction within the larger power structure. Reconciliation in Lebanon is conducted on the basis of relegating one’s allegiance to an outside factor. This is precisely at the heart of the pact of conviviality, the “National Pact” of 1943, where one faction rejected its alliance with the West and another faction rejected its alliance with Syria. On the absurd basis of two tainted negations, one chaste nation was expected to surface. As soon as one faction deviates from this arrangement, the country plunges once again into confrontation as seen in 1958, 1975, 1989, and 2006.
This tacit agreement for conflict resolution was barely functional until the nature of the relationship between the different actors flipped permanently damaging the structure of the arrangement. Ever since the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, the two competing movements “the March 8th” at its head Hezbollah and the “March 14th” at its head the leaders of the anti-Syria protests of 2005, have defined a new archetype which reflects a different story. In fact, each community is defining itself by affirming an alliance with an external factor as opposed to the previous “negation” format that would dictate the norms of sectarian cohabitation.
This new format prevailed on February 14th 2008. On this traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other, two divergent waves of peoples of one same country, simultaneously hit the streets in demonstration of their own infatuation with their respective causes, martyrs and ideals. Some say love hurts. Well indeed it does. Two antagonistic movements are leading the country into an even deeper divide in an attempt to claim larger political authority refusing to accept that there is only so much pie to go around. A harsh economic recession is being felt, internal security as well as border security has never been so low which allows for external extremist groups such as Al Qaeda to use Lebanon as a safe-haven for their terrorist plots. In this state of total anarchy, the population is merely collateral damage attempting to survive a system that slowly captures it into an annihilating fall.

A critical solution needs to be reached without further delays taking into account that the rules of the game have been altered. It has become clearer through the stringent political discourses that two cultures are materializing in one State with contradictory beliefs, concerns and identities. While one seemingly aspires for modernity and progress the other aspires for power and recognition. The two most pressing issues in the country are the election of a Presidential candidate (a void in place since last November) and the functioning of the governmental institutions through the reintegration of the March 8th block into parliament. To avoid an imminent escalation in violence in a worn-out country it is likely that the first power concession will obviously benefit one party to the detriment of another. Indeed, the balance of power has shifted in favor of the March 8th movement who possesses the key to the rehabilitation of Government. One solution, although painful to the March 14th movement, would be to yield to the March 8th demands for an increase in Parliamentary representation to 1/3 of the seats. Hence by untangling the deadlock, one might hope to alleviate the mounting tension and generate room for negotiation between these “two cities”.