Are we moving towards the post-March 14 era?
Fares Soueid, the General Secretary of March 14 loves the big picture. You often find him in various TV station talk shows, talking about grand schemes and lofty ideals, long-term projects and sophisticated theories about the Christians in the East and how the March 14 alliance can restore their influence. Yet when it comes to the nitty-gritty of politics, like in the recent infighting over ministerial positions, Mr. Soueid becomes conspicuously absent.
I like to compare the March 14 project to the European Union. A great idea on paper with enormous potential, but when push comes to shove, the nation state becomes the only polity that really matters. Likewise, in March 14, when matters become concrete (a ministerial position here, an election there), the alliance breaks down into its separate sectarian blocks that compete to further their individual interests.
So why insist on having such an umbrella group?
Mr Soueid would perhaps answer that the March 14 project, as imagined by people like Gebran Tueni and Samir Kassir, is an inherently optimistic and hopeful project. A yearning to a time when the Lebanese will move beyond tribalism into the realm of ideas and fair competition.
But as far as this generation is concerned, what really matters is who gets the ministry of public works.
Hello, my name is Mustapha and I've been blogging about Lebanese society, business and politics since February 2005.
the reason this alliance always “breaks down into its separate sectarian blocks that compete to further their individual interests” is because that is who the individual players truly are at heart. the supposed “inherently optimistic and hopeful project” that pretends to yearn for “a time when the Lebanese will move beyond tribalism into the realm of ideas and fair competition” is just rhetoric on the part of the warlords and cleptocrats that make up march 14. you do know what rhetoric is, don’t you? some people call it “smoke in your eyes.” sometimes also referred to as bullshit or propaganda.
this government is just a mafia that steals from the people’s resources, keeping them starved, in the dark, in danger, and subjegated to the larger policies of the u.s.
Hey, onion, you were sort of making semi-sense there for a while, until you–I know it must be stronger than you–had to throw in that stupid canard about some “US policy” cabal to which Lebanese politicians are somehow beholden.
You know what the plobrem is, onion? The plobrem is uncouth plimitive cledurous peopre rike you who are smalt enough to identify “burrshit and plopaganda” of othels, but stirr farr for the “burrshit and plopaganda” of theil own burrshitters and plopagandists. (Chinese accent/off.)
Grow up, onion! Become a Spanish onion maybe! The Middle East is an ugly place! People are sensitive to their primordial identities and loyalties for a reason. Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism have not been particularly kind to minority peoples who don’t abide by silly Arabist and Islamist orthodoxies. Hard as it tries to go beyond the blinkered prejudices of Arabists and Islamists, Lebanon’s “dialogue of cultures” remains under tremendous pressure to pay lipservice to these two imperious thuggish impulses.
To some extent, March 14th IS like the European Union–and this is where I agree with Mustapha. Where I disagree with him is in his assumption that the European Union is somehow some reductive and rigid supra-national fuser of peoples that seeks to wither local identities. It is not! It is a mechanism for cross-national, cross-ethnic, cross-cultural cooperation. Unlike reductive monistic Arabism and Islamism, the EU does not supercede the nation and it doesn’t seek to replace it. It is a modicum of “unity” through “diversity”; “e pluribus unum” as we call it in my neck of the woods. Contrary to what Mustapha claims, March 14th IS a healthy exercise; the very fact that there is disagreement among its various components is a testament to its nuanced and complex nature. I would rather leave the stiff-arm-salutes and goose-steps to bearded mullah megalomaniacs and demented generals.
Don’t forget why the EU was formed in the first place: to stop Europe from going to bloody wars every other decade. By this standard, it has been rather successful.
The Future Movement has good potential if they Keep the Kataeb mainly, and the LF secondly with their camp.
Pingback: Last Week Recap | The Beirut Spring, a Lebanese Blog