Peter Germanos


They still say Lebanon is not a failed state. But in what normal country do hundreds of thousands of citizens wait for the word of the Speaker of Parliament to decide whether they should return to their villages or remain displaced? In what sovereign republic does the position of the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, or the Army Command matter less than the signal sent by one sectarian-political leader?

This is not a minor constitutional disorder. It is the most visible sign that real authority in Lebanon no longer belongs to the legitimate state. Lebanon has institutions, flags, ministries, embassies, elections, and official speeches. But behind this formal façade, power is fragmented among parallel authorities. Each community has its own leadership, its own fears, its own foreign relations, its own security calculations, and often its own definition of national interest.

Lebanon is therefore not merely a weak state. It is a state without a single center of command. Its communities coexist, but they do not truly live together under one political project. Christians often think in terms of survival, autonomy, and Western or international guarantees. Sunnis have historically looked toward the Arab world and today probably Türkiye. Druze politics has often been shaped by geographic autonomy and regional balancing. The Shiite political leadership, especially since 1990 through the Hezbollah-Amal axis, has increasingly imposed a strategic reading based on resistance, regional confrontation, and alliance with Iran. This reading has not only shaped Shiite politics; it has repeatedly forced the entire country, Christians, Sunnis, Druze, and dissenting Shiites included, to live with the consequences of choices they did not collectively make.

The post-1990 Lebanese order was supposed to end the civil war and rebuild state sovereignty. Instead, it normalized a contradiction: all militias were supposed to disappear, but one armed structure was allowed to remain under the title of “resistance.” Over time, this exception became the rule. The Lebanese state did not absorb the armed actor; the armed actor absorbed the state’s decision-making space. Foreign policy, war, peace, borders, negotiations, and national security became subjects outside the normal reach of constitutional institutions.

This is why Lebanon’s crisis cannot be reduced to corruption, narco-state, banking collapse, or bad governance, although all four are real. The deeper crisis is that the state itself has become negotiable. A state can survive poverty. It can survive recession. It can even survive political paralysis. But it cannot survive indefinitely when the monopoly of force, the monopoly of foreign policy, and the monopoly of national decision-making are broken.

The Lebanese model is often praised as coexistence. In reality, it is managed separation. The communities share roads, airports, banks, and schools, but they do not necessarily share a single destiny. They meet inside the same institutions, yet each one keeps a private insurance policy outside the state: a foreign patron, a militia, a sectarian party, a religious authority, or a regional sponsor.

This is the real meaning of state failure in Lebanon. Failure is not only when garbage is not collected, electricity is absent, or banks collapse. Failure is when citizens no longer instinctively look to the state in moments of danger. Failure is when a villager asks what a party leader decided before asking what the government decided. Failure is when peace and war are not national decisions but sectarian calculations.

Before speaking of grand peace agreements, reconstruction plans, or the restoration of state authority over all Lebanese territory, Lebanon must first admit the central truth: no republic can function when entire segments of society receive existential instructions from authorities more powerful than the official state.

Lebanon does not need another slogan about unity. It needs a brutal political diagnosis. It is not one people governed by one state. It is a collection of communities negotiating coexistence under a hollow republic. Until the state becomes the only source of security, legality, and national decision, Lebanon will remain what it refuses to call itself: a failed state dressed in the costume of a republic


المصدر : Transparency News