The current state of affairs in Lebanon is sad and deeply alarming. A dense cloud obscures the reality of profound and sharp divisions amid a chasm that seems impossible to bridge. Two fundamental and irreconcilable views are pulling against one another with great intensity. As for the advocates of a “third path,” their only virtue is their relatively nonviolent rhetoric. At the level of substance, they are riddled with contradictions, ambiguities, and dead-ends in a concealed, exhausting, and futile search for a “half-Lebanese, half-Iranian” solution that cannot be formulated without divine intervention.
What lies behind this thick cloud of dust?
There is no doubt that structural theory presents a pivotal tool for understanding sociological and anthropological realities. Every social structure is formed, lives, and then declines, only to be replaced by a new structure that follows the same path in turn. No social structure is eternal. The constant is perpetual transformation.
The vitality of a structure stems from its contradictions, generated by numerous inherent and external factors around two major opposite views – a thesis and its antithesis, which together drive the structure forward. As long as the structure can absorb the transformations unfolding within it over time, through a dynamic struggle between the thesis and antithesis, it remains capable of regulating itself and endures.
But once the structure can no longer absorb these transformations, it begins to disintegrate, making way for the emergence of a new structure. And so the cycle continues. How, then, can structural theory help us understand the Lebanese situation, its past, present, and future?
If we view the Lebanese entity established in 1861 as a social, political, economic, and cultural structure – and it is indeed such a structure – we find that its contradictions revolved around the permanent conflict between the thesis of a Lebanese project aspiring to a trajectory and its antithesis, a regional project in Lebanon aimed at reintegrating the country into a wider regional framework.
The Lebanese structure was sufficiently solid and dynamic to absorb the immense internal and external transformations it witnessed over the course of 114 years, from 1861 to 1975. Since then, it has been in turmoil. For over half a century, from 1975 to 2026, it has witnessed a fierce battle between the Lebanese project and successive regional projects, whose final outcome has yet to be determined.
Will the Lebanese structure ultimately save itself and survive? Or will it collapse, giving rise to another structure upon its ruins? This is the major question.
Since its establishment in 1861, the Lebanese structure has succeeded in absorbing numerous transformations. Among the most significant of the shifts was the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the horrors that followed when Türkiye entered the war in 1915 alongside Germany and Austria. The Ottomans suspended autonomous rule, imposed martial law, and erected gallows. Then came the terrible blockade that annihilated one-third of the population of Mount Lebanon between 1915 and 1918. However, the Great War ended with the defeat of the German-Austrian-Ottoman axis, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the disappearance of the Ottoman regional project in Lebanon in favor of the Lebanese project.
Then, in 1920, the Lebanese structure succeeded in absorbing the creation of “Greater Lebanon,” which expanded the entity to its present borders and brought with it major geographic, demographic, and social transformations under the French Mandate. It absorbed the new regional project represented by Faisal’s Kingdom of Syria, with the conflict once again resolved in favor of the Lebanese project. It also absorbed the transition from mandate to independence, the 1948 war and the establishment of Israel and their repercussions on Lebanon, as well as the successive Arab-Israeli wars that followed.
Likewise, it absorbed the regional unification projects- Baathist, Nasserist, and Syrian nationalist. It also absorbed the arrival of the armed Palestinian resistance faction and the establishment of “Fatahland” in southern Lebanese territory, from which these factions began launching operations against Israel in 1969, with the help of strong sectarian and Marxist-socialist popular pressure internally and the efforts led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yasser Arafat.
With the slogan “the road to Jerusalem passes through Jounieh” and the clashes of 1975, however, the Lebanese structure was no longer capable of truly absorbing the emerging regional projects. It became home to a sea of death, migration, destruction, bloody internal conflicts, Israeli occupations and resistance operations, and the long period of Assadist hegemony.
Although the Lebanese structure eventually outlasted the Assadist regional project, it found itself confronting a Khomeinist regional project that took the mantle and raised the slogan of liberating Palestine from Lebanon. All of this was accompanied by unprecedented economic and financial collapse, devastating wars, mass migration and displacement, culminating in the ongoing conflict between the Lebanese state and the Iranian Hezbollah over direct negotiations with Israel.
So, what fate awaits the Lebanese structure amid this storm? Is it fated to survive after 165 years, or will it collapse and give rise to a new structure? And what structure would replace it?
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