When Saad al-Hariri says that he has no project other than that of the state, he is actually announcing that he has no project whatsoever. This is not due to the fact that there is a difference between the absent state and its current project, but because both this state and this project have not yet been drawn up in our countries. There is no need here to evoke the definitions of the modern state and the core of the political entity or the citizens, since this is a path that was never adopted by the Arab states, which are still living in some sort of isthmus between the different types of states that came through this region, from the state of overwhelming bigotry to the alliance of the tyrannical and parasitical forces, which called themselves “a national state” under the pretext of their liberation from the control of colonialism. In reality, through his talk about the project of the state, the Lebanese prime minister is bringing back to mind the statist models, which came through Lebanon since its independence, from the “state of sectarian privileges”, in which the Maronites had the upper hand before the civil war, to the state of the “milked cow” (based on the expression of former President Elias al-Hrawi) in which hegemony was divided between the sectarian “troika” and foreign tutelage, to the currently suspended state, in which one cannot differentiate between the loyalists and the detractors. Moreover, the idea of a nation itself is still unclear in the minds of the politicians and the “public,” since the meaning of national belonging is being mixed up with the acknowledgement of the fact that the authority shall be submitted to an “elite” (or clique) governing outside the known monitoring framework in today's world. What happened in Egypt is the biggest example for that, as the slogan “the police at the service of the people” was replaced with the slogan “the police and the people at the service of the country.” This marked the unleashing of the security apparatuses' hands to protect the interests of the “country,” which started symbolizing a separate entity that is very distant from the people, i.e. the forces directly controlling the authority. The live projects in this part of the world are the projects of demolition of the state. They are insisting on marginalizing a faction, which has started claiming its right to representation and self expression. Moreover, the framework of the current Arab state enhanced the contradictions between the individuals and the community in favor of the latter, thus boosting the collective, religious, sectarian and tribal consciousness at the expense of individual consciousness that constitutes the basis of the modern state. The communities thus started demanding the protection of their true or fictive specificities, which is the fastest way toward colliding with the specificities of the others and opening the door of denominational and sectarian conflicts at its widest. Back to Al-Hariri's example and his project for the state in Lebanon, one may say that abstract talk in the Lebanese case is the shortest way towards wondering about the accomplishments. If Al-Hariri's perceives himself as being a man with a project for the state, he must explain the massive failures, which were encountered by this project since the beginning of the stage that was inaugurated by the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. Resorting to the pretexts of the “tutelage,” the fait accompli and the authority of the sects would be useless, considering that they will remain as long as Lebanon exists. It would be better to seek the factors that are rendering the aforementioned project of the state the project of a faction, which the other factions in the country perceive as being a source of threat to their political (and security) role. What is happening in Lebanon today clearly proves that the “state” is a factional project at best, as well as the omen of a civil war, which can only be eluded by relinquishing the idea of a state in its current form. Useless to say that the alternative for the factional state would not be by leaving the arena to “parties of madness,” rather to a more advanced project, which embraces all the citizens and provides them with the awaited equality and freedoms. Will we grow closer to this blessing?
