Thoughts on the Lebanese State: Failure Facts and Prospects for the Future

The Center for Arab Unity Studies published the book Thoughts on the Lebanese State: Failure Facts and Prospects for the Future by professor and writer Sassine Assaf.

The current Lebanese crisis, due to its historical accumulations and complexities, has turned into a national catastrophe, one of its results is a disintegrated state, with paralyzed constitutional authorities, from which the rational solutions required to get out are almost non-existent, given the tangible decline in the production of intellectual elites and the movement of Unionist political forces. The system that the people entrusted to build the state and elevate it to the ranks of modern democratic states betrayed the trust, and the Lebanese were wasted the opportunity to live with dignity in a just civil state, a state of truth, the rule of law, integrity and transparency. This reality forced the Lebanese to work to find foundational understandings in a historical path different from the path of the first founding from 1920-1943 in terms of forming a general national Will to build the state, and in terms of understanding Lebanon’s geopolitical and geostrategic position in the context of Arab, regional and international changes.

The first founding state was a constitutional state under the 1926 Constitution, but its unitary civil structure was modified by the National Charter of 1943, which created a bi-religious state, similar to federal states. With the aim of stopping the civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, another pact was held in the city of Taif among Lebanese representatives, known as the National Accord Document, which enshrined the consensus between sects in running the state. Regarding these two charters, intellectual, political, legal, and terminological chaos arose to the absence of constitutional, legal, and linguistic jurisprudence, which left each group (sect) to work to establish its own concepts, and the concept of the State fell.

This book is an attempt to rethink the causes and facts that led to the failed state in Lebanon and the aspirations to build a state that is successful in performing its functions towards its people and its Arab environment.