The situation got so bad that people began to organize and protest, and a movement calling itself YouStink emerged, using the trash problem as a trigger to call for more profound change in the system. But suspicion is the order of the day in Lebanon. An organization, any organization, is immediately suspected of being the tool of one of the other communities attempting to increase its power. As a despairing Facebook post from the movement on August 25, 2015, put it:
Since the beginning of the #YouStink movement, we have tried to bite our tongues concerning the accusations that fell upon us as a movement … Our movement, since its outset, has been accused of being a partisan of Al-Mustaqbal (Future Movement) and working against the rights of the Christians (on the Tayyar website). We were then accused of being partisans of the 8th of March bloc and working against the Al-Mustaqbal (according to both El-Machnouk Ministers and the Government). As for the movement’s members themselves, they have been accused of being bribed, partisans of Walid Jumblat, foreign embassies, the Amal Movement, Hezbollah … No one has remained safe from these accusations which main purpose was and is to distort and refute the idea of having an independent non-sectarian alternative.
This post illustrates something we often see under an Absent Leviathan: a society divided against itself, unable to act collectively, and in fact deeply suspicious of anybody and any group attempting to influence politics.
The behavior of the parliament reflects the fact that the communities do not want it to do anything. As Ghassan Moukheiber, a Christian lawmaker from central Lebanon, put it:
They don’t like the institutions such as the parliament meeting too often and competing with them in running the country.
The Lebanese state is not weak because its people have not worked out the right engineering design. In fact, the country has one of the most educated populations in the Middle East, with a fairly modern university system. Many Lebanese study abroad in some of the world’s best academic institutions. It isn’t that they don’t know how to build a capable state. Rather, the state is weak by design because the communities fear the slippery slope. Parliamentarians know they are not supposed to do much, so what is the incentive to show up? They can vote to delay elections because nobody really cares who is elected. Sometimes, as with the trash problem, this has terrible social consequences, but even then it’s hard to make something happen. Nobody wants to give power to parliament, they don’t trust it, and they don’t like social activism either. You never know whom you can trust.
Lebanon is not a stateless society. It’s a modern state of six million people with a seat in the United Nations and ambassadors all over the world. But just as with the Tiv, power is elsewhere. Lebanon has an Absent Leviathan.
Between 1975 and 1989 Lebanon was plunged into a vicious civil war between its different communities, after being destabilized by an influx of Palestinian refugees from Jordan. The Taif Agreement of 1989, which ended the conflict, brought one adjustment to the National Pact, moving to a 50–50 split between Christians and Muslims in parliament and increasing the representation of Shias. But it also weakened presidential power.
Did the 50–50 split represent the communities better than the six-to-five division adopted in the 1943 pact? Probably, but nobody really knows the populations of different communities, and nobody wants to know. Society wants to remain illegible to a state it fears might be captured by others, and to ensure against the possibility, it makes sure the Leviathan continues to slumber. The trash piles up.
The Narrow Corridor
This book is about liberty. Liberty depends on the different types of Leviathans and their evolution—whether a society will live without an effective state, put up with a despotic one, or manage to forge a balance of power that opens the way for the emergence of a Shackled Leviathan and the gradual flourishing of liberty.
In contrast to Hobbes’s vision of society submitting its will to the Leviathan, which much of social science and the modern world order take for granted, it is fundamental to our theory that Leviathans are not always welcomed with open arms and their path is a rocky one, to say the least. In many instances society will resist their ascendancy and will do so successfully, just like the Tiv did and the Lebanese still do. The result of this resistance is illiberty.
When this resistance crumbles, we may end up with a Despotic Leviathan, which looks a lot like the sea monster that Hobbes imagined. But this Leviathan, though it prevents Warre, does not necessarily make its subjects’ lives much richer than the “nasty, brutish, and short” existence that people eke out under the Absent Leviathan. Nor do its subjects really “submit their wills” to the Leviathan—any more than East Europeans chanting the “Internationale” in the streets before the collapse of the Berlin Wall really submitted their wills to Soviet Russia. The implications for citizens are different in some ways, but still there is no liberty.
A very different type of Leviathan, a shackled one, emerges when there is a balance between its power and society’s capacity to control it. This is the Leviathan that can resolve conflicts fairly, provide public services and economic opportunities, and prevent dominance, laying down the basic foundations of liberty. This is the Leviathan that people, believing that they can control it, trust and cooperate with and allow to increase its capacity. This is the Leviathan that also promotes liberty by breaking down the various cages of norms tightly regulating behavior in society. But in a fundamental sense this is not a Hobbesian Leviathan. Its defining feature is its shackles: it does not have Hobbes’s sea monster’s dominance over society; it does not have the capability to ignore or silence people when they try to influence political decision making. It stands not above but alongside society.
Figure 1. The Evolution of Despotic, Shackled, and Absent Leviathans
Figure 1 summarizes these ideas and the forces shaping the evolution of different types of states in our theory. To focus on its main outlines, we simplify matters and reduce everything to two variables. The first is how powerful a society is in terms of its norms, practices, and institutions, especially when it comes to acting collectively, coordinating its actions, and constraining political hierarchy. This variable, shown on the horizontal axis, thus combines society’s general mobilization, its institutional power, and its ability to control hierarchy via norms, as among the Tiv. The second is the power of the state. This variable is shown on the vertical axis and similarly combines several aspects including the power of political and economic elites and the capacity and power of state institutions. Of course, ignoring conflicts within society is a huge simplification, and so is ignoring conflicts within the elite and between the elite and state institutions. Nevertheless, these simplifications enable us to highlight several important ingredients and novel implications of our theory. Later in the book, we’ll go beyond these simplifications and discuss the richer tableau that emerges without them.