Lebanon has been an unwilling actor in this drama. It has suffered directly from the negative political, demographic, and, later, economic effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The impact of this seemingly intractable regional conflict upon the frail Lebanese entity was so severe that many among us thought that Lebanon might utterly disappear long before the Middle East conflict was settled. This would have made truer than life the old Chinese curse of having to live "in interesting times."

For Lebanon, these "interesting times" are unfortunately aggravated by the country's existence in an equally "interesting" area. How many Lebanese haven't dreamt of a Lebanon suddenly broken off from its hinterland, transformed into an island on the high seas? How many of them haven't fantasized of a country located in an uneventful, symbolically free, culturally peripheral part of the world? And yet Lebanon remains, on the Western edge of Asia: open to the sea, yes, but strongly bound to the continent as well. Toynbee already noted the dilemma triggered by these two different tendencies: a window to the world, on the one side, and the territorial limes of a continent, on the other; an opening on the ocean accompanied by closure towards the interior. To this, the creation of the state of Israel added another, more pressing dilemma: how could Lebanon be part of the culturally Arab - and politically Arabist - hinterland without being entirely involved in its conflict with Israel?

One of the major causes of Lebanon's predicament is the overlapping, or worse, the confusion of two basically different challenges: namely that many Lebanese have confused Israel with the West, while others have confused their cultural Arabness with subservience to militant Arabism. Lebanon entered into an impasse the very day a growing number of Lebanese came to see these two different challenges as facets of the same problem. Some of these Lebanese were to badly hurt their country by equating Israel with the West, when the two remained quite different, despite Western support for Israel since its creation. Meanwhile, others - sometimes the same as the first, but now playing a different role - began equating their sense of belonging to the Arab hinterland with increasing sensitivity to the region's political convulsions, and subservience to its political diktats. And yet the Arab-Israeli conflict did not, and does not, encompass any country's Arabness, and is by no means the exclusive way of measuring it.

Western Asia has seldom been a quiet area in the past. It has been the scene of many wars, imperial advances, and pitiful retreats; the stone engravings at Nahr al-Kalb are there to remind us of the passage of ambitious conquerors. Conscious of its strategic position at a cross-roads, the area has, since time immemorial, encouraged the expression of universalist ideas: laws, utopias, prophecies, and religions. It has sought, not to rule the world, but to affect it, to attract its attention, to be its spiritual nexus. It has, in a word, never been satisfied with being just itself. Though particularly devastating, the Arab-Israeli conflict - so heavily loaded with the region's symbols, visions, and obsessions - which has now entered into a new era of unequal compromise, will ultimately prove to be only one piece in a chain of conflicts which have been intimately linked to this regional hubris.

The Lebanese themselves have never been reluctant to participate in the always self-intoxicating, often tragic, flirtation with universalism. One of their most famous singers sings, "What is Lebanon?" before answering: "a few cedars attracting the attention of the whole world." Nationalist-chauvinistic exaggeration often goes hand in hand with the actual weakness of a nation. This is particularly true in times of pain and desolation, as it was in Lebanon where a constructed "Lebanonism" - an expression of a crafted nationalism - provided a psychological refuge for its citizens. This is only normal: nations are often built through pain and suffering, as products of nationalism. As E.J. Hobsbawm put it: "nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around." Peoples first seek togetherness and then translate it into geographical terms, surrounding themselves with borders.

Hobsbawm, however, was writing of modern Western nationalism, which accompanied the industrial revolution and its value system. Yet modern nationalism can hardly grow in agrarian societies, and it was much stronger in countries where the state, furthered by the industrial revolution, was firmly in place. Ernest Gellner noticed that "nationalism emerges only in milieux in which the existence of the state is already very much taken for granted".

Lebanon's predicament was that it attempted to induce nationalism without having adjusted to the necessities of the modern state. Its politics - despite the increasing urbanization of all aspects of daily life -were predominately 'agrarian,' in that "the state is interested in extracting taxes, maintaining the peace, and not much else, and has no interest in promoting lateral communication between its subject communities." This lateral communication was limited, spontaneous rather than state-organized, and often hypocritical when it occurred. The state was often not even able to perform the minimal tasks expected of it, namely the levying of taxes and imposition of civil peace: the fiscal system - the backbone of all states- remained minimal, while civil peace was in constant danger. Attempts, especially under President Fuad Chehab were made to reform this state of affairs, but the reclusive Amir-General-President, though morally contemptuous of all fromagistes, did little to challenge the 'agrarian' outlook of the political class itself.

The term, Lebanese national independence, commemorated on November 22, raises two questions. In celebrating national independence, we can remark on how tautological the adjective appears when referring to modern states, and yet how very problematical it is in the case of Lebanon, where the word nation - particularly in its French meaning - covers a wide range of different geographical and demographic realities, depending on which groups and parties are concerned. The Lebanese have had an endemic problem in building their nation: the state was never really "taken for granted," in Gellner's words, and nationalism had a strong sectarian colouring. Admittedly, the Hobsbawm-Gellner ideal-type, however, was a very tall order in the limited period provided Lebanon since independence.

The second question raised by the term national independence, comes from the noun in the phrase: independence from whom? The question needs to be asked because all Lebanese feel that it has no clear answer. A true nationalist - and Lebanon has had some in the past few decades - would say, "independence from all." This is an ideological statement which is both moving and unconvincing. Some history text-books would tell us in the language of "Third Worldism" that Lebanon extracted its sovereignty from a quasi-colonial power, Mandatory France. Yet nobody would be really satisfied with the answer. In practical terms, Lebanon became independent as a result of a game of nations, specifically between leading states involved in World War II. If World War I made possible Lebanon's existence within its present borders, World War II paved the way for its legal independence. Implicitly, however, Lebanon also became independent from its continental hinterland, most notably from Syria. This dual meaning of Lebanon's independence has been, until recently, a non-dit, preferably whispered than stated outright. Yet in this era of "distinguished relations" with Damascus, the matter ought to be addressed with frankness.

The "neither Arab, nor Western" formula embodied in the National Pact- or indeed any "neither, nor" formula - is a smart, but even less convincing answer to the question of independence. For one thing, the external forces which endanger independence change themselves: France is no longer a factor in Lebanon, while Israel is now very much one. While some Lebanese have had great difficult in swallowing the "neither Arab, nor Western" equation, even fewer would now accept the basically Western formulation of a "neither Arab, nor Israeli" equation. For having recklessly adopted an "Arab or Israeli" equation - and through it opting for an alliance with Israel - some Lebanese encouraged a sentiment where their fellow countrymen believed, and continue to believe, that the best way to be independent from "the enemy"(Israel) was, and is, to be as close as possible to the "sister" (Syria). At present, this seems to be the government's official line. But the question remains open: is integration with Syria the best way to counter Israel's real designs? Isn't it more reasonable to repudiate any form of "either/nor" equation between Syria and Israel, and, once this is done, to start organizing Syrian-Lebanese relations in se and per se. More generally, isn't it more reasonable to defuse the connection between the domestic confessional game and Syrian-Lebanese relations, so that any approach towards Syria - viewed as inevitable by all - becomes neutral in terms of domestic politics and therefore acceptable to all, in other words somehow "national?"

While independence is, in theory, directed at all which threatens it, the ambiguity of Lebanese independence is that it is actually directed at a specific force or forces. Its meaning is always highly political. The complex fabric of our society is such that the identification of the force or forces to which independence is practically opposed, or from which independence is sought, is not easy: various groups identify different external forces. Most of the time the answers are rather similar, for which Lebanon is lucky. Yet most of the time, also, they are not given in the same order of priorities, and here is where the problem lies. Dependence towards one external force or the other was - and indeed is - a crucial factor in the political re-ordering of the various domestic forces within Lebanon. Minds already confused by so many overlapping challenges did not need to be disturbed by a new one, but they were: "independence" became a polysemous word, heavily conditioned by each actor's position on the domestic political scene.

The authors of the Taif agreement were, consciously or unconsciously, aware of this situation. They confronted some Lebanese fears in the agreement's introduction by suggesting pompously that Lebanon represented the final political horizon for all its citizens; and then, in the agreement's final chapter, dealing in nicely worded language with the sensitive matter of relations with Syria. This was a deftly presented compromise; compromises are to be valued and their life expectancy never to be underestimated. But constructive ambiguities are often clarified in the practice of politics, and this particular compromise's ambiguity, four years after it was signed, badly needs better, hopefully consensual, elucidation.

^* Ghassan Salame is director of studies at the Centre National de Recherches Scientifique (CNRS), and professor at the Institut d'etudes politiques, both in Paris.