Noubar Afeyan: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think is the most conceptual or most structural reason why Lebanon has been so politically unstable? I won’t profess expertise in this area other than it’s my birthplace, and I lived 13 years of my life enjoying what seemed, in hindsight, as a Disney ride. It was an idyllic place. It was a fun place. It had a lot of different cultures, commingled seemingly harmoniously, just mountains and sea and you name it. But it turns out that a lot of the seeming societal stability that I thought we lived within in the decade that I lived there or so was a surface on a volatile situation. I think that what happened in the Middle East basically led to displacement of population, some of which came to Lebanon. Of course, there was a large Palestinian contingent there that was looking for the world to help it and administer its fate, or help it with its fate after the wars that took place. So it was an unstable place that, clearly, the way it was put together in a post–World War I, and the way the governance was decided upon — there were very forward-looking things done, but actually, they did not prove stable. That plus it used to be the financial capital of the region. Once you have a civil war — a protracted one at that — then that’s a fleeting advantage in that it moved to other places like Dubai. What single thing contributes to it? It’s easier for me to answer how Lebanon has endured despite those things, which is an incomparable degree of optimism about things getting better. It’s really genetic in that country, I think. To some extent, probably, it’s what makes them survive. It’s what might also condemn them to go back there because they may not spend as much time trying to address the underlying conflicts and underlying incompatibilities to so many different factions trying to coexist there as one would like in order to maybe trade off the short-term optimism for a long-term durability. As an outsider, I haven’t lived there for some 45 years, but I view Lebanon in the context of the prism of Armenia, which has, in some ways, similar problems, in that we have a rather optimistic population despite the setbacks. You’ve got to ask yourself, is the optimism sometimes hurting you or helping you? Sometimes it can hurt you if it makes you accept the next illusion or the next fiction, versus actually dealing with tough problems. You’ve described your own approach as a kind of paranoid optimism. You got that from Lebanon and your Lebanese background? Or your Armenian background? You probably didn’t get it from Canada. How did you get that?…

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