In Haiti, for a few years now, there has been a persistent difficulty in thinking of itself as a society. Not an absence of society, that would be absurd. A difficulty in naming itself as such, in recognizing itself in a shared movement, in projecting itself into a history that would belong to everyone. This difficulty is generally diagnosed as an excess of division. I think it should be understood differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vocabulary of ‘division’ and ‘splits’ has become so common in public discourse that people use it without even questioning it. It\u2019s taken as obvious. Yet, as soon as you try to pin it down, it slips away. To divide assumes a prior whole, a previous unity that forces then fracture. In political sociology, this primordial unity doesn\u2019t exist. Societies never preexist their own creation. They are made. In fact, this is one of the strongest insights in social thought over the past century. Gaetano Mosca put it simply. Every lasting society rests on what he called a ‘political formula,’ meaning a way by which those in power justify their position and those governed accept the established order. The formula can be religious, dynastic, republican, nationalist, meritocratic\u2014whatever its outward form. What matters is its function.She organizes the common good. Without an effective political framework, there is no society. There is just a population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Max Weber expanded on this idea by talking about legitimacy. A form of domination doesn\u2019t hold up through sheer force alone. It works because the governed more or less consciously believe that the order they live in makes sense, fits into an acceptable continuity, and aims at something bigger than themselves. This belief is the real glue of a society. When it erodes, no public force can permanently take its placeBenedict Anderson later showed that modern nations are ‘imagined communities.’ The citizens of the same country will never meet physically. What makes them a nation is their ability to think of themselves together, to recognize themselves in the same history, to project themselves into the same future. This ability doesn\u2019t just fall from the sky. It\u2019s produced by institutions: the press, schools, civic rituals, churches, and of course the intellectual and political elites whose historical role, whether we like it or not, is precisely that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ernest Renan, in a lecture that became classic, added an essential touch. A nation, he wrote, is ‘a daily plebiscite.’ He meant that no political community is maintained simply by the inertia of its past. Every generation must, in one way or another, ratify the desire to continue together. This ratification assumes that something is offered to them to ratify..From all this arises a question. If Haiti today struggles to function as a society, should we really blame its internal divisions? Or should we look at those whose historical function was to create the common and who, obviously, have stopped doing so?Let’s look at the raw material. Haitians share a majority language, spoken across all classes and everywhere in the country. They share a founding history, that of the first modern black republic, and this history is strong enough to have lasted over two centuries without falling apart. They share a collective memory of disasters, occupations, authoritarian regimes, and earthquakes. They share cultural references that easily circulate from the central market to Haitian neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Montreal, and Santiago. On paper, the material conditions for a national identity are already in place, and better than in many countries that function properly today.The diagnosis of division, then, no longer quite holds. Something else is going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Comparison helps to clarify things. The United States is going through a political polarization of an intensity that recent generations haven\u2019t experienced. France is dealing with territorial, religious, and social fractures that its own intellectuals sometimes describe as gaping. Italy has never resolved its historical split between an industrial north and an agricultural south, and it\u2019s not certain that it ever will. In many ways, these societies are culturally more diverse than Haiti. Yet they hold together. Not perfectly. Not without significant political costs. But they hold together.Why do they hold together? Because they still have an institutional story that survives their daily conflicts. Americans tear each other apart over abortion, immigration, or gun regulation, but the Constitution remains a horizon that both sides claim. The French can hate their rulers while still believing in the Republic. Italians can vote against Rome while still being Italians. The narrative absorbs conflicts because it offers a framework that outlasts them. When the framework gives way, conflicts stop being disagreements and become fractures.One could rightly argue that these societies have their own share of identity anxiety, and that social media worsens a fairly noticeable turning inward. That\u2019s true. However, two phenomena get mixed up in public conversation. The first is a breakdown of ordinary social bonds, seen a bit everywhere in the world, linked to digital technology, individualization, and fragmented allegiances. The second, rarer and more serious, is the collapse of a collective project in the strong sense. The first affects advanced societies. The second is what I believe I see in Haiti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the relevant question is not only: who am I in society with? It is also, and perhaps more importantly: what are we walking toward together? A nation doesn’t live only on its present and its past. It lives on a horizon. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern nations built themselves around concrete promises. Build the Republic. Expand social rights. Industrialize the country. Colonize and then decolonize. Conquer space, economic independence, civic equality. Citizens could disagree on the means, but at least they shared a direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What direction is being offered to Haitians today? And who is offering it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The question is harsh because the honest answer is almost nonexistent. Haitian political discourse over the past decades has relied heavily on two themes. Nostalgia for a glorious past\u20141804, independence, Dessalines, Toussaint. And the denunciation of a painful past\u2014occupations, authoritarian regimes, foreign interference. Both of these themes have their place. But they aren\u2019t enough. Memory, even a rich one, isn\u2019t a plan. You don\u2019t rally young people around a memory, just as you don\u2019t build a country on constantly commemorating what it once was.This is probably where Mosca becomes useful again. If we accept the idea that elites have a productive function and not just an extractive one, we have to ask an uncomfortable question. Have Haitian elites\u2014political, economic, intellectual, religious\u2014managed over the past few decades to create a coherent vision for the country’s future? A political formula in Mosca’s sense, that is, a story in which peasants, city dwellers, professionals, and the diaspora can all see themselves as part of the same project? I doubt it. The rare times such a project seemed to emerge were brief, not widely shared, often confined to small circles, and rarely translated into institutions that could survive them.The consequence is almost automatic. Where the national narrative pulls back, people retreat into the units where belonging still feels real. Family. The neighborhood. Churches. The parish. Networks of friends and alumni. The diaspora, often more organized and active than local institutions. Tocqueville already noticed in the 19th century that modern democracy tended to isolate citizens, and he argued that to preserve it, people needed what he called associations\u2014that is, all those forms that stand between the individual and the state. When the state weakens and associations aren\u2019t enough, people turn back to the basic units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This retreat isn\u2019t abnormal in itself. It\u2019s rational. When the grand narrative stops working, everyone invests in the smaller stories that continue to generate trust. The danger isn\u2019t the retreat itself. It\u2019s if it becomes the only available form of belonging, and people start to believe that no larger scale is possible anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would be worrying if this meant that Haitians had stopped believing in each other. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case. Haitian solidarities still exist, on a small scale, and support a significant part of daily life. What has faded, rather, is the belief in the story that institutions were telling about the country. The nuance is essential. It shifts the problem, and it changes the nature of the solutions that can be considered.The withdrawal seen in advanced societies is actually of a different kind. People there pull back from a collective project that still exists but that they consider insufficient, restrictive, or unfair. An American, French, or Italian citizen who retreats into their own networks is doing so against a still-living national narrative that they criticize or reject. In Haiti, withdrawal doesn\u2019t have this oppositional nature. It happens because the narrative itself no longer holds up as something thinkable. You can\u2019t refuse what hasn\u2019t been expressed.This opens up a strategic perspective for anyone looking to consider an exit from the current crisis. In my view, the urgent work isn\u2019t to \u201creconcile\u201d groups that aren\u2019t truly irreconcilable. Haitians, by and large, don\u2019t hate each other. They just no longer see themselves as part of the same project, because no project has been offered to them with enough coherence to be credible. So the urgent task is to patiently rebuild a national narrative\u2014not one that\u2019s just constant commemoration or complaint. A narrative that shows where the country is heading, why it makes sense for very different individuals to keep moving in the same direction, and which institutions will support that journey.This work isn’t just politics in the narrow sense. It concerns everything that creates a sense of common life in a society. Schools, first, which shape imaginations even before teaching knowledge. The media, next, as they choose which stories deserve to be amplified. Universities, when they agree to produce thinking about their own society and not just degrees that can be traded elsewhere. Churches, through their ability to mobilize moral support. Companies, when they are willing to exercise civic responsibility that goes beyond the quarterly bottom line. None of these actors alone has the power to rebuild a nation. But together, and only together, they hold what Weber called the shared belief in the legitimacy of an order.Maybe, to move forward, we need to give up some of the vocabulary we’ve been using for too long. Talking about ‘division’ suggests that there was once a state of non-division to which we should return. That state has never existed, in any society. What does exist, in some happy moments of history, are societies capable of absorbing their divisions because they have a horizon bigger than their conflicts. The work to be done in Haiti isn’t to erase conflicts, which are inherent to all social life. It’s to create a horizon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Haitians aren’t divided. They’re alone. Alone with each other, with no one to tell them what they form together or where they’re headed. This collective loneliness, seen from afar, looks like a fracture. Up close, it’s the silent admission of elites who have forgotten their duty. Calling it division is convenient because it avoids the hotter question: what have those whose job it was to build the nation done in the past fifty years? What they haven’t built, no one will build in their place. And as long as that question isn’t asked out loud, people will keep mistaking what’s long been missing for a division.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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