A CONTRAST Iran’s presidential race has led to turmoil, while Lebanon’s elections, below, produced promises of compromise.


By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ABU DHABI


VOTERS IN LEBANON and Iran were asked in recent weeks to choose between competing candidates who offered very different policies but, more fundamentally, different ways of defining national identity.

Identity is an umbrella term, a collection of ideas and characteristics that define how we see ourselves as individuals and as part of a group. Creating a unified national identity, especially in states with richly diverse populations, is an essential step toward unity, stability and - for leaders - control.

In Lebanon and Iran, that challenge remains the subtext of nearly every tension and is the fuel that burned with intensity during parliamentary races in Lebanon and the presidential contest in Iran.

“There has never been a time in our history when we agreed on the identity of the country,” Ibrahim Moussawi, a spokesman for Hezbollah, said in Beirut before the election there on June 7.

But when Hezbollah’s alliance lost, it offered conciliatory words and agreed to work with the majority. That was possible, because people accepted the vote as legitimate and understood that this contest did not present an existential threat. The loser would still have a hand in guiding the state, and defining identity.

That contrasts with Iran, where politics has become a winner-take-all contest. When the government said that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won, the streets exploded in anger not just in the belief that the results were fraudulent but because of a fundamental disagreement over the identity of the nation and its people, according to political scientists in Iran and around the region.

“Ahmadinejad’s Iran is an Islamic republic, anti-American, anti-Western, the revolutionary Iran,” said Amr Hamzawi, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. He cited a second camp, “which is more driven by a reform-oriented view of society that needs more freedoms, more liberties, a society where religion needs to be pushed back to some extent.”

In the politics of the Middle East, identity is often defined by who the enemy is. In Iran’s presidential contest, on June 12, and Lebanon’s parliamentary race there were essentially two sides, one with the West and one against it. That is more than a political position, but reflects broadly on the character of the state.

Those allied with the West tend to see room for more individual rights. Those opposed have a more fundamentalist religious view and see individuals as conforming more to society’s demands.

“You have to cement the identity of the country, to identify who its supporters are, and who its enemies are,” Mr. Moussawi said.

In Iran, that means allowing young men and women to sit together in coffee shops, or not. It means allowing women to ride bicycles or smoke cigarettes, or not. It means being part of the global financial markets, or not.

“It was a battle over the identity of the two respective countries, and of the whole region as such, between liberal and conservative ideas,” said Mr. Hamzawi.

Across the Middle East, competing identities create tensions, from Egypt, which struggles between Islamism, nationalism and the vestiges of pan- Arabism, to Saudi Arabia where modernity and conservative Islam clash.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah said it wanted more institutional authority because it wanted to entrench its “culture of resistance” in the national identity. “There are principles we cannot negotiate,” Mr. Moussawi said. “We want as many Lebanese to be integrated to this resistance approach as possible.”

But when it failed in its election bid, Hezbollah accepted the realities of Lebanese politics, in which power is carved up among the religious sects. In Iran, if Mr. Ahmadinejad wins, there is no room for reformers in the government and, perhaps more importantly, there is less room for reform ideas in individual lives.

The two halves of Iran’s current fight - a slim band of unified hardliners versus an unlikely coalition of reformers and more pragmatic conservatives - have made themselves mutually exclusive, political analysts said.

But that is not to say the two sides have reached a point of no return.

“They have a strong incentive to avoid a complete collapse of the system since that would be a lose-lose for both of them,” said Trita Parsi, a writer and founder of the National Iranian American Council. “Whether this will be strong enough to enable them to find common ground is, of course, a different matter.”