In Rokkan and Lipset’s historical comparative macro-sociological model analysing West European political systems, societal cleavages are created by important historical processes. Whereas the industrial revolution re-affirmed the left-right divide and explains the emergence of Socialist, communist, or social-democratic parties, the national revolution (the nation building and nation consolidation process) created the conflict between the centre and the periphery within countries. The centre-periphery cleavage explains the emergence and resilience of agrarian parties and linguistic cultural movements, what Rokkan calls counter-cultures. Re- visiting Rokkan and Lipset’s model, this paper examines the emergence of a conservative (“religious”, “Sunni”) counter-culture in Northern Lebanon in 1920, when the modern Lebanese state was created with Beirut as capital, and why this counter-culture has become so attractive to youth in Tripoli since the 1980s. This counter-culture has since the 1980s been expressed in religious language. We would therefore like to understand to what extent the rise of religiosity in Tripoli, a rival city to Beirut, is explained solely by historical processes linked to the Lebanese state formation – as Rokkan and Lipset would argue – and to what extent transnational and regional factors also must be accounted for. We hypothesize that Islamism is the expression of a long-lasting counterculture in North Lebanon, a counter-culture that had a leftist or Arab nationalist (Nasserist, Maoist) expression until the 1970s, and was then Islamicized as a result of the regional Middle Eastern ideological conjuncture after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. Lebanon is an illustrating case for re-assessing Rokkan and Lipset’s cleavage model, because of the permeability of the country’s borders to transnational ideological and material fluxes, constituting an extreme example of possible impacts of the communications revolution, which create new cleavages in the population and re-affirm old ones. Lebanon has not yet consolidated its nation building process, the sense of being Lebanese, and a Sunni Muslim remains a subject of dispute. Hence, we shall attempt to pay more attention to agency and conflict between actors than Rokkan did in his works, which remained partly inspired by Parsons’ structural-functionalism.
