In the past decade and a half, demands for freedom in the Arab Middle East underwent several stages and headlines, with varying degrees of importance and scope: From the Damascus Spring to the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and from the Qamishli uprising to March 14 in Lebanon, leading to the epic culmination that is the Syrian revolution.

Among its many attributes, this trend was opening a new path in both visions and perceptions: For it appeared that freedom was a necessary pre-condition for all policies, and that every other goal, be it leftwing, rightwing, socialist, or liberal came second.

Yet there is no doubt that the environment of freedom, which celebrated those transformations, is suffering from some frustration these days. In Iraq, the demand for freedom was infected with sectarian and ethnic splits whose early signs were not at all invisible. In Lebanon, on a smaller and less dramatic scale, it has been revealed that March 14 was nothing but a federacy of sects that, in exceptional circumstances, took upon itself a nationwide rallying mission. In Syria, the revolution has intersected with civil strife and a regional crisis that have weakened the glow of freedom as a question that transcends sects and ethnicities.

Many things can be said about each one of those cases, when taken separately. But what is common among them all, and which explains much of the present frustration, is the fact that the peoples of our region were not prepared to recognize themselves as projects for the future projects that may succeed or may fail, but which definitely did not materialize as peoples and homelands.

If freedom is the first fundamental condition for politics, then national identity is the second one. Indeed it, among other things, gives freedom its direction and prevents it from turning into civil conflict.

This lack of preparation is the result of collusion among different ideological and political schools, some in contradiction with one another, but which all presented us in a false guise. The ideological lines of the traditional regimes, which stood before the era of military coups, told us that we were homelands and peoples with flags, national anthems and seats at the United Nations. Then came the military ideologies, which dealt with those givens as though they were axiomatic, and took us towards calls for unity within broader frameworks.

Liberal and socialist factions did not deviate from the hypothesis that they were dealing with true homelands-peoples, so it was sufficient for them to topple a tyrannical clique (in the view of the liberals) or a greedy one (in the view of the socialists) to propel to the surface what is best in the homeland and the people.

They were all in agreement over denying divisions and attributing them either to the colonial powers, or to a lack of education and consciousness and so on. They maintained that examining the roots of these divisions and their manifestations bordered on treason, or in the most polite of terms, orientalism. The logical conclusion was that each ideology proposed itself as the last savior with which the homeland and the people may finally fulfill themselves.

This is while bearing in mind that the history of our region, since it came into contact with modern ideologies, reveals that these ideologies only reflect and modernize deeper civil divisions, leaving some individuals to express their moods and tastes through them.

Today, more than ever, it is clear that without settling the two issues of freedom and the formation of the nation-state, politics remain a verbal game played in the stoppage time between two bloody times. If this is correct, then the demand for freedom must be coupled with the demand for a national identity to depart from a negative outcome that no longer affords cosmetic or fraudulent treatments. This may ease the feeling of frustration with freedom when its path stumbles, and may help it in the future to avoid deviating from its desired destination.

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Frustration in the Environment of Freedom