Haitians Are Not Divided, They Are Alone

For some years now, Haiti has had a stubborn difficulty thinking of itself as a society. Not an absence of society, which 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 believe it should be read differently.

The vocabulary of “division” and “cleavages” has settled so firmly into public discourse that it is used without being questioned anymore. It passes for self-evident. Yet as soon as one tries to pin it down, it slips away. To divide presupposes a prior aggregate, an earlier unity that forces then fractured. In political sociology, this primordial unity does not exist. Societies never precede their own making. They are made. This is, moreover, one of the most solid gains of social thought over the past century.

Gaetano Mosca put the intuition simply. Every lasting society rests on what he called a “political formula,” that is, a representation through which those who rule justify their position and through which the governed accept the established order. The formula may be religious, dynastic, republican, nationalist, or meritocratic; its outward form matters little. What counts is its function. It organizes what people hold in common. Without a working political formula, there is no society. There is a population.

Max Weber extended this intuition by speaking of legitimacy. Domination does not rest on coercion alone. It holds because the governed believe, more or less consciously, that the order in which they live makes sense, that it belongs to an acceptable continuity, that it pursues something larger than themselves. This belief is the true cement of a society. When it erodes, no amount of state force can replace it for long.

Benedict Anderson later showed that modern nations were “imagined communities.” The citizens of one country will never all meet face to face. What makes them a nation is their capacity to think of themselves together, to recognize themselves in the same history, to project themselves into the same future. This capacity does not fall from the sky. It is produced by institutions: the press, the school, civic rituals, the churches, and of course the intellectual and political elites, whose historical function, like it or not, is precisely that.

Ernest Renan, in a lecture that has become a classic, added an essential touch. A nation, he wrote, is “a daily plebiscite.” He meant that no political community sustains itself through the mere inertia of its past. Each generation must, in one way or another, ratify the desire to go on together. That ratification presupposes that it is offered something to ratify.

From all this, a question follows. If Haiti today struggles to function as a society, should its internal divisions really be blamed? Or should we look to those whose historical function was to forge what is held in common and who, quite plainly, have stopped doing so?

Consider the raw material. Haitians share a majority language, spoken in every class and throughout the territory. They share a founding history, that of the first modern Black republic, and this history is powerful enough to have come through two centuries without dissolving. They share a common memory of disasters, occupations, authoritarian regimes, earthquakes. They share cultural references that travel effortlessly from the central market to the Haitian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Montreal, and Santiago. On paper, the material conditions for a national identity are already in place, and more fully than in many countries that function properly today.

The diagnosis of division, then, no longer quite holds. Something else is at play.

Comparison helps to see clearly. The United States is going through political polarization of an intensity that recent generations had never known. France has 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 is not certain that it ever will. These societies are, in many respects, more culturally heterogeneous than Haiti. Yet they hold together. Not perfectly. Not without considerable political costs. But they hold.

Why do they hold? Because they still have an institutional narrative that survives their daily conflicts. Americans tear one another apart over abortion, immigration, or gun regulation, but the Constitution remains a horizon that both camps claim. The French can loathe their rulers while believing in the Republic. Italians can vote against Rome while remaining Italian. The narrative absorbs conflicts because it offers a framework that outlives them. When the framework gives way, conflicts stop being disagreements and become fractures.

It will be objected, rightly, that these societies have their own share of anxiety about identity, and that social media there are deepening a fairly visible turn inward. That is true. Two phenomena, however, are being conflated in public conversation. The first is an erosion of ordinary social ties, observable more or less everywhere in the world, linked to digital technology, to individualization, to the fragmentation of belonging. 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 recognize in Haiti.

For the relevant question is not only: with whom do I share a society? It is also, and perhaps above all: where are we heading together? A nation does not live on its present and its past alone. It lives on a horizon. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern nations were built around concrete promises. Building the Republic. Extending social rights. Industrializing the country. Colonizing, then decolonizing. Conquering space, economic independence, civic equality. Citizens could disagree about the means, but they at least shared a direction.

What direction are Haitians offered today? And who is offering it?

The question is cruel, because the honest answer is almost nonexistent. Haitian political discourse in recent decades has drawn heavily on two registers. Nostalgia for a glorious past: 1804, independence, Dessalines, Toussaint. And denunciation of a painful past: the occupations, the authoritarian regimes, foreign interference. Both registers have their legitimacy. They are not enough. A memory, however rich, is not a project. You do not mobilize young people around a memory, any more than you found a country on the permanent commemoration of what it once was.

This is probably where Mosca becomes useful again. If one accepts that elites have a productive function and not merely an extractive one, one is forced to ask an uncomfortable question. Have Haiti’s elites (political, economic, intellectual, religious) produced, over the past few decades, a coherent representation of the country’s future? A political formula in Mosca’s sense, that is, a story in which peasants, city dwellers, professionals, and members of the diaspora could recognize themselves as taking part in a single enterprise? I doubt it. The rare moments when such a project seemed to emerge were brief, little publicized, often confined to small circles, and rarely translated into institutions capable of outliving them.

The consequence is almost mechanical. Where the national narrative contracts, individuals fall back on the units in which belonging remains tangible. The family. The neighborhood. The churches. The parish. Networks of friends and alumni. The diaspora, often better organized and more active than local institutions. Tocqueville already observed, in the nineteenth century, that modern democracy tended to isolate the citizen and that preserving it required what he called associations, that is, all those intermediate forms between the individual and the state. When the state weakens and associations are no longer enough, people fall back on primary units.

There is nothing abnormal about this withdrawal in itself. It is rational. When the grand narrative stops working, everyone invests in the small narratives that continue to produce trust. The danger is not the withdrawal itself. It is that it should become the only form of belonging available, and that people should come to believe that no broader scale is possible anymore.

It would be worrying if it meant that Haitians had stopped believing in one another. I do not believe that is the case. Haitian solidarity exists, at fine-grained scales, and sustains a significant part of daily life. What has died out is, rather, belief in the story that institutions used to tell about the country. The nuance is essential. It shifts the problem, and it changes the nature of the solutions that can be envisaged.

The withdrawal observable in advanced societies is, in reality, of a different nature. There, individuals withdraw from a collective project that still exists but that they judge inadequate, constraining, or unjust. American, French, or Italian citizens who fall back on their own networks do so against a national narrative that is still alive, one they criticize or reject. In Haiti, the withdrawal has no such oppositional character. It occurs because the narrative itself no longer holds up as something that can even be thought. One cannot refuse what has not been formulated.

This opens a strategic perspective for anyone who wants to imagine a way out of the current crisis. The urgent task is not, in my view, to “reconcile” groups that are not truly irreconcilable. Haitians, in their overwhelming majority, do not hate one another. They simply no longer see themselves as stakeholders in a common project, because no project is put to them with enough coherence to become credible. The urgent task, then, is to produce once again, patiently, a national narrative that is neither permanent commemoration nor lament. A narrative that says where the country is heading, why it is rational for very different individuals to keep walking in the same direction, and which institutions will sustain that march.

This work is not only a matter of politics in the narrow sense. It is a matter for everything that creates common ground in a society. The school, first, which shapes imaginations even before it transmits knowledge. The media, next, insofar as they choose which narratives deserve to be amplified. The universities, when they agree to produce thought about their own society and not only diplomas that can be cashed in elsewhere. The churches, through their capacity for moral mobilization. Businesses, when they consent to exercise a civic responsibility that reaches beyond the quarterly horizon. None of these actors has, on its own, the power to refound a nation. But together, and only together, they hold what Weber called the shared belief in the legitimacy of an order.

To move forward, we may need to give up part of the vocabulary we have been using for too long. Speaking of “division” suggests that there was once a state of non-division to which we ought to return. That state has never existed, in any society. What exists, at certain happy moments in history, are societies capable of absorbing their divisions because they have a horizon more powerful than their conflicts. The task in Haiti is not to erase conflicts, which are inherent in all social life. It is to build a horizon.

Haitians are not divided. They are alone. Alone with one another, with no one to tell them what they form together, or where they are heading. Seen from afar, this collective solitude looks like a fracture. Seen up close, it is the silent confession of elites who have forgotten their calling. The diagnosis of division is convenient because it sidesteps the more burning question: what have those whose job it should have been to produce the nation been doing for the past fifty years? What they did not build, no one will build in their place. And as long as this question is not asked out loud, we will go on mistaking for division what has long been nothing more than a project that never showed up.