This week, Libya witnessed two events that were celebrated as signs of progress, even though they express nothing more than the normalisation of division within what is supposed to be a single state. This happens in a country that the Greek historian Herodotus once described as “the source of all new things.” But what “new” can we speak of today, when novelty itself has become synonymous with fragmentation?

The first event was the participation of forces from Libya’s rival governments—one based in the east and the other in the west—in joint US special forces training in the central city of Sirte. It was the first military exercise of its kind bringing together former adversaries from the civil war. The Flintlock special operations drills, conducted by US Africa Command since 2005, aim to strengthen the counterterrorism and border‑security capabilities of participating nations. This year, they included units from Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army and forces aligned with the UN‑recognized Government of National Unity led by Abdulhamid Dbeibah.

The second event, celebrated with equal enthusiasm, was the announcement by the Central Bank of Libya that the House of Representatives in Benghazi and the High Council of State in Tripoli had approved the country’s first unified budget in more than thirteen years. These two legislative bodies are themselves products of Libya’s long political fracture: the eastern parliament elected in 2014, and the western consultative council formed in 2015 from members of the 2012 General National Congress.

Such celebrations amount to an open admission that Libya is no longer a unified state. Yet, in the logic of the politicians applauding these developments, they are treated as achievements.

Here lies the political tragedy: division has ceased to be a temporary crisis and has instead become a governing method—a structural condition reproduced at every opportunity that should have been a bridge toward unity.

Here lies the political tragedy: division has ceased to be a temporary crisis and has instead become a governing method—a structural condition reproduced at every opportunity that should have been a bridge toward unity.

The mere act of representatives from the two governments sitting at the same table is treated as exceptional. The participation of two rival armies in a single training exercise becomes a moment worthy of national celebration, as though modern states are built through symbolic gestures rather than unified institutions.

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Instead of speaking about one country, Libya now speaks of two governments and two armies. The country no longer understands itself, and any interaction between its two halves is marketed as progress. It is as if legitimacy can be plural, when in modern statehood, the multiplication of legitimacy is simply the absence of it.

This is the tragedy of a nation that celebrates its own fragmentation while possessing the longest coastline on the Mediterranean—a coastline that could have been a political asset far greater than its geographical value. Libya is blessed with nearly 2,000 kilometers of uninterrupted shore, yet this blessing has become a symbol of political failure.

The coastline that links western Libya to its east, dotted with cities along its length, has never been connected by a single railway line whose whistle might awaken the sleeping sea.

The coastline that links western Libya to its east, dotted with cities along its length, has never been connected by a single railway line whose whistle might awaken the sleeping sea.

Countries with long coastlines often build their unity on the sea, not away from it. Libya did the opposite: it neglected the sea, neglected the land, and neglected the idea of connecting the two. The coastline became nothing more than a beautiful blue line on the map—devoid of political meaning.

Railways, like roads, are the arteries of nations. Sever one artery, and the body weakens. In Libya, not only are the roads fragmented, but the deeper social and tribal fractures—often invisible—stand in the way of building a railway from Ras Ajdir on the Tunisian border to Tobruk on the Egyptian border. The tribe in Libya is not merely a social unit; it is a long shadow cast over every attempt at state‑building. The new political class did not try to shorten this shadow; they extended it, finding in it a tool for survival rather than an obstacle to progress. Religious leaders and tribal authorities, now dominant across the divided landscape, have become a continuous extension of Muammar Gaddafi’s failure, adopting tribalism and regionalism as the basis of their political projects while clinging to inherited rivalries. Libyan nationalism—Libya as one country—remains at the margins of their definitions of the future. And so they celebrate division as success.

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Unless Libyan politicians place national identity above all other labels, they will remain, no matter how often they appear together before cameras or in divided parliaments or international halls, the legitimate representatives of fragmentation. For the Libyans who rose up against Gaddafi, it is a bitter fate that religious and tribal authorities now dominate the entire scene. History offers no example of a tribe or a clergy successfully building a state. What Libya has today is daily crisis management, not a nation‑building project.

States are not built by coincidence, nor by protocol meetings, nor by celebrating a unified budget between two divided institutions. They are built when there is one national project, not multiple small projects dividing the ruins.

States are not built by coincidence, nor by protocol meetings, nor by celebrating a unified budget between two divided institutions. They are built when there is one national project, not multiple small projects dividing the ruins.

In the mid‑1990s, my late friend, the journalist Omar al‑Sanousi, stepped out of his car, walked toward the Mediterranean, then turned toward the Red Castle in Tripoli and said, “Look, Karam, how beautiful Tripoli is.” Before him, the late poet Ali Sidqi Abd al‑Qadir had imagined Libya’s houses in The Land of the Fragrant Flowers as earrings hanging from the sky. The same national dream haunted the late Abdelkarim al‑Danna and Abu al‑Qasim al‑Quwari, who longed to see Misrata freed from its tribal constraints. Mansour Bushnaf from Bani Walid spent years behind bars for hinting at freedom in one of his plays. The poet Ali al‑Fazzani yearned for the luminous city from Benghazi, his eyes fixed on the entire country. Even Jilani Trebishan threw his poems into the ocean and chose the quiet town of Rajban to die in, far from the noise of Ireland.

But all these national dreams were buried yesterday by Gaddafi, and they continue to be buried today by Libya’s politicians and religious authorities. The country no longer fulfills Herodotus’s prophecy, for nothing new emerges from a Libya that celebrates a joint military drill and a unified budget as if they were signs of rebirth, when they are merely symptoms of a nation comfortable with its own division.

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