Source: Eng. Mohammed Al-Ghweil · EP 60
Subject: The 1951 conversation Libya never had
Libya gained independence in December 1951, the first state to be granted independence by the newly formed United Nations. The 1951 constitution established a federal monarchy under King Idris, joining the three historical regions — Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan — into a single state.
The constitution was drafted. The state was constituted. The flag was raised.
Mohammed Al-Ghweil's first lesson, drawn from his reading of Libya's last seven decades, is that the country rushed into independence without first having the conversation that other newly independent states held: a national charter answering the question of how a heterogeneous society of regions, tribes, languages and political traditions would live together.
The legal architecture existed. The social compact did not.
The distinction matters. A constitution is a set of rules about how power is exercised. A national charter — in Al-Ghweil's framing — is a prior agreement about what the country is for, who its members are, and what the terms of belonging require of them. Constitutions can be written quickly. Charters cannot. They emerge from extended societal conversation, often over decades, and they bind the population to the state through something other than legal compulsion.
Libya skipped that conversation.
The shortcut produced a state that could be undone by any sufficiently strong faction, because nothing beneath the state held it together. The 1969 coup that brought Gaddafi to power encountered no organised resistance from a population committed to the existing constitutional order — not because the population was disloyal, but because the order had never been seated in popular consent. The 2011 collapse encountered the same condition, in reverse: the regime fell, and what was beneath it turned out to be regional, tribal and factional rather than civic.
Al-Ghweil's argument is not nostalgic. He is not arguing that the 1951 moment should have been delayed. He is arguing that the conversation should have been held in parallel — that the founding generation should have undertaken, alongside the legal work, the longer political work of agreeing what living together would actually mean across the three regions and inside each of them.
Al-Ghweil's second lesson follows the first: by 1962, Libya had become an oil exporter. The economic basis of the state changed within a decade of independence. A second national conversation was now required — about how oil revenue would be managed, what generations had a claim on it, and how a hydrocarbon-funded state would relate to the citizens it could now afford to provide for.
That conversation was also skipped.
The wealth was allocated, fought over, stolen and redistributed across three political eras — monarchy, Gaddafi, post-2011 — but the underlying question of what the wealth is for has never been put to the public. Every successor regime has assumed it already had the answer. The post-2011 conflict, in Al-Ghweil's reading, is partially explained by this absence: when there is no agreed answer to who the oil is for, every faction can credibly claim its share.
The argument is structural rather than partisan. Al-Ghweil is not blaming a single regime, a single tribe, or a single foreign power. He is naming a particular kind of failure — the failure to do the slow, dull, indispensable work of constructing public agreement before constructing public institutions.
It is the kind of argument that an engineer makes. The infrastructure cannot be built before the survey is done. The state cannot hold if the foundation underneath it has not been laid. Libya, in his reading, has been attempting to operate, since 1951, on a foundation that was never poured.
The phrase he applied to the post-2011 period — "festival of collective suicide" — gets its force from this longer arc. The current decade is not, for him, an aberration. It is the predictable consequence of seventy years of skipped conversation.