Lebanon cannot form a cabinet. Since January, when Hizbullah withdrew its ministers from the cabinet and forced the cabinet to resign, Lebanon has not been able to put together a new government. It only has a “care-taker,” i.e. temporary government. The problem lies in sectarian divisions. Every political coalition in Lebanon by law has to have members of the Christian, Sunni and Shiite communities. That’s because Lebanon’s constitution requires the President be Christian, the Prime Minister be Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament be Shiite. The sectarian divisions run deep. There has been no census since 1932 because no ethnic group wants to find itself officially recognized as a minority. It wants to retain an illusion of influence. For Lebanon, that has forced the creation of political divisions along sectarian lines, not forced them to be erased. Those divisions exploded with the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, and nearly rekindled a civil war in 2008. 
Since the end of the war in 1990, only the Shiites still have their own militia, meaning the country is divided between an empowered Shiite community and a resentful, fearful rest of the country. Rivalries, therefore, are dangerously fierce.
Other countries have also struggled to form governments. Iraq just finished a year-long process to come up with something after its elections, and the same has occurred in Belgium. In Belgium, the Dutch and French speaking halves of the country produce their own representatives who resent each other and often fail to work together for the good of the entire country. For Belgium, the suggestion the country split into two has been pushed harder than ever before. While in Belgium a split would likely not spark a war, that is the fear in Lebanon. How to divide the country would also be a subject of contention. Additionally, if Hizbullah were to lead a majority-Shiite state as the main power, it would not be able to hide among Christian, Druze and Sunni civilians in the rest of Lebanon to make Israel hesitate before it thinks to attack the aggressive militia.
But look at the ethnic breakdown. The four major divisions are scattered throughout the country. No political breakdown would evenly distribute ethnically, much less leave Shiite areas next to each other Christian areas next to each other and so on. Even putting Christians and Druze in the same state or Shiites and the Sunnis in the same state is no guarantee for stability. Political alliances have changed too many times to make any division viable. Any split would create multi-ethnic states.
Partition Lebanon?
But that might be worth the risk. If two or three small states were created with clear ethnic majorities, there would be no dispute over what the majority in parliament would be. It could be that the answer lies in a yet-to-be tapped political strategy. Democracy is supposedly designed to empower the electoral majority, but increasingly it has come to stand for something else: minority rights.
Other Models:
In Egypt, Syria and the Persian Gulf, there are substantial minorities that have either been suppressed by their ethnic rivals (Egyptian Muslims oppressing Egyptian Christians [Copts]) or minorities unwilling to let majorities rule over them (Syrian Alawites oppressing Syrian Sunnis; Bahraini Sunnis oppressing Bahraini Shiites). But a democratic model, with electoral representation and independent judiciaries (courts) can work to serve minority interests in the face of majority rule. Take Israel, where Jews make up a near 80% majority. Arabs are broken up into Sunnis (the majority within the minority), Druze and Christians.
There is a clear definition of the country and any calls to change the country’s identity are small compared to those who accept the reality of the Jewish majority. Instead, Arabs who feel discrimination have formed civil rights organizations and successfully (and unsuccessfully) brought cases relating to ethnic issues to court. Land rights, government allocations and the like have seen related court cases in Israel. Despite the tremendous ethnic tension, the uneven distribution has protected Israeli Arabs from the type of circumstances that have provoked civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq, plus the military suppression of fellow citizens in Syria or Bahrain.
That is not to say that the effort to preserve that balance has not provoked wars. Just as much as Israel has security arguments for staying the West Bank, its indecision on how much territory to annex there has kept the army in an open-ended situation. Demographics are a clear factor for Israel’s policy toward West Bank Palestinians, but the country has never decided if that should mean Israel should try to annex territory to extend the area where Jews would be a majority (Israel) or withdraw and consolidate what is already internationally recognized Israeli territory.
What it would look like:
Without going on too much of a tangent. Consider the possibility Lebanon could be divided along similar lines. Shiites in the south and northeast would have a majority and need some way to connect the two areas. Christians dominate the coastline but also have communities along the Israeli border stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Golan Heights. But Christians are split right now between the Shiite-dominated faction in Lebanese politics and the Sunni-dominated. Druze leadership flip flops depending on who has the edge.
But Lebanon was always intended to be a Christian state by France, and perhaps it should stay that way, especially given Christians’ weakening position in the Middle East today. Given the political variety among Christians, a Christian Lebanon might even balance the interests of the other Lebanons: mediating disputes and providing a stable area for economic growth that invests in the neighboring regions.
As for Hizbullah, they would avoid that type of division. They fear Israel would now have a clearer target in the event of a war. So Hizbullah would either be isolated versus Israel, or forced to give up its doctrine of infinite war against the Jewish state as it tries to compete with other Shiite political parties for influence in a new Shiite Lebanon.
Sunnis would have regained self-government. They would likely be absorbed by a future (Sunni-majority) Syria, if not as a full-fledged part of the country than at least as a patron.
The Druze community in Lebanon has not historically had its own state, but those in Syria have. Druze have though been fiercely independent, and could easily connect their regions in the southeast with the central part of the country along the coast.
A Connecticut Compromise?
But in reality, this is all a fantasy based on a map whose relevance may be long gone. But they could serve as rough guidelines to a realignment of Lebanon’s provinces.
The best direction for Lebanon would likely be something similar to the Connecticut Compromise, which created a two-house, bicameral legislature for the United States (the House and the Senate) where at the same time one body represented each state equally and the other proportionately represented the general population of the whole country. Lebanon currently has a single legislature which is divided unevenly between the sects, where Christians have half the seats in parliament while having less than a third of the country’s general population. That system can stay in place, but adding a second house that did not discriminate along ethnic lines would probably make thinks more equitable. Each ethnic group still has an equal say on matters in the original parliament, and the general population can be represented with no regard for ethnic divisions in the second.
Hizbullah’s Power
That does not resolve problems regarding Hizbullah’s weapons. The best hope to end that is to isolate Hizbullah and shift Shiite political power to its old rival Amal, or a new party representing Shiite interests. That is not on anyone’s drawing board right now. Maybe it should be.
