Connections without Linkage: Michel Chiha and Lebanese Ideology

The opening chapter reconstructs Michel Chiha's triple identity: a Chaldean Catholic banker from a powerful Beirut family married into the Pharaon dynasty; the founder and editorial voice of the French-language daily Le Jour; and the principal architect of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution. Traboulsi shows how these three roles were inseparable — Chiha's journalism served his banking interests, his constitutional drafting institutionalised his class's political vision, and his ideology naturalised the economic order from which his family profited. The chapter establishes that Chiha was not a detached intellectual but the organic intellectual of Beirut's commercial-financial bourgeoisie — the man who gave that class its self-understanding, its political programme, and its claim to represent Lebanon as a whole.

Traboulsi dissects what he calls Chiha's "geographic determinism" — the foundational claim that Lebanon's character is dictated by its geography: the Mountain produces spirituality, community, and isolation; the Sea produces commerce, cosmopolitanism, and openness. This duality becomes the master key to Chiha's entire system: every contradiction in Lebanese society is explained as a geographic given rather than a political choice. The chapter shows how this geographic theology performs a precise ideological function: it naturalises the division between a commercial coastal elite and a rural mountain hinterland, presenting class domination as landscape. Traboulsi demonstrates that Chiha's "geography" is not descriptive but prescriptive — it tells Lebanon what it must be rather than what it is.

This chapter analyses Chiha's economic thought — a radical laissez-faire liberalism that opposed all state intervention in the economy, rejected progressive taxation, fought industrialisation, and defended Lebanon's vocation as a commercial and financial intermediary. Traboulsi shows how Chiha systematically argued against any economic policy that might threaten the interests of the import-export bourgeoisie: protectionist tariffs, state planning, industrial development, labour legislation. The chapter's title is ironic: Chiha's "liberalism" had no theoretical depth — no engagement with Smith, Ricardo, or Mill — but it served its purpose perfectly as the ideology of a specific fraction of capital. Traboulsi reconstructs the counter-argument of Naim Amiouni, who in a 1946 lecture at the American University demonstrated that Lebanon's productive sectors were being deliberately sacrificed to the commercial-financial elite's interests, and that the country's workforce was overwhelmingly composed of wage workers and peasants — not the "nation of merchants" that Chiha proclaimed.

This chapter examines how Chiha's economic ideology shaped Lebanese-Syrian relations — specifically, how the Beirut commercial bourgeoisie (which Kamal Jumblatt called "the party of importers") fought to maintain Lebanon's role as the gateway for imports into Syria while resisting any economic integration that might benefit Syrian industry or Lebanese workers. Traboulsi reconstructs the customs union negotiations, the currency disputes, and the trade wars between the two countries, showing how Chiha consistently advocated for policies that served Beirut's commercial monopoly at the expense of both Syrian and Lebanese productive sectors. The chapter demonstrates that the economic separation of Lebanon from Syria — often presented as a natural consequence of Lebanese identity — was in fact a political project driven by the material interests of the import-export bourgeoisie.

This is the book's most devastating chapter — a systematic exposure of Chiha's social thought. Traboulsi shows how Chiha denied the existence of poverty in Lebanon (attributing it to "external sources" — immigrants from the annexed regions); denied the existence of large fortunes (claiming Lebanese businessmen "barely make a living"); denied the existence of exploitation (arguing that since Lebanon had no industry, it could have no exploitation); and opposed all redistributive policies, progressive taxation, and social legislation. The chapter traces Chiha's intellectual genealogy to Social Darwinism — the doctrine that inequality is natural, freedom and equality are incompatible, and any attempt to reduce social disparities rewards "the weakest and worst." Traboulsi quotes Chiha's extraordinary claim that "social equality exists only in paradise" — a theological closure of the social question that reveals the ideological function of religion in his system.

This is the book's longest and most analytically complex chapter. Traboulsi examines Chiha's domestic political thought through three interlocking concepts: entityism (the doctrine that Lebanon's existence as a separate entity takes priority over its independence); sectarianism (elevated by Chiha from a political arrangement to a cosmic vision — "Lebanon is the country of participatory sectarian minorities"); and traditionalism (the defence of feudal notables, hereditary leadership, and patriarchal authority as the natural order of Lebanese politics). The chapter's most important contribution is its analysis of how Chiha reframed the demographic problem created by Greater Lebanon — the loss of the Christian majority — not through democratic reform but through the formula of "participatory sectarian minorities" united by fear of the external Sunni majority and by the commercial partnership of the marketplace. The concept rests on two pillars: fear of the external "majority" (which unites all sects as "minorities") and the economic interest of commercial partnership (which binds them through the market).

A short but brilliant chapter that deconstructs the concept of the "Lebanese miracle" — the idea that Lebanon's prosperity, stability, and coexistence are miraculous, defying rational explanation. Traboulsi traces the genealogy of this discourse from Arnold Toynbee's lecture at the Cénacle Libanais through Ghassan Tueni's ecstatic editorials in An-Nahar. Traboulsi counts: in a 700-word editorial, Tueni uses the word "miracle" no fewer than 48 times — once every 15 words. The chapter reveals that the "miracle" is the ideological capstone of Chiha's entire system: when geographic determinism, liberalism, sectarianism, and traditionalism have done their work, what remains is explained by miracle. Translated into secular language, the "miracle" becomes a "radar" — a quasi-religious guidance system that steers the country without human intervention. The miracle is the ideology's confession that it cannot explain its own success.

This chapter examines Chiha's foreign policy thought — built on three principles: anti-communism as the supreme priority; "dependency" as a natural law requiring Lebanon's attachment to the dominant Western power; and Mediterraneanism as Lebanon's civilisational vocation. Traboulsi documents Chiha's extraordinary hostility to communism — which he considered a greater danger than death itself — his ambiguous relationship with fascism and Nazism (sympathy for Vichy, admiration for Pétain, enthusiasm for Salazar, equivocation about Franco), and his post-war rehabilitation of European colonialism as a civilising mission. The chapter reveals the deepest contradiction in Chiha's system: his insistence on Lebanon's independence coexisted with his equally insistent demand that Lebanon attach itself to the dominant Western power — making "independence" mean, in practice, the freedom to choose one's protector.

This chapter — introduced by a quotation from Kamal Jumblatt calling Chiha "undoubtedly the most prolific Lebanese writer on the Palestinian question" — reconstructs Chiha's complex and shifting positions on Zionism and Israel. Traboulsi identifies two competing currents in Lebanese Christian thought: the "identification of the two similars" (Lebanon and the Jewish national home as twin minority refuges) championed by Bishop Mubarak, and the "competition between the two similars" (Israel as an economic and political rival) which was Chiha's own position. The chapter traces how Chiha opposed Zionism not from solidarity with the Palestinians but from fear that a Jewish state would compete with Lebanon's role as the region's commercial intermediary and financial haven.

The title chapter examines how Chiha's vision of Lebanon as a "universal nexus" — connecting East and West — collapsed under the pressure of Cold War geopolitics. Chiha insisted on the designation "Near East" (a Mediterranean, culturally European region) against the Anglo-American "Middle East" (a strategic zone stretching from Pakistan to Egypt). But the Cold War forced Lebanon to choose between Western military alliances and Arab nationalism — precisely the choice Chiha's system was designed to avoid. The chapter traces how Chiha's Mediterraneanism was destroyed by the rise of Nasserism, the Baghdad Pact controversies, and the Suez crisis of 1956, leaving Lebanon's "universal nexus" with connections to everyone but linkage to no one — the book's governing metaphor for the structural impossibility of Chiha's vision.

The final chapter takes apart the most durable cliché in Lebanese political discourse: "Lebanon, the Switzerland of the East." Traboulsi traces the phrase to French colonial officials who promised Mount Lebanon's inhabitants that their mountains would become as prosperous as the Alps. He then conducts a devastating comparison between the two countries — showing that everything the Lebanese ideologues admired about Switzerland (neutrality, banking secrecy, cantonal autonomy, financial prosperity) rested on foundations that Lebanon lacked: an industrial economy, a peasant-soldier democratic tradition, genuine cantonal self-governance, and compulsory military service. Switzerland was founded by peasant revolts against feudal tyranny; Lebanon's confessional system was designed to preserve feudal authority. The comparison, pushed to its logical conclusion, becomes an indictment.

The conclusion asks whether Lebanon is condemned to repeat Chiha's founding vision — with its structural contradictions, its denial of class, its naturalisation of inequality, and its dependence on external protection — or whether it can break free into a genuinely new political imagination. Traboulsi argues that Chiha's ideology has proven remarkably resilient not because it was true but because it served the interests of the class that controls the economy, the banks, the media, and the political system. The postwar reconstruction under Rafik Hariri was, in many ways, a return to Chiha's model — updated for the age of globalisation but structurally identical. Breaking with Chiha requires not merely critiquing his ideas but transforming the material conditions that make them plausible.