Do Collective Rights Contribute to Conflict Resolution?
The case of Lebanon
Presented by: Fawwaz Traboulsi
Ethnonationalisms and State Building, International Conference, Heinrich Boll Stifting, Berlin, 4 April 2008.
Questioning ethnonationalism
Allow me to begin with a few quick remarks on the current debates concerning ethnonationalism.
- Apart from the Kurdish and Armenian communities, the Lebanese are in their majority ethnically Arabs. Neither difference of ‘blood’ nor of ‘kinship’ distinguish the Lebanese religious sects one from the other. So we will be talking here about sects as socio-political formations in which the religious element plays two basic roles. One, religion defines the contours of the formation (Maxime Rodinson); ii) it provides a strong ideological factor for communal identification and solidarity in addition to being an impulse for action.
- Concerning the debate between ‘primordialists’ and ‘constructivists’- that is, how to make the part between the tribal and the ‘cultural’ on one hand and the constructed on the other – one comment is worth adding. Rather than extrapolate, it might be better to examine how older (‘primordial’) social formations are recycled to play defined roles in ‘modern’, colonial and postcolonial peripheral societies. It goes without saying that this recycling serves certain political, economic and geo-strategic interests. In fact, modern tribes, sects, and ethnicities, borrow structures, habits and traditions from the earlier communities but usually disregard their codes and modalities for conflict resolution. This ‘deregulation’ makes these more ‘modern’ formations prone to excessive violence.
In this sense, we can say that politicized sects are neither fixed not immobile, they are flexible and changeable, and they can be constructed as well as deconstructed according to factors and imperatives usually exterior to them. More importantly, conscious of being constructs, politicized religious communities possess multiple ways of maintaining and reproducing themselves. Institutionally, they do this through services they provide in the fields of education, health, and charity. Ideologically, they exploit and manipulate the sacred. Psychologically, they instill fear of the ‘other’ among their members. Last but not least, in times of internal crisis or breaks within the community, they resort to repression and military control over their members and to the liquidation of dissidents. - When discussing communalism, emphasis is usually put on fissures and conflicts, both tautologically explained by communal differences. The point here is i) to explain the rule and not only the exception – i.e. the long periods when conflicts did not assume a violent character; and ii) to look into the extra-communal factors that make sub-national communities into ‘fall back positions’ (Hobsbawm) to which individuals resort when other structures fail them.
- Contrary to those who define ethnic groups as formations disengaged from economic factors, communal formations coalesce and become operative precisely when they are differently located as regards power, status and economic and social hierarchy. In the case of Lebanon, identity politics is concerned not only with division of political power (and competition over it) but also, if not mainly, with social and regional distribution. The sectarian factor operates in all the fields of social distribution left out by the class hierarchies and class struggles: in the countryside/city differentiation; in the realm of politico-legal privileges and positions of power (where political and military power become a formidable means for the creation of economic interests); in the fields of social promotion and social mobility; and last but not least in the scurrying for the control of social wealth, natural resources and the services of the state.
Politicized sects can thus be seen as enlarged patronage networks in which sectarian solidarity and patronage has the additional function of defending groups tied to pre-capitalist formations against the implacable laws of the capitalist market, and covering up administrative corruption and predatory capitalism.
A brief history
Lebanon’s sectarian system is a French adaptation of the Ottoman millet system for the purposes of colonial rule. In order to legitimize its colonial mandate over Syria, France presented itself as the champion of the region’s religious minorities, namely, the Christians, Shiites, Alawis and Druze. One might ask: defend them against whom? Against the Sunni majority. The policy that considered Syria’s Sunni population accountable for the heritage of the Ottoman Empire was not dissimilar from that which held the Sunnis of Iraq responsible for Saddam Hussein dictatorship. According to that sectarian-based identification of the region, Syria was divided into five states when France obtained its mandate over it in 1920: one for each of the Christians (Lebanon), the Druze and the `Alawis and two for the Sunnis (Damascus and Aleppo).
Be that as it may, Greater Lebanon, created by annexing the predominantly coastal cities and the plains of the interior and the southern Jabal `Amil, to Mount Lebanon, was hardly a Christian homeland as it counted nearly as many Christians as Muslims. In order to insure Christian domination over the new entity, the French adopted the notion of Lebanon as ‘a country of associated religious minorities’: the Lebanese were thus defined in terms of sects rather than of religions and the numerically larger sect, the Maronites, was allotted political primacy.
In 1926, Lebanon was provided by the French mandate with a dualistic constitution in which republican democratic institutions were adapted to sectarian communalism. Article 9 confirmed the right of sects to follow their own legislations in personal status (birth rights, marriage, divorce, guardianship, inheritance, adoption, etc.), while article 10 held the state responsible to defend and uphold ‘private religious education’, and article 95 called for ‘justice’ in the distribution of the offices of the state among the religious sects. Yet, the legislators of 1926 were keen to strike a balance between collective rights and individual rights. They called for the creation of a Senate to represent the sects, as Parliament was supposed to be a non-sectarian institution representing individual citizens. However, the opposition of the Maronite church and of many a political and religious leader led to the annulment of the senate three years later and parliamentary elections was based on a sectarian distribution of seats with a ratio of 7/5 Christians to Muslims. Since, sects have proliferated from the initial six to the present eighteen.
Under the post-independence regime, the amended Constitution of 1943 preserved the articles concerning sectarian communal rights and supplemented them with an oral agreement known as the National Pact between the leaders of the Independence movement, Bishara al-Khouri and Riad al-Sulh. As the Muslims withdrew their long-held demand for unity with Syria, the Christians dropping their demand for French protection in return for a privileged primacy in the State, exercised mainly by the all-powerful Maronite President of the Republic.
A division of labour soon emerged between the ruling oligarchy of landed political notabilities (za`ims) and the services-oriented bourgeoisie according to which the administration became the domain of the political notabilities, who stuffed it with their clients. Patronage became the Siamese twin of sectarianism.
Generally, economic prosperity catered for lulls of relative political stability, notwithstanding two factors that contributed to the disruption of the sectarian status-quo.
One was social and sectarian mobility. The sizeable enlargement of a multi-sectarian middle class coupled with the rise of Sunni Muslim families to the ranks of the Christian-dominated oligarchic bourgeoisie due to education and work abroad- unleashed new socio-political forces seeking a place in a quasi-impermeable political system.
The other disruptive factor consisted of the major changes in regional and international power relations with the onset of the Cold War and the rise of modern anti-colonial Arab nationalism under Gamal `Abd al-Nasir and the Ba`th party.
The 1958 Arab nationalist rebellion against the pro-western regime of Camille Chamoun, and the ensuing few weeks of armed civil srife in the summer of that year, were a direct product of those internal and external mutations. The crisis concluded with an Americans-Egyptian brokered understanding for a better distribution of power between Maronites and Sunnis, a set of reforms toward a more efficient administration, a rationalized development of Lebanese capitalism and the alleviation of uneven regional development and social inequalities. Those were the main characteristics of the regime of President Fouad Shihab (1958-1964) and of his successor Charled Hilu (1964-1970) both relying heavily on technocrats, and an increased role of the army and the intelligence services in public life. Nevertheless, this attempt at building a viable and modern State was sabotaged by the alliance of the Christian-dominated bourgeoisie and the sectarian za`ims, encouraged by a new alignment of regional forces, initiated by the military defeat of Gamal `Abd al-Nasir in the June 1967 war, and the rise of Saudi power.
The return of the traditional za`ims to power, the roll back of socio-economic reforms, the deepening socio-economic crises, the rapid unrbanization (especially of the Shi`is) and the proliferation of ‘poverty belts’ around Beirut, the increased frustration of the middle classes, and the intrusion of the armed organizations of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were as many factors that led to the 1975-1990 wars.
It should be noted for our purposes that a project of federalism based exclusively on communal rights did emerge during the war years. Initiated by the Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) under Bashir Jumayyil, the project proposed the division of the country into five autonomous regions in which the federal government will be mainly concerned with defense and foreign affairs. The project served two main functions. First, it ensured Maronite Christian hegemony liberated from any threat of Muslim demography. The bulk of the contiguous Christian territories will be grouped into one large autonomous region, whilst the Muslim population will be distributed among the other the four region in which it would have to share power with the remaining Christian populations. Second, the adoption of regional financing for development and services was destined to relieve the relatively richer and better educated Christian region from any fiscal, financial or budgetary responsibility vis-à-vis the less favoured, and predominantly Muslim, peripheral regions, much along the lines of the program of the north separatists in Italy.
The project was deemed economically unviable by business circles. Many also pointed out that the implementation of the federation will encourage Syria to annex the non Christian parts of the country. Finally, the plan was shelved when the Americans-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in the summer 1982, boosted the hopes in a decisive victory for the Christian camp that will be able reconstruct its muscular domination over the whole country under the presidency of Bashir Jumayyil.
Post-war communalism: Lebanon as failed state
According to the 1989 Ta’if agreement that put an end to the fighting, and the new Constitution of 1990, power was equally distributed among the three major sects, reducing the prerogatives of the Maronite president to the benefit of the Speaker of Parliament (Shi`i) and the Prime Minister (Sunni) thus creating an impossible balance of power between three virtual competing presidents. This arrangement should be understood within the context of the regionally and internationally brokered understanding to grant Syrian mandate over Lebanon. Politics, including foreign relations, and security were administered by Damascus backed by the 30.000 Syrian soldiers and its intelligence branch on Lebanese territory. President Hafez al-Assad became the virtual ruler of the country and more importantly the ultimate arbiter of Lebanese conflicts.
Rather than contribute to the reconstruction of the Lebanese state, the Syrian mandate, did the opposite. It succeeded in disarming the militias, except Hizb Allah, defined as a resistance organization for its role in the resistance against the Israeli occupation of the Southern strip. Syria’s pro-consuls and officers juggled with sectarian conflicts, weakening all the contending parties, controlled the levers of political and military power, including its foreign policy, imposed protection money on all lucrative economic activities, created their own additional patronage networks, raising predation and corruption to an unprecedented scale.
The withdrawal of Syria’s troops and intelligence services from Lebanon, in April 2005, weeks after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a crime primarily attribute to Syrian agents, relatively liberated Lebanon from the exactions perpetrated during the long years of the Syrian mandate. But it nevertheless deprived political life of its mechanism of conflict management. Representatives of the major sects became equally obsessed by domination phobias. The Christians were wailing their lost prerogatives and their drastic marginalization, even in the economic domain; the Shi`is, still feeling underpowered despite their obvious post-war empowerment, were asking for a bigger share in decision making; the Sunnis, main beneficiaries of the reduction of Presidential prerogatives in favour of the Prime Minister, afraid to share their executive prerogatives with the Shi`i representatives; and finally, the Druze, unwillingness to reduce their share of power to their numerical status of 7% among the population. Thus all parties concerned went back to their old time habit of soliciting outside help, the ones from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the USA, the others from the Syrian-Iranian alliance.
These tensions and competitions were further aggravated by three additional factors. First, the inflation of the religious element in state and society, not only because of the major role clerics of all sects played in public life but also but an added religious dimension to the politics of identity and difference. Second, the combined effects of laissez-faire economics and sectarian-based patronage, morphed mafism and warlordism, had indeed severely reduced the role of the state as provider of economic opportunities and social distribution. Third, the political system, already rocked by the scurrying over sectarian sharing, had to deal with two populist socio-political forces that had been marginalized under the Ta’if system: Hizb Allah and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) of General Michel `Awn. The former dropped out voluntarily because of its role in the resistance against Israeli occupation (1982-2000); the second forced itself out because of its opposition to the Syrian mandate and its rejection of the whole Ta’if concensus. Both forces are populist in the strict sense of the word as they articulate demands and discourses that address an amalgam of social forces- the upward mobile sections of the bourgeoisie and of the professional middle classes as well as the inhabitants of the suburbs around Beirut, Christian to the north and the east and Shi`i to the west and the south. But while the `Awnists are mainly urban, Hizb Allah commands sizeable power in the rural South and the Biqa`.
Lebanon is presently a severely divided political society. Though the new post-Syrian divide in Lebanon does not follow the traditional religious divide between Christians and Muslims, it nevertheless increased inter-sectarian as well as intra-sectarian tensions. Maronites and Christians in general are pitted against each other on both sides of the divide between the parliamentary majority (the March 14 camp) which has the support of the majority of the Sunni and Druze forces, while the allied Hizballah-FPM opposition, of the March 8th camp, rallies the support of the quasi-unanimity of the Shi`i population. Both protagonists legitimize their discourse by reference to the Constitution: ones in the name of majority rule, the others in the name of community rights, taxing the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora as illegitimate since it does not include representatives of one major sect, the Shi`is. In return, the Opposition calls for a coalition government in which it commands a third of the cabinet seats, which means commanding veto power on all major government decisions (which constitutionally have to be taken by a 2/3 majority).
As regards the political system, it can safely be said that the basic components of parliamentary democracy (majority rule an the alternation of power) are presently being eroded in what used to be called Lebanese ‘sectarian emocracy’ in favour of consociationalism which in practice means: either unanimity is achieved between the six major players who monopolise power in the country – two Maronites, two Shi`is, one Sunni and one Druze – or each preserves to himself the right to veto any decision or legislation.
One last development illustrates the hitherto unmentioned link between the reconstructed Lebanese communal divisions and the hegemonic discourses of globalization. Although both camps are steeped in identitarian politics and deny any sectarianism in their positions, presenting their discourses and struggles as ‘eminently political’, one camp marks a more pronounced predilection for culturalism. In its manifesto of March 2008, the ‘loyalists’ define the conflict as one that confronts their ‘culture of openness and life’ to the ‘culture of isolation and death’ of the Opposition. Interestingly enough, the March 14th alliance takes the lead in its ‘culturalism’ from a trendy advertising company. Initially commissioned by the Hariri family to organize the logos and slogans for its political campaigns, the London-based Satchi and Satchi. is famed for launching the slogan ‘we love life!’ as the rallying cry for the March 14 alliance. Tragically, all that the ‘loyalists’ have to propose as solution to this life and death cultural conflict is to call upon its adversaries to rally to their ‘culture’ of ‘openness and life’!
This latter stance illustrates the extent to which both camps are locked into what Clausewitz called ‘ascendancy to extremes’. Both lack a B plan for compromise to fall back to and equally await a regional/international arrangement between Syria and Iran on the one hand and the USA and Saudi Arabia, on the other, that would impose on them a compromise they are unwilling and incapable of generating.
Conclusion
This presentation should have illustrated to what extent, in the real experience of Lebanon, politicized communal rights have become the problem not the solution. Nevertheless, the solution is not beyond imagination. It can be initiated on the basic of two reforms. One is an indirect method of addressing sectarian problems as mainly rooted in socio-economic differences and privileges by a project of social justice. The other is simply to apply the Lebanese Constitution, which is based on a balance between individual rights and communal rights as it provides for the creation of a Senate to represent the sects while the non-sectarian House of Representatives will represent the citizens.