Lebanon

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A nation of the Levant; since 1512, an autonomous region of the Ottoman Empire, and later a League of Nations Mandate awarded to France (1919-1942). Lebanon became independent in 1942 and became the most prosperous of the Arab nations. It has suffered grievously from an enormous civil war that raged from 1975-1990, which was exacerbated by overwhelming foreign intervention.

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Introduction

Lebanon is likened to a lot of things—Beirut is often described as the (once and future) Paris of the Middle East, or the Zurich (because of it is a major center of the finance sector). It has accumulated pockets of several different religious and linguistic communities, as well as some major diaspora groups, although that alone is no explanation for a civil war. Here is a summary of the groups:

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Prior to the Ottoman Empire

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Ottoman Rule

Lebanon was a province of the Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1917. Ottoman Turkey stumbled into World War I, largely in spite of the plans of its leaders. Fiscally and politically the Ottoman Empire was a mess and it had been under a mailed fist of military rule since 1908. When the war broke out, the British aided Amir Faisal in his rebellion against Turkish rule in the Levant].[3] Although the Arab forces under Faisal defeated the Turks and their allies (at terrible cost; over a million Arabs died during the war), the British and the French were able to impose a mandate and draw the boundaries of the countries which exist there today.



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Lebanon had always had always enjoyed some autonomy; in 1516 the Amir Fakhr ad Din I (1516-44) and persuaded Selim I to grant Lebanon special privileges within the empire. So, for example, the province had its own khedive (aristocratic governor), from the Shehab family which would later supply Lebanon with a president.


While the Ottoman Empire was a normally-tolerant Sunni empire, and so was the Shehab khedive, there were two large, old, insular religious groups who resided close to Beirut. These were the Maronites, who were concentrated north of the Shuf (Chouf) Mountains, and the Druze, who lived to the South. In 1860, partly as a result of a Maronite peasant revolt two years earlier, the Druze leaders began a massacre of some 10,000 Maronites. This caused the French to intervene to stop the killing and extract powers from the Turkish sultan; the British, unsurprisingly, tried to counter the French position by backing the Druze. The large Maronite Diaspora (most famously, Kahlil Gibran) dates from this era. Also, after 1861 the Western powers prevailed on Turkey to replace the khedive with a Maronite governor appointed by the sultan.


Lebanon continued to flourish until the end of the 19th century, when it fell victim to the dire economic crises which gripped the third world and a deterioration in Turkish administration. In 1908 a military coup d'etat clamped down on political opposition, began policies of violent repression (such as the genocide in Armenia and Kurdistan, and finally, with outbreak of WW1, in the Arab Levant.


Despite the efforts of the Ottoman military, the Great Arab Revolt captured Damascus (Sept. 1918); the Patriarch of the Maronite Church sent a delegation to the Paris negotiations pleading for an autonomous and enlarged Lebanon.

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The French Mandate


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Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement (see map), Lebanon and Syria fell under the French Mandate. Lebanon received the Bekaa Valley and some territory to the south, diluting the Christian majority in the country. But under the National Pact the Christians were guaranteed a critical mass of power in both the legislature and the executive.[4] This posed a problem, because Lebanon had been bestowed on the Christian community therein; but the converse was not true. The leaders of Maronites, as the pre-eminent Christian community, would tend to remain loyal to and dependent upon foreign patrons.

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Independence

In '26 Lebanon was granted self-rule within the French Mandate; independence came the ouster of the Vichy government (July '41) and a subsequent clash with the informal French domination ('43).
The ending of the French Mandate left Lebanon a mixed legacy. When the Mandate began, Lebanon was still suffering from the religious conflicts of the 1860s and from World War I. The French authorities were concerned not only with maintaining control over the country but also with rebuilding the Lebanese economy and social systems. They repaired and enlarged the harbor of Beirut and developed a network of roads linking the major cities. They also began to develop a governmental structure that included new administrative and judicial systems and a new civil code. They improved the education system, agriculture, public health, and the standard of living. Concurrently, however, they linked the Lebanese currency to the depreciating French franc, tying the Lebanese economy to that of France. This action had a negative impact on Lebanon. Another negative effect of the Mandate was the place given to French as a language of instruction, a move that favored Christians at the expense of Muslims.[5]
For the decades that followed internal independence, Lebanon's presidents, insulated from political competition, pursued a neoliberal economic policy.


Syria also became independent at the end of the War; in '48, all of the Arab states of the region, including Lebanon, participated in the war against Israel. Defeat in this war severely discredited the national governments, most of whom had been repressive in the name of "national security." Lebanon, while enjoying considerable internal freedom, was still technocratic and parochial. The Suez Crisis galvanized much of the Arab world, which was predominantly Sunni, and fastened its loyalties to Egyptian President Nasser.

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The Crisis of 1958

Nasser reserved special invective for Lebanon's President Camille Shamun, who had veered towards an embarrassing closeness to the West. Shamun and his foreign minister, Malik, were alarmed by the upsurge of radical pan-Arab nationalism, to which the exceptionalism of Lebanon was an obvious obstacle. Also, a the decisive event of '58 was the Coup in Iraq, which replaced the conservative Hashemite monarchy with radical, pro-Soviet dictator Qassim. In the summer of '58, therefore, a revolt against Pres. Shamun's administration began.[6] The military, commanded by Fuad Chehab, declared neutrality. US Marines were deployed in Lebanon, but to the surprise of many, did not attempt to prop up Shamun. At this time, Syria had recently entered into the United Arab Republic (UAR) with Egypt; while some pan-Arabists hoped that illegitimate means by which Shamun intended to succeed himself as president would lead to a popular ouster of the Maronite elites and the merger of Lebanon with Syria, Sunni Lebanese themselves overwhelmingly refused to challenge the autonomy of Lebanon or its borders.[7] Instead, most of the leftwing in Lebanon at this time sought to reverse the means by which Shamun had tried to consolidate power into the hands of his own clique.[8]

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Fuad Shehab and "The Golden Age" (1958-1970)

Fuad Shehab was the commander of the Lbanese armed forces; he was chosen president by the parliament as the result of a pact between the right and left. His long-term restraint in the use of military force against leftist/Muslim made him popular with them, and immediately upon coming to power he appointed Rashid Karami as prime minister. However, he had a precarious relationship with the Phalange Party, which thereafter sought to restore not only Christian hegemony over Lebanese politics, but also link this endeavor with anti-Communism and the Eisenhower Doctrine.


Shehab restored friendly ties with the rest of the Arab world. He also implemented Keynesian economic policies.[9] As a consequence of this and the boom in the banking sector, sectional tensions within society were greatly mitigated. Perhaps some considerable credit may go to the fragmentation of the Maronite political community among rival warlord interests (Sectionalism#In_Lebanonsee main article, Sectionalism: Lebanon). Another was the Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence), which was detached from the sectional divisions of Lebanese society. All of my sources agree that Shehab relied very heavily on the Deuxième Bureau to bypass the confessional/sectional gridlock; some go so far as to say Shehab subverted the rule of law in this way.[10] The Deuxième Bureau was peculiarly impartial for a Lebanese institution, although it stumbled badly in 1965 when it captured, and possibly murdered, a Palestinian fedayeen caught attempting to infiltrate Israel.[11] This was a fairly odd error for it to make, and conservative Christian politicians joined in the outcry. In 1969, Shehab's (by then-estranged) protégé, Charles Hilu, took steps to weaken the Bureau, and his successor, the ultra-conservative Suleiman Franjieh, abolished it altogether.


Another important event of the period, as mentioned, was the boom in the banking sector; at mid-decade, this was severely impacted by the Intrabank Crisis.[12] Intrabank was an unusual case of a financial institution in Lebanon that had been founded by Palestinian immigrants in defiance of the conservative financial establishment. The key figure, Yousseff Beidas, emigrated from Jerusalem in 1948 and founded Intrabank in 1951. The growth and audacity of Beidas' supervision were truly phenomenal. By 1966, the 15-year old bank had branch offices in all of the major financial centers of the world, and accounted for a staggering 40% of Lebanese deposits.[13] In early 1966, there was a gradual climb in the dollar as capital began to flow into the Bretton Woods zone (i.e., North America, Japan, and most of Europe). Intrabank's rise was owed in part to the Shehabist policies of fiduciary reform and economic stimulus, and partly to Beida's ties to the Shehabist elite: a large group of Christian, Druze, and Muslim civil servants who had risen into successive cabinets through university degrees and professionalism. Ranged against them (and Intrabank) was the topmost group of elites in Lebanon, the confessional notables and landlords whose relative standing had taking a beating.


In a cash-based economy such as that of the Levant, Intrabank tended to be highly risky since it held long-term, illiquid assets. Under a normal political regime, the central bank governors would respond to a solvent, but liquidity-stressed, bank by reviewing its asset sheets and lending it cash to meet withdrawals; during the runs on Intrabank that occurred in October '66, the governors of the Lebanese central bank actually conspired to tie up its remaining cash reserves, then proclaimed its bankruptcy. Subsequently, the older families were able to use the legal proceedings against Intrabank to purge many Shehabists. While subsequent reforms of the central bank did professionalize its management, the run on Intrabank and subsequent financial boom in Beirut (from the massive influx of oil wealth) drastically widened the gap between rich and poor. Reflecting the loss of middle class prosperity, Lebanon's warlord elites suddenly had a new monopoly of power; this was their "unipolar moment," when the financial sector hired up the crop of college graduates and populist politics vanished overnight. Alone at the top, they splintered against each other as never before.[14]


At the same time, while the inner circle of elites (mostly Maronite, but some Sunni and Druze) basked in their renewed hegemony, the Sunni-dominated left realized that Shehabism had been a false promise; hundreds of thousands of Lebanese working class of all religions had been ruined by the collapse of the local banking system; the country's banking sector was now in the hands of large foreign multinationals, and parliamentary debate was frivolous. In 1958, the prize was full participation in parliamentary democracy; now it was revolution.

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The Civil War

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Since 1990

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Notes

  1. ↑ Palestinian Arabs are not always Muslim; Hanan Ashrawi is Episcopalian and there other denominations as well. But demographically, the Palestian population still resident in this part of the world is now almost entirely Sunni. In Lebanon, about 214,000 Palestinians (54% of the Lebanese total) live in refugee camps. At this time most of the ongoing strife is between Wahhabi and secular Palestinians in the camps south of Beirut.

    Statistics on Palestinians
  2. ↑ This statistic is extremely controversial. The 1926 Constitution of Lebanon apportioned power among the groups based on a census which counted Maronites living abroad as part of the Maronite population of the new country. Obviously, this was not done for Sunnis or Shi'a. The Constitution ensured that the president and the commander of the armed forces would be Christian (not necessarily Maronite; the first president was Greek Orthodox), while the PM would be Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament would be Shi'a; posts were apportioned out to each of the 19 religious groups in this way. The 1990 Constitution ended official confessionalism. (See text.) The Maronite Church is acknowledged as uniate with the Roman Catholic Church, but retains Eastern rites. The Melkite Church in Greece and Lebanon is the same way
  3. ↑ "Thomas Edward Lawrence," The Columbia Encyclopedia; "The Great Arab Revolt," Royal Hashemite Court
  4. ↑ The Lebanese Constitution does not mention the religious groups. That was part of an extraconstitutional pact. This is actually not rare; a similar pact was made between the rival factions of Colombia to end La Violencia
  5. ↑ Thomas Collelo, ed., "World War II and Independence, 1939-41", A Country Study: Lebanon , Library of Congress (1989)
  6. ↑ See Fawaz A. Gerges, "The Lebanese Crisis of 1958: The Risks of Inflated Self-Importance," Lebanese Center for Policy Studies
  7. ↑ Ahmad Beydoun, "Lebanon's Sects and the Difficult Road to a Unifying Identity," Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (Spring 1992)
  8. ↑ For a vehemently opposed version of this situation, see Adel Beshara Lebanon: The Politics of Frustration--the Failed Coup of 1961 Routledge (2005). Beshara acknowledges that Shehab was intent on implementing "much needed social and economic reforms" (p.75), but makes much of his alleged reliance on the Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence). In contrast, he defends Shamun's rightwing ideology as arising from "his strong commitment to political liberalism and Western-style democracy, and, increasingly, to free-market developmentalism." More generally, Beshara would probably reject my view that Shamun was abusing the '42 guarantees of Maronite political hegemony, and courting Western intervention, to establish an open oligarchy—and this was what was caused the crisis of '58.
  9. ↑ See Boutros Labaki, "Development Policy in Lebanon Between Past and Future" for a summary of economic policy in Lebanon.
  10. ↑ Adel Beshara (2005), as mentioned above, insists that Shehab veered towards authoritarianism in this way; so does Charles Winslow, Lebanon: War and Politics in a Fragmented Society, Routledge (1996), p.133; and Kamal Dib, Warlords and Merchants: The Lebanese Business and Political Establishment Ithaca Press (2006), p.108. The latter two sources are very favorable in their assessment of Shehab, and imply (in my view) that Shehab used the power of the Deuxième Bureau to thwart the oligarchic character of the Lebanese polity.
  11. ↑ Winslow (1996), p.156
  12. ↑ Kamal Dib (2006), p.103ff. Dib goes so far as to cite Najib Almuddine, "I am convinced the Intrabank affair was the beginning of the disintegration of Lebanon."
  13. ↑ Intrabank was one of 99 banks in Beirut; 14 others were French, three were American, two were British, and ten were of other nationality (70 were Lebanese). By rank, the eight banks after Intrabank controlled 15% of assets. Intrabank controlled 56% of assets in the Lebanese banking sector. See Kamal Dib (2006), p.106.
  14. ↑ For the sudden and explosive concentration of wealth, see Kamal Dib (2006), p.127-129; Charles Winslow (1996) also corroborates Dib's account of a "carefully engineered run" on Intrabank, p.154.
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See Also

Hizbullah (Lebanon)

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External Links

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General Reference

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News & Analysis

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History

Garnet & Ithaca Press

Retrieved from "http://www.jamesrmaclean.com/mw/index.php/Lebanon"
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