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Since the upheavals that began in 2011, states in the Middle East with pluralistic, heterogeneous societies have collapsed, driving a renewed interest in sectarian power-sharing systems as possible models for these countries’ rehabilitation. Lebanon has just such a system in which religious communities share power. Although it is flawed and unraveling in many ways, it has helped keep the country at peace and provides valuable lessons for the region.

An Unraveling System

• The Lebanese political system is based on a sectarian division of constitutional powers and administrative positions, guaranteeing the representation of certain groups while also contributing to decisionmaking paralysis.
   
• The flaws of the sect-based governance system in part led Lebanon into civil war. The 1989 Taif Agreement, which put an end to the war, reshuffled the system. Syria was made the postwar power broker and given guardianship over Lebanon.
   
• After Taif, a divisive tension arose between Lebanon’s two main Muslim communities, the Sunnis and Shia. Syria managed the divisions while also exacerbating them.
• Sunni-Shia frictions sharpened after the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister and Syria’s 2005 withdrawal from the country. They further intensified with the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
   
• Today, the Lebanese state is deadlocked. Lebanon has no president, and parliament has been paralyzed since 2013.
   
• Many Lebanese seem to believe their system is the least bad option compared with neighbors, but the state’s dysfunction raises doubts about implementing the Lebanese model elsewhere.

Implications for Lebanon and the Region

• For a Lebanon-inspired system to work in other states in the region, significant societal adjustments would be required.
   
• Time and historical experience have largely rendered sectarianism commonplace in Lebanon, and it is now deeply entrenched in the collective ethos and national behavior. Other Arab countries lack this characteristic. Models of centralized states that rely on a unifying definition of national identity for state building are the rule across the region, and the idea of pan-Arabism has traditionally been more attractive than that of states constructed around subnational identities.
   
• There are typically no winners and no vanquished emerging from crises in Lebanon. This has helped Lebanon’s sect-based system survive since the 1940s. This type of culture is missing in many Arab states.
   
• Lebanon’s system held together in the past in large part thanks to an external regulator, Syria. The chaotic state of Lebanon’s system today is to a considerable degree due to the absence of that external force. It is difficult to imagine an outside power could help guarantee peace in other Arab states.

Introduction

The upheavals in the Arab world that began in December 2010 and continue to this day in a number of countries shook the most solid pillars of what had been considered a stable, even immutable, Arab order. Several countries long considered solidly under the control of authoritarian regimes have fragmented, bringing to the fore realities that had largely been beneath the surface. One of these realities was the heterogeneous nature of the social fabric in a number of Arab states, and, therefore, the fragile relationship between this social reality and the states themselves, which were openly challenged in the revolutionary process.

All across the Middle East today the political systems of a number of countries are eroding, and states themselves are unraveling, while their societies are fragmenting, perhaps irremediably. This is particularly true in the Levant, where identity politics have come to predominate, and where, until recently, disparate sectarian, ethnic, and tribal groups coexisted in mosaic-like social environments, for the most part in heavily centralized, strongly nationalistic state systems.

Because of this unraveling, the decadelong process of nation building in a number of mixed states proved to be elusive, despite the strong, even brutal, dynamics that were brought to bear. Instead, substate and subnational identities now increasingly appear to prevail. Their consolidation is, in part at least, a defense mechanism, the answer to perceptions of threat, which are frequently defined and described in sectarian terms. In the past, substate and subnational identities were kept in abeyance in the presence of state apparatuses much more focused on defending a privileged minority clan than on enhancing the public interest.

Today, the broader Sunni-Shia rift, which has had dramatic repercussions in the Levant in particular, is the most visible and explosive of these identity-shaped responses. However, beyond the purely sectarian question (one that takes religion as a determining factor in behavior), the question of minorities—or groups that define and perceive themselves as being marginalized by a dominant community or suppressed by an aggressive minority—is also at play in the Middle East. Identity reformation expresses itself in sectarian terms, as well as in ethnic or even tribal terms, depending on which Arab country is affected. Identity reformation tends to express itself in terms of sect in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or elsewhere in the Levant and in the Gulf—where Sunnis, Shia, Christians, and other minorities often coexist. It tends to do so more in ethnic terms elsewhere—Kurds or Turkmen in northern Syria and Iraq, and Berbers in the Maghreb.

In all these cases, the dynamics of disintegration that have been unleashed will be difficult to reverse without new and inventive means of political reintegration. On the social level, and in cases of civil conflicts or wars, this will entail processes of reconciliation, justice, and the redistribution of resources. On the political level, countries will have to go through structural political change, even political reengineering, to devise new power-sharing formulas that can take the new realities into account and come to grips with them. The challenge ahead, if the Arab world is to emerge from the long night in which it seems to have entered, will be to try to find the proper balance between a more unified national identity and sociological and political pluralism, as a prelude to democracy. Such a balance will be very difficult to attain.

The dynamics of disintegration that have been unleashed in the Arab world will be difficult to reverse without new and inventive means of political reintegration.

Over the course of the past century, since the development of the modern Arab state system, pan-Arab nationalism has developed amid nationalistic political cultures that only partially approximated the ideal of Arab nationalism as well as substate loyalties and allegiances. These loyalties and allegiances were suppressed by authoritarian regimes through mechanisms of state centralization, which aimed to overwhelm and marginalize primordial ties in the state. The process came at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.

Of all the Arab states, only Lebanon pretended to offer a different answer. It crafted an unusual power-sharing and governing system, based on a different definition of identity than in other Arab countries. Lebanon gradually adopted a political system built on sectarian representation, itself influenced by developments during the Ottoman period. This was done as soon as the state of Greater Lebanon was formally established under French authority on September 1, 1920.

Political sectarianism in Lebanon was refined and embraced by the independence movement in November 1943 through what became known as the National Pact, an unwritten agreement that laid the foundations of a sectarian system in the postindependence republic. Surprisingly, the pact survived the civil war of 1975–1990. The conflict began, in part, because of calls to abolish political sectarianism. Yet political sectarianism was reaffirmed and even consolidated in the Taif Agreement of 1989, also known as the Document of National Accord. In that regard Lebanon has the illustrious privilege of having been a pioneer in the creation of a system based on sectarianism and also a laboratory highlighting its dysfunctions and limitations.

Political sectarianism has had its successes as well as its sad and bloody moments of failure and shame. It is worth investigating both extremes and reexamining the origins and history of Lebanese sectarianism, its translation into a political structure, and the dynamics of its unraveling in the period leading up to 1975. The conditions under which the system was resurrected and reshaped after the war and how, nowadays, it is showing its limitations also merit attention. The question of how, or whether, the confessional system can still deal with and adapt to the many structural challenges that it faces again in 2016 can be addressed by focusing on Lebanon. And, given the strong and profound relationship between Syria and Lebanon since the two countries’ inception, the dynamics of the ongoing conflict in Syria, and that country’s disintegration, are weighing most heavily on the future prospects of the Lebanese system.

In light of this, the many flaws in the Lebanese system have become increasingly evident. What is striking in the current regional political context, however, is that because all the experiments elsewhere in creating strong centralized states have failed, some analysts and policymakers are willing to look at the Lebanese system, or experience, in a new way. Their interest lies in determining what can be taken from, or influenced by, Lebanon and applied to mixed Arab countries in deep crisis, and what is to be avoided at all costs. For example, analysts as well as policymakers observing post-2003 Iraq have often referred to an “Iraqi Taif” to govern communal relations in the future—in reference to the Lebanese postwar reconciliation and power distribution agreement. More recently, some attempts to address the mayhem in Syria have led to discussions of adopting some features of Lebanon’s system to bring about an eventual “Syrian Taif.”

Similar calls may involve other countries in the region as the quest for new and more flexible paths to accommodate different identities, integrate societies, and allow for political power sharing become unavoidable. This is why an assessment of Lebanese sectarianism conjures up some lessons that could have relevance for the region. The Lebanese experience may form the basis for a reflection on what may be applied elsewhere, and what, on the contrary, would best be abandoned.

A Muslim-Christian National Pact

Lebanon’s system of political confessionalism (al-taifiyya al-siyasiyya), or political sectarianism, was originally an answer to a sociological and ideological challenge. A sectarian distribution of power had already been adopted under the Ottoman Empire, since the inception of the administrative region of Mount Lebanon during the nineteenth century as the nucleus of modern Lebanon. The governing system that was introduced after the civil war in Mount Lebanon in 1860, the mutasarrifiyya, like the arrangement adopted earlier to end the conflict of 1840, accepted the various religious sects as political actors. In the post-1860 period, and under the authority of a non-Arab Christian Ottoman governor known as the mutasarrif, an administrative council was created in which seats were reserved for the six main religious sects in Mount Lebanon, proportional to their overall numbers.¹

What is notable here is that this post-1860 power-sharing and local governance formula followed a conflict that had pitted the Druze against the Maronites, the two main communities of the semiautonomous Mount Lebanon region. Further tensions later on, not to mention the civil war of 1975, were similarly ended through power-sharing and political rebalancing arrangements, though the pursuit of nonsectarian systems of political accommodation was never attempted.

From a multicommunal society, Lebanon was thus transformed into a multicommunal state system. The sociological reality, a relatively neutral one at the beginning, was used by the founders of the Lebanese polity to become the prime consideration of their political order. To paraphrase the Marxist formula regarding social classes and their formation, the adoption of political sectarianism in Lebanon could be considered similar to the passing from a group (or a community) in itself to a group (or a community) for itself. After that, the culture of political sectarianism became gradually entrenched in the collective consciousness and political practice of Lebanon’s political and social elites.

The culture of political sectarianism became gradually entrenched in the collective consciousness and political practice of Lebanon’s political and social elites.

On the ideological level, political sectarianism indirectly answered a challenge that emerged from the conditions in which the Lebanese entity was born. The formation of Greater Lebanon after 1920 could not be considered—whether by its detractors or partisans—anything more than a French colonial construct undertaken with the active complicity of Maronite elites and on their own behalf. For both the Maronites and the French, while motivated by different reasons, the aim was to provide Christians with a quasi-national homeland in a Muslim-majority Middle East. Maronite elites saw this venture as the crowning moment of a long-maturing project of a Lebanese nation,² in which the ambiguous relationship between Lebanonism and political Maronitism was never resolved.³ For France, in the midst of its growing rivalry with Great Britain, the motive was to satisfy its geopolitical interests. It sought a vanguard in the Levant that would allow France to project its ideology in the region, alongside a policy of minority protection—that of the Christians at the forefront.

Thus, from the outset, Maronite elites had to invent a founding narrative that would supersede and transcend their new state’s very crude raison-d’être. Given Lebanon’s new demographic and sociological makeup, created by the enlargement of the country around a core of Mount Lebanon, a more inclusive discourse was needed to better accommodate the Muslim sects that had been integrated into the new state and that demographically were almost as numerous as the Maronites. In other words, hegemony needed to be transformed into a more commonly accepted national story in order to supersede and absorb the cleavages between the main communities.

Additionally, the plethora of competing narratives and legends surrounding the Lebanese entity and its legitimacy—from the myth of Phoenician ancestry, to the Maronite presence described by France’s King Louis IX as a “rose between two thorns,” to the country as an outpost of the Arab conquest of the Levant—had to be balanced.⁴ The emirate (until 1841), the nucleus of Greater Lebanon that reflected Maronite-Druze joint sovereignty, had already been grounded in the idea of a land of refuge for persecuted communities. This narrative delved into the early history of religious schisms and conflicts in the region, from the original fragmentation of primitive Christian churches to the Arab and Muslim conquest and its repercussions on the Middle East. This was thus seen as a convenient framework to encompass other religious groups, provided its scope was widened and it was granted a universal dimension. Lebanon was therefore to be considered a land of communal coexistence, mainly between Islam and Christianity, and a bridge between the East and the West, between Arab lands and Europe.

A consequence of Lebanon’s national power-sharing pledge was the decision to reserve highly important government positions for particular communities.

Such ideas were precisely what Bechara el-Khoury, Lebanon’s president at the time, and Riad al-Solh, the prime minister, integrated into the National Pact of 1943.⁵ According to Solh’s formulation, the National Pact’s primary aim was to “Lebanonize Lebanese Muslims and to Arabize Lebanon’s Christians.”⁶ In the pact Christians were supposed to renounce alignment with the West (mainly France), while Muslims were to forgo any notion of integrating Lebanon into a larger Arab nation.

With respect to the details of governance and the structure of the independent state, the National Pact put in place what both Khoury and Solh considered a fair distribution of power between the two religious communities, but one that would grant a large margin of superiority to the Christians. Parliamentary representation, based on ratios reflecting communal demographics, was six to five in favor of Christians over Muslims. The same ratio was adopted in the cabinet and in the civil service.

The most fascinating aspect of the National Pact, however, is one that is frequently overlooked, and yet is the most important: the allocation of the three top positions in the state to specific communities. The pact implied that the president of the republic would be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shia. This was never formally stated or spelled out, but it has been left untouched ever since, indicating the strength of the pact and its superiority over rigorously written constitutional texts. Another consequence of this implicit power-sharing pledge was the decision to reserve highly important government positions for particular communities. Maronites were to get the lion’s share, especially in vital sectors of the state. The commander of the army, the heads of military intelligence and the state security services, as well as the governor of the central bank, to name a few, were all Maronites.⁷

Political sectarianism had two sides. On the one hand it allowed disparate groups to come together by providing the Lebanese people with the framework to devise a social contract. On the other hand, power sharing almost necessarily introduced a corrosive machinery for the distribution of spoils. This allowed corruption to become an accepted form of political behavior relatively quickly; over time, it translated into state inefficiency and the paralysis of decisionmaking. More important, and this is the main flaw of the sectarian model, is that reinforcing sectarian identities and providing them with full-fledged political and legal status came at the expense of convergence toward a common identity.

Consociational Democracy and Its Unraveling

By opting for a system based on political sectarianism, the founders of the Lebanese Republic effectively joined the club of so-called consociational democracies, a political model that flourished after World War II. By seeking to establish states on the basis of permanent compromise and consensus, consociationalism was an inventive way of reconciling social heterogeneity with parliamentary democracy.⁸ The political unit was not only the individual but also the group. In Lebanon, religious sects were both political and legal entities, in which the rights of individuals were balanced by the guarantees given to the sects. If the notion of guarantees was mainly dear to the Christians, relating to the fears and threats they perceived in a Muslim-majority Middle East, it gradually expanded over time to encompass almost all other religious groups. Guarantees thus became another word for minority rights, a kind of material and symbolic security mechanism in which a community was assured a place in the sun whatever the changing conditions.

However, consociational democracies must meet certain conditions to function in a lasting way. These include a stable and peaceful regional environment, as well as economic growth with efficient redistributive mechanisms ensuring a socioeconomic balance between the various segments of the polity.⁹

Both conditions, in addition to many others, were cruelly lacking in Lebanon’s case before 1975. Muslim political forces began demanding a greater share in a system they were more or less forced to join. Although aspirations for a unified Arab state prevailed in the Middle East, the idea that individual states were now permanent gained traction over time. If Muslims still doubted the idea of a Lebanese nation, they nevertheless began to accept the state, at least as a livable framework. Hence it became necessary for them to substantially ameliorate the conditions of their participation in this state—displaying precisely the reflexes of citizenship that their Christian partners had long demanded.

Consequently, participation (musharaka) became a rallying cry for Muslim politicians. This was especially true after changes in the system opened up new avenues for fundamental political change in the country.¹⁰ The quest for greater participation emanated from highly conflictual regional dynamics, such as the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of Palestinian militancy, inter-Arab rivalries, and the Cold War and its projections on the Middle Eastern stage. The convergence of these factors was largely the origin of Lebanon’s war in 1975.

Taif’s Rebalancing Act and the Sunni-Shia Question

The Lebanese conflict was not all about political sectarianism, nor was it only about the redistribution of sectarian shares in the political system. Indeed, such issues were largely tackled, and more or less agreed upon, during the early stages of the war, well before the Taif Agreement.¹¹ However, the domestic dimension of the war was very much about sectarianism. When Muslim political forces began contesting the system during the 1960s, it was with the aim of rebalancing powers and prerogatives between Muslims and Christians. By the 1970s this had evolved. On the eve of the war, Muslims were demanding fundamental change and the introduction of a one-person, one-vote democratic system.¹²

Yet by 1989, after multiple rounds of fighting, more than 100,000 deaths, and immeasurable destruction, all that the Taif Agreement did about sectarianism was readjust the old system. With the exception of ties with Syria and Lebanon’s relations with its regional environment, Taif was much more about reorganization than transformation.

The agreement was organized around three guiding principles: the establishment of a new balance between the unity of Lebanon and its political system and the diversity of the country’s political and social structure; the transfer of executive power from the presidency of the republic to the Council of Ministers as a collective body; and the principle of parity between Muslims and Christians in the parliament, the cabinet, and the higher echelons of the civil service, regardless of future demographic developments.¹³ The agreement also called for the establishment of a sectarian-based senate, which guaranteed the say of religious groups by granting them oversight on vital national affairs and matters that referred to the pact, after the deconfessionalization of parliament; introduced administrative decentralization; mentioned revising the civil status law system; and called for the creation of a national committee to discuss the abolition of political sectarianism, though probably with little expectation that it would be implemented. Furthermore, Taif laid the groundwork for privileged relations between Lebanon and Syria, with implications for the two countries’ political environment. Of the three principles, the first two are the most relevant for this discussion of Lebanese sectarianism. However, the third would, arguably, turn out to be the most important.

Taif disseminated and diffused power, making it difficult to locate and exercise. Nor was it clear who was to be held accountable for decisions.

Behind the benign facade of a transfer of executive prerogatives from a once-omnipotent presidency to the Council of Ministers, Taif reorganized constitutional powers and apparatuses. It also put in place an entirely new paradigm for a sectarian balance of power by ending the political and symbolic hegemony exercised by the Maronite establishment. However, the destination of the transferred presidential powers remained unclear. By vesting such powers in the cabinet, where religious parity was a formal guarantee of equality among communities, Taif also disseminated and diffused power, making it difficult to locate and exercise. Nor was it clear who was to be held accountable for decisions. This situation was exacerbated by several provisions of the agreement that were, probably intentionally, left vague and subject to interpretation.

At first sight, the Sunni prime minister appeared to be the main beneficiary of this transfer of power. Nevertheless, other measures were adopted to avoid such an outcome. As the master of cabinet agendas, the prime minister had to draft them with the speaker of parliament. Taif stipulated that the executive and legislative branches were separate but that they “should work in synergy and coordination” to optimize political action. To that was added the fact that the prime minister was to be nominated after obligatory consultations between the president and speaker and the president’s consultations with parliamentary blocs in the presence of the speaker. In the Council of Ministers all important decisions required a two-thirds majority, giving implicit veto power to one of the three larger anticipated blocs of ministers—those of the president, the speaker of parliament, and the prime minister. This was repeatedly true of the Shia ministers, more homogeneously organized and disciplined than the others, held together by the tight alliance between the Amal Movement (a Shia political party created in the 1970s) and Hezbollah, backed by Syria.

So if the Sunni prime minister appeared to some as the new king, the ultimate kingmaker was nevertheless the Shia speaker—at least that is what the experience of Taif’s implementation has shown until now. The speaker has been granted enhanced powers, and the speaker’s term has been extended to correspond with that of parliament, normally four years. The speaker also has been granted extensive control over legislative activity and potentially has major influence over the votes of Shia ministers and parliamentarians.

What has animated political life and reality since the Taif Agreement is the three-tiered interaction among Christians, Sunnis, and Shia.

At best, behind the formal facade of parity between Muslims and Christians, what has really animated political life and reality since the Taif Agreement is the three-tiered interaction among Christians (with the Maronite component gradually melding into the broader Christian community), Sunnis, and Shia. Maronite preeminence was indeed ended by Taif, but it was in turn replaced by the rising and competing preeminence of the two principal Muslim sects, and this happened well before Sunni-Shia polarization came to characterize the Middle East.

Syria as Taif’s First and Ultimate Regulator

Beyond the text, Taif was largely shaped by the way it was implemented after 1990 and how Lebanon was governed, both by its new leaders and Syria, which exercised control—or tutelage—over the country. From the outset, many observers and critics of Taif determined that the shortcomings in the means of governance outlined by the agreement were intentional, for reasons pertaining to Syrian power. The international guarantors of Taif had unanimously accepted that Syria be allowed to impose a de facto protectorate over Lebanon and its political life. Taking full advantage of the leeway it was granted, Syria played a permanent and subtle balancing act between Christians and Muslims in general, between Maronites, Sunnis, and Shia more particularly, and between Sunnis and Shia specifically, initiating many of the tensions that are present today.

More important, Syria’s management of Lebanon was defined exclusively by its own priorities. These were of two sorts: The first was regional, pertaining to Syria’s position on the Middle Eastern chessboard, and its relations with the Arab world and with the West, the United States in particular. The second related to maintaining delicate balances inside Syria, expertly manipulated by then president Hafez al-Assad and increasingly affected by the imperative of ensuring his own succession.

Syria’s tutelage over Lebanon was accepted by the international community in exchange for Damascus’s constructive participation in the peace process with Israel, an outgrowth of the Madrid Conference of 1991. From Syria’s perspective, in line with its first priority, this role allowed it to gain leverage in the negotiations by manipulating the still-open front in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, in which Hezbollah played an important role. At the same time Syria was the overseer and de facto protector of the lucrative reconstruction process in Lebanon, guided by Rafik Hariri, the indispensable prime minister as of 1992. This allocation of roles allowed Syria to award Hariri’s political patron, Saudi Arabia, as well as other Gulf and Sunni-majority Arab states, a stake in stabilizing the country, while at the same time extracting enormous financial profits for its own elite through this protection mechanism.¹⁴

Assad’s highly accurate reading of power relations in Lebanon and the region permitted him to play effectively on both levels. At moments of stalemate or crisis in the negotiations between Syria and Israel, Hezbollah operations in southern Lebanon would all of a sudden escalate, sometimes culminating in mini-wars, leading to rapid intervention by international actors. When, on the contrary, the process was smoother, or when Assad’s relations w