The State of Consociationalism in Lebanon

Abstract

Deploying a critical juncture agency approach, this paper undertakes a genealogy of the adoption of consociationalism at colonial state formation in Lebanon to compare different consociational experiences as actually existing processes. It also aims to amplify the effects of variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism on state forms and political trajectories in the original European cases and in postcolonial contexts. Formal consociational arrangements in the European cases emerged after a long process of state formation that overlapped with state building and created substantial cross-pressures at the organizational levels that, in turn, militated for moderation and later de-pillarization. By contrast, in Lebanon, the postcolonial and postwar elite instrumentalized consociationalism to capture state institutions and resources to stymie state building (or rebuilding) and produce (or reproduce) sectarian politics. Unlike the experiences of the classic European states, then, and by capturing the institutions and political economy of the state in the name of power sharing and mutual coexistence as it was being formed during colonial state formation—or rebuilt during the postwar moment—the sectarian political elite denied the state any role in interest group intermediation, thus blocking the very possibility of de-pillarization and de-consociation.

Introduction

Consociational power sharing is one among a number of democratic strategies to manage conflict in divided places.¹ Its main political institutional features to promote peace and stability in divided or postwar places consist of a grand coalition, mutual veto, proportionality, and segmental autonomy.² This power-sharing strategy was first developed empirically from the study of four European cases—Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—all sharing a number of features that distinguished them from other cases on which the strategy was later applied. “The four classical consociations were all divided ideologically, linguistically, or religiously rather than ethnonationally.”³ In other words, and unlike the cases of Bosnia, Iraq, Macedonia, Northern Ireland, and South Tyrol, none of the classic European cases possessed ethnonational groups with self-determination claims⁴—Flemish secessionism is a latter-day development. Nor, with the exception of Austria, did their consociational arrangements emerge after violent conflicts.⁵ More importantly, all four cases share “long traditions of statehood”⁶ where state formation (defined as boundary creation with violence monopolization) and state building (defined as the shift from patrimonialism to bureaucratic administration) proceeded together.⁷ This enabled the state to expand its institutional capacity and play an important role in interest group intermediation and transformation, consequently opening space for future de-pillarization and de-consociation, as is the case at least in Austria and the Netherlands,⁸ “where class and religious cleavages have faded.”⁹

Protracted processes of state formation after industrialization meant that power sharing in the classical European cases was anchored not on ethnic or religious identities, but rather on cross-cutting territorial and ideological divisions and functional organizations.¹⁰ In Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, the presence of more than one non-religious cleavage, and the power of social class divisions, had a moderating effect on politics. Organizational cross-pressures among the Socialist, Liberal, and Christian pillars in Belgium, or the Socialists, Liberals, and Christian Democrats in the Netherlands, “forced the pillars to moderate their positions.”¹¹ Moreover, the Netherlands’ later de-pillarization took place in the context of a welfare state¹² and proceeded from below as a result of the disappearance of social segmentation, rather than the end of elite accommodation. This ultimately gave rise to a permanent dealignment between socioeconomic and religious divisions, while in Belgium a dealignment between class and religious divisions has led to a renewed realignment along linguistic divisions.¹³ Similarly, Switzerland’s power-sharing experience is “the result of both historical continuities and political innovation.”¹⁴ The country’s long process of state formation established territorial and functional organizations, rather than ethnic groups, as the main foundations for power sharing, with cross-cuttingness precluding the emergence of ethnic political parties or an overlap between ethnic groups, regions, or classes.¹⁵

What if the adoption of consociationalism moves in tandem with state formation? How does this shape the “different forms of state”¹⁶ that emerge in these contexts and state building prospects? More broadly, what is the impact of variations in the sequence of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism on state building and the type of postcolonial politics that emerges? This paper undertakes a genealogy of the adoption of consociationalism at colonial state formation in Lebanon to amplify the effects of variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism on state forms and political trajectories in the original European cases and in postcolonial contexts.

Foregrounding alternative processes of state formation underscores the importance of investigating how different state forms interact differently with the institutional features of the consociational package. In contrast to the approach Matthijs Bogaards¹⁷ takes in this special issue to examine how each of the four consociational features shaped the production of state weakness and more specifically corruption, clientelism, and patronage, I make a number of methodological choices to propose an alternative approach that (1) avoids the pitfall of comparing different consociational experiences by analogy rather than as actually existing processes¹⁸ and (2) allows for tracing the impact of consociationalism as an institutional package on the state as it is in the process of being formed. To do this, I suspend the state form into which consociationalism’s institutional features are inserted. This “historicization of the state in its formation”¹⁹ opens up space for a “critical juncture agency” approach that underscores “the role of human choices, ideas, and intentionality”²⁰ in the assembling of consociationalism during state formation, one that stymied state building and produced a sectarian order in postcolonial Lebanon that was later reproduced in the postwar era. This process involved political elites imposing on the new polity the image of a society composed of “internally homogeneous, externally bounded” sectarian groups²¹ to justify consociational power sharing as a pretext for elite capture of state institutions and resources. This genealogy reveals that intentional elite imposition of consociationalism during the state’s foundational years under French colonial rule may not have been without precedence but was certainly not the only available political alternative. Moreover, as approaches underscoring political agency in critical junctures²²—including historical institutionalism²³ and comparative state formation²⁴—insist, these early state formation choices shaped future political outcomes in enduring ways, locking political identification and mobilization into sectarian incentives.

A study of critical junctures at state formation in Lebanon amplifies the effects of variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism on state forms and political trajectories in the original European cases and in postcolonial contexts. In the European cases, the accompaniment of state formation and state building before the formal adoption of consociationalism created a historical trajectory that proceeded from the rise of a form of cross-cuttingness and a politics of accommodation, to the emergence of robust modern bureaucratic institutions, to the adoption of formal power-sharing arrangements anchored on the principle of equal democratic citizenship. By contrast, in Lebanon the adoption of consociationalism at colonial state formation created a reverse trajectory: it entailed constructing an image of a society segmented along closed, monolithic sectarian communities that allowed political elites to instrumentalize consociationalism to enable and justify capture of the postcolonial state, which precluded state building and the emergence of a polity of equal citizens. The effects of this variation in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism may be gleaned from comparing the emergence of consociationalism as actually existing processes in Switzerland and Lebanon. As Mark Farha suggests, “full independence and national consolidation under the aegis of a modern state was attained in Switzerland in 1848 almost exactly one century prior to Lebanese independence”²⁵ This, in turn, gave rise to stark differences in the “institutional form that political alliances”²⁶ between the state and its citizens assumed. In Switzerland, robust cross-regional, multi-ethnic networks of civil society organizations predated the transition to the nation-state²⁷ and the building of modern bureaucratic institutions.²⁸ The liberal elite who came to power after 1848 tapped into these networks to recruit followers and leaders in what became “an inclusive, transethnic power structure.”²⁹ This kind of horizontal state–society institutional form for building political alliances predated any formal power-sharing arrangement between the different ethnolinguistic communities³⁰ and proved instrumental for successful nation building and hence the later amelioration of confessional and ethnolinguistic identities.³¹ By contrast, assembling consociationalism during state formation in Lebanon³² served a vertical clientelist form for building political alliances that stymied state building: mono-sectarian patronage networks that spread within, rather than across, sectarian communities, tying the sectarian political elite to their clients. Variation in this sequencing led to robust state institutional authority in Switzerland compared to Lebanon—best expressed in the former’s “adoption of a transconfessional, civil personal status code”³³ as compared to the latter’s sectarian personal status codes producing biopolitical sectarian subjects.³⁴

Variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism explain why the consociational package enabled possibilities for de-pillarization, institution-building, accountability, intra-ethnic competition, and the abandonment of consociation altogether in some contexts, while in others, it exacerbated existing cleavages, allowed state capture, incentivized systematic corruption, and undermined the rule of law and the coherence and capabilities of state institutions.³⁵ Suspending state forms and tracing the different impacts that consociational arrangements can have on the postcolonial state also avoids the binary choice between outright rejection³⁶ or support³⁷ of the utility of consociational power sharing in postwar contexts. For if, as Allison McCulloch suggests, in “the search for consociational settlements, context matters,”³⁸ then surely the specific state form through which consociationalism’s institutional features must necessarily pass as they incentivize political outcomes is the master context.

This way of examining how different state forms interact with the consociational package also uncovers the implicit assumptions made in the power sharing literature about the state. Brendan O’Leary has argued that “there needs … to be some prospect of ‘stateness’ or ‘governability’ for power sharing to work as a recipe for deeply divided places.”³⁹ But what state forms are we talking about, and what exactly about these state forms that matters most for viable consociational power sharing? O’Leary outlines the elements of stateness, or the lack of it, in a distinction between “functioning” and “failed” states:

Impersonalized institutions that have some degree of centralized and procedurally governed political decision making characterize functioning states. They have coercive capacities to ensure security: they can regulate all instruments of potential public violence and prevent or inhibit their own agents from being predators. They express authentic legal authority over persons, property, and their movements, and are recognized as such entities by their citizens, civil society organizations, and other states. Through self-help or alliances they can defend themselves. Lastly, functioning states are defined by their recognized sovereignty over their territory and its accompanying prerogatives: control over entry and exit of persons and entities. […]

Conversely, failing and failed states are personalized: previously dominated by rulers, a family, clan, or clique, which did not distinguish public from private realms. They have become “kleptocracies,” governments of thieves, before or during the collapses of their regimes. They lack coherent, institutionalized, rule-governed patterns that inhibit predation. The “rulers” are indeed predators. They have usually lost their monopoly on the regulation of coercion and are challenged by guerillas, paramilitaries, terrorists, Mafiosi; they may be invaded, looted, and occupied by other states. They neither make nor enforce law. Those over whom they have failed to rule despise them as much as they fear them.⁴⁰

Moreover, and in an earlier survey of “ethno-national strategies for industrial and industrializing states,” O’Leary’s “state managers” operate within the confines of a particular type of state form: it is one where “within its well-bordered territory the grip of the state, and its extractive and policy-making agencies, is presumptively of equal and uniform capacity.”⁴¹

What if, as this paper suggests, consociationalism becomes a pretext to justify elite capture of state institutions and resources, thus inhibiting the emergence of the stateness and governability O’Leary sets up as preconditions for the success of power sharing? This image of the “functioning state” with “impersonalized institutions” and effective “state managers” who can manage ethnonational differences with an uncontested grip belongs more to the neo-Weberian institutionalist state form with its violence monopoly and extractive and penetrative capacities practiced through a centralized, rational, and autonomous bureaucracy, than the state forms one finds across the Global South, whether during postcolonial or postwar moments.⁴²

Recent research on consociational power sharing has recognized this institutional gap in the original argument. John McGarry revisited Arend Lijphart’s original “facilitative factors and prescriptive institutional pillars”⁴³ for consociational performance. In addition to the aforementioned four political institutional mechanisms, Lijphart considered the size of the state and the presence of a common enemy as other facilitative factors—alongside a tradition of pre-democratic accommodation and a demographic balance of power. McGarry⁴⁴ finds that Lijphart’s original factors for measuring the successful adoption, durability, and stabilizing potential of consociational power sharing cannot explain the later non-classical cases unless three additional dimensions are considered: the external, the security, and the self-determination dimensions. Consequently, consociational performance also hinges on permissive geopolitical factors and non-demographic balances of power as well as the adoption of novel institutional designs to address self-determination claims and the security concerns of the different ethnonational groups.

Although he shifts Lijphart’s focus away from looking at the state as size, or at the political institutional rules that govern consociationalism, incorporating the state’s security arrangements into the menu of institutional pillars conducive for successful consociational performance, McGarry nevertheless does not consider the different state forms in which these new security arrangements operate: whether they are states with functioning, coherent, and autonomous institutions, or postcolonial states with stymied state building and postwar states with institutions that are up for grabs by myriad actors. Consequently, if stateness and those “impersonalized institutions that have some degree of centralized and procedurally governed political decision making” are crucial to power-sharing performance, what happens when consociationalism is instrumentalized to capture the state and its resources and preclude state building? In this special issue and elsewhere, Toby Dodge has shown precisely how the imposition of power sharing in post-2003 Iraq succeeded in binding the ethno-sectarian elite together but only “at the expense of coherent, functioning state institutions.”⁴⁵ In this case, stateness and the state’s pre-invasion institutional capacities were a direct casualty of consociational power sharing.

In the balance of this paper, I retrace how the adoption of consociationalism in Lebanon during state formation under colonial rule entailed intentionally imposing the image of a society segmented chiefly along closed, monolithic sectarian communities while simultaneously erasing other types of divisions. Using a combination of Arabic and Western sources based on archival material, I revisit the critical junctures of colonial state formation to recreate the historical and ideational contexts permitting the imposition of this sectarian reimagining. In turn, consociationalism enabled the capture of the postcolonial state’s institutions and resources by a combination of old and new political economic elites. This stymied state building and privileged sectarian identities over a range of other identities. Former militia leaders and new political economic elites recycled consociational power sharing to capture the postwar state. I use primary data collected from the ledgers of the Ministry of Finance to demonstrate empirically how these elites deployed the political economy of the state to reproduce postwar consociationalism at the expense of stateness and the emergence of alternative political and organizational forms beyond sectarianism. The conclusion spells out the broader implications of my argument to prospects for de-sectarianization, power-sharing debates, and the study of comparative postcolonial state forms.

Justifying consociationalism to capture the postcolonial state

Imposing segmentation on the new polity of Grand Liban created by France in 1920 was a deliberate and incremental process. It had historical precedents but was not inevitable, and it transpired against a backdrop of multiple attempts, in Syria and in Iraq, to underplay ethno-sectarian divisions in a post-Ottoman order.⁴⁶ Albert Hourani locates “the first embodiment of the communal principle,”⁴⁷ or the division of political office along sectarian lines, in the stillborn Double Qa’imaqamates regime established in Mount Lebanon on 1 January 1843, with a northern district administered by a Maronite district governor (qa’immaqam) and a southern district administered by a Druze. It provided for a twelve-member elected council representing the different religious groups to advise and assist the governor of each district. Each council consisted of a deputy to the district governor of the same sect of the latter, plus a judge and a tax-assessor from each of the six different sects that inhabited Mount Lebanon: the Maronites, the Druze, the Greek Orthodox, the Greek Catholics, the Sunni Muslims, and the Shi‘a Muslims—with the Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims sharing the same judge.⁴⁸ Carol Hakim contends that the new regime “formally introduced for the first time the communal factor at the political and institutional levels,” triggering in Mount Lebanon “a developing process of communal crystallization and regrouping,” but one that “unfolded slowly, unevenly, and inconsistently” given that it was “confounded by the many horizontal and vertical social and political divisions”⁴⁹ dotting the socioeconomic landscape. The road from this new regime, and more importantly from the 1861–1914 Mutasarifiya of Mount Lebanon and the blatant sectarian order imposed by the 9 June 1861, Règlement Organique,⁵⁰ to the French-created Grand Liban was not linear⁵¹ however, nor was the new political entity composed of neatly divided monolithic sectarian groups. The former was driven primarily by France’s determination to undermine and isolate any opposition to its mandate in Syria,⁵² the latter the result of a deliberate elite reimagining of the new state and its society as “a multichrome mosaic of monochrome” sectarian “blocs”⁵³ under the guise of consociationalism.⁵⁴

It was during the French mandate years, when the political system was still under construction, that old and new political elites advanced the claim that they represented monolithic sectarian communities to justify the adoption of a consociational arrangement that, in turn, was deployed to control the new state’s institutions and resources. What were often marketed as “inter-sectarian conflicts frequently reflected power struggles between elites for access to state institution and wealth.”⁵⁵ The Maronite political economic elite that emerged under the Mandate used access to state office and resources “to promote their own and their families’ interests.”⁵⁶ But integration into the state apparatus after independence was also used to create buy-in to, and support for, the new entity from the old feudal elite from the Mountain core and the annexed peripheral regions, as well as prominent Sunni families from Beirut, Sidon, and Tripoli. “The success of both old and new elites in strengthening their control over the state evolved partly from French policy and partly from their ability to portray themselves as guardians of their communities’ rights.”⁵⁷ The latter, however, required a substantial degree of social imaging.

As Ussama Makdisi argues, and to create the image of a society segmented along monolithic sectarian lines, “political elites dexterously marshaled an explicit language of the coexistence of ‘communities’ that elided the rights of secular individuals and ignored the brute reality of disparate geographic, class, and gender inequalities within and across communities.”⁵⁸ This was part of a gradual process of engineering “groupness,”⁵⁹ where complex, shifting, and overlapping identities were reimagined as homogenized forms, and entailed presenting internally divided communities as politically and socioeconomically monolithic. The process by which this image of a segmented society was being constructed was organically connected to “the idea of Lebanon as a model of Christian-Muslim symbiosis” promoted by what was then a minority intellectual, professional, and business elite, an image of “a state in which the two religions and the diverse communities would coexist harmoniously within the framework of a liberal, democratic parliamentary system.”⁶⁰ When juxtaposed against earlier, more insular ideas rooted in the Mount Lebanon experience, this very “urban idea of Lebanon,” in Hourani’s haunting description, “was neither of a society closed against the outside world, nor of a unitary society in which smaller communities were dissolved, but something between the two: a plural society in which communities, still different on the level of inherited religious loyalties and intimate family ties, coexisted within a common framework.”⁶¹ Constructing this image of a plural society segmented along closed, monolithic sectarian communities entailed committing illocutionary violence against the lived history and reality of the nascent polity. It involved trampolining over the reality “that the ‘communities’ are not, beyond a certain limit, solid bodies having a single interest or attitude, and the division into religious communities is not the only division which can be made of the population of Lebanon, and in some ways may not be the most significant,” as Hourani⁶² would later insist in a retrospective essay. It was necessary to commit this violence, however, to justify consociational power sharing among sectarian communities, a political strategy used as pretext for elite state capture.

No figure played a more decisive role in this reimagining than the merchant-banker-cum-political theorist Michel Chiha (1891–1954), the rising commercial-financial bourgeoisie’s organic intellectual.⁶³ Chiha theorized the Lebanese as invariably, by history and geography, a collection of “associated sectarian minorities”⁶⁴ whose diversity as segmental groups must be managed perpetually, and who can only be represented indirectly through the medium of their sects.⁶⁵ As Michelle Hartman and Alessandro Olsaretti⁶⁶ conclude from a close contextual survey of Chiha’s writings, and much in the same way as his invention of Lebanon’s imagined Phoenician genealogy served to legitimize “the merchant republic”⁶⁷ and the material interests of the commercial-financial bourgeoisie he represented, Chiha’s obsession with the idea of Lebanon as a refuge for persecuted minorities was part of the repertoire inventing the image of a country for which sectarianism is its singular raison d’être;⁶⁸ it “provided a justification for the confessional system of government and the power-sharing arrangements within it between the elites of different religious groups.”⁶⁹ Nowhere is this more visible than in the manner in which he theorized Parliament’s extremely limited role. Chiha insisted that this country of sectarian minorities cannot “survive politically in the long run without a Parliament that serves”⁷⁰ as a site where elite representatives gather and “affirm the desire to live together.”⁷¹ This Parliament had a specific role, however: a place where elites representing sects and regions gathered to ensure peace and accommodation among groups, not a site for holding the executive accountable to citizens with inalienable rights through their elected representatives.⁷² As Ghassan Tueni would later quip quoting Chiha himself, better “a Parliament where sects meet even if only to fight [among themselves] rather than fighting outside Parliament, in the street, in the shadow of church and mosque.”⁷³ In a political system constructed as a partnership between an ascending Christian commercial-financial bourgeoisie and an established sectarian and regional elite, Parliament’s role was not to represent but to ensure social control at the expense of socioeconomic rights.⁷⁴ In turn, a robust institutional infrastructure was organized to institutionalize and regulate relations between the “associated sectarian minorities,” Lebanon’s new pillars.

The effort to transform what were otherwise fluid and overlapping social formations into reified “solid bodies” or “blocs” was inaugurated with Decree 1307 of 10 March 1922, when the mandatory authority created an elected “thirty-member representative council consisting of sixteen Christians and thirteen Muslims plus one [Protestant] minority” member, thus introducing the 6:5 Christian-to-Muslim confessional ratio to the nascent state.⁷⁵ This approach was confirmed in the 1926 Constitution as the wording of its text consecrated monolithic sectarian communities as the main pillars of Lebanese society. This was a deliberate strategy by the majority of the native drafters of the Constitution, but chiefly Chiha,⁷⁶ to justify the image of the segmented Lebanon they wanted to impose on society.⁷⁷ Moreover, Fawwaz Traboulsi contends that Chiha intentionally repressed transplanting into the 1926 Constitution any clauses from the Constitution of the French Third Republic consecrating the principles of “political and legal equality between citizens.”⁷⁸ Consequently, and under the guise of insisting that “freedom of belief is absolute,” Article 9 proceeds to establish the sinews of the sectarian system: it obliges the state to “pay homage to God Almighty” and to “respect all religions and sects, and guarantee the freedom to exercise all religious rites under its protection, provided these do not disturb public order. It also guarantees for all, irrespective of their sects, the respect of their personal status laws and religious wellbeing.”⁷⁹ The constitutional scholar Edmond Rabbath⁸⁰ considered the expansive opening line of Article 9 a decoy used to insinuate the sectarian system into the text of the Constitution. For alongside Article 10, which guaranteed the right of all sects to possess their own private schools, Article 9 granted sectarian communities substantial non-territorial segmental autonomy in administering their private affairs. It was the infamous Article 95, however, that inscribed political sectarianism across state institutions.

Always in the name of “justice and coexistence” and as a “provisional measure,” Article 95 prescribed “the equitable representation of the sects in public offices and in government formation so long as this does not damage state interest.”⁸¹ Promulgated in part to address the Muslim elite’s apprehensions of Christian domination of state offices under the French mandate,⁸² a result mainly of the latter’s predilection to recruit pliant francophone native cadres,⁸³ Article 95 was the consociational institutional feature that exposed state institutions and resources to elite capture in the name of sectarian proportionality. This was reinforced in the letters exchanged between President Emile Eddé (1936–1941) and the French High Commissioner Count Damien de Martel (1933–1939) on the eve of the signing of the 1936 Franco-Lebanese Treaty. In Annex 6, Eddé pledged that the government will guarantee “equality in civil and political rights among all its citizens, without any discrimination between them,” that “it was also ready to guarantee equitable representation for the country’s different groups in the various state positions,” and that public expenditures shall be “distributed equitably between the different regions.”⁸⁴

The next salvo in the process of creating closed sectarian communities from the nascent state’s otherwise heterogenous socioeconomic and political reality came in the form of a series of decrees formally recognizing “each “community” in matters of personal status, thereby assuring all of Lebanon’s “religious sects” … their right to sovereignty over personal status law.”⁸⁵ Tellingly, this transpired on the morrow of two failed attempts by the French mandatory authorities, in 1924 and 1926, to bring most personal status matters, except those pertaining to marriage, under the jurisdiction of civil rather than religious courts.⁸⁶ This process was inaugurated by Decree 60/LR of 13 March 1936, and followed by Decree 164/LR of 18 November 1938. Although Muslim opposition to Decree 60/LR soon forced the mandatory authority to exclude them from its jurisdiction, the process was completed after independence with Law 18 of 13 January 1955, recognizing the Sunni sect’s autonomy over its own religious, administrative, and fiscal affairs, two laws on 31 July 1962, that did the same for the Druze community, and finally Law 72/67 of 19 December 1967, granting the Shia sect similar prerogatives. As an ensemble, these decrees elevated otherwise constructed sectarian “communities” to the status of autonomous “political entities” or kiyanat siyasiya, as Rabbath deftly noted.⁸⁷ They supplied the biopolitical edifice for the “complete sectarianization”⁸⁸ of the Lebanese peoples and their vivisection into monolithic sectarian communities that formed the “infrastructure”⁸⁹ of the Lebanese state, communities that required perpetual elite management.

The political elite had weaponized sectarianism to construct an image of a segmented society to justify capturing state offices and resources under the guise of managing this diversity through consociationalism. In so doing, they created a problem for which consociationalism was the perfect solution.⁹⁰ Nothing expressed this more than the 1943 National Pact. Couched in the language of compromises and coexistence between what were described as the multiple religious communities from which the Lebanese people are made—or “al-jama‘at al-rohiya al-muta‘adida al-lati yata’alaf minha al-sha‘b al-lubnani,”⁹¹ to use Riad al-Sulh’s words in the manifesto of independent Lebanon’s first cabinet on 7 October 1943—it served to entrench sectarianism as the main incentive structure for political identification and mobilization and justified elite capture and division of state offices and resources in the name of “a balancing of interests between the various communities.”⁹² Chiha’s political philosophy supplied the rhetoric and the imagery⁹³ that cemented the alliance between the old sectarian and regional za‘ims and the ascendent commercial-financial bourgeoisie in the context of Christian, namely Maronite, political preponderance.⁹⁴ The old elite lubricated their clientelist networks through access to state offices and resources while supplying the social control that repressed socioeconomic demands from below and the extreme laissez-faire economic policies from above, both of which served the material interests of the commercial-financial bourgeoisie.⁹⁵ This language of communities was extremely durable, reemerging in the postwar era under the euphemism of al-mukawenat al-wataniya (national entities). It also served to disarticulate class consciousness and mask the material interests binding the political economic elite together. The next section turns to the postwar period, showing how the postwar political economic elite plundered state offices and resources in the name of a recalibrated consociational arrangement. This they did by organizing a postwar political economy aimed at precluding the emergence of alternative political and organizational forms beyond sectarianism, one that undermined prospects for stateness.

Consociationalism and postwar stateness

Writing during the late civil war years, Michael Hudson concluded that both the liberal (1943–1958 and 1970–1975) politics of the za‘im consociational model and the Shihabist (1958–1970) étatist strong-state model, one that was able to engage in state building because it suspended consociationalism,⁹⁶ had failed to achieve that “synthesis of power sharing and power concentration that ideally is what Lebanon needs.”⁹⁷ This double failure was followed by the civil war (1975–1990) non-state model,⁹⁸ that by the mid-1980s witnessed “tafatut al-dawla”⁹⁹ or the utter pulverization of the state and its institutions. What, then, was the impact of the new consociational arrangement on the postwar state?

The 1989 Taif Accord recalibrated the pre-war corporate consociational arrangement in a more balanced direction, in the process rectifying many of the model’s pre-war deviations.¹⁰⁰ The pre-war formal provisos pertaining to non-territorial segmental autonomy and proportionality were retained, with the latter now assuming parity form and extending across the whole public sector even though constitutional Article 95, Section B, limited the sectarian quota to only first-grade (fi’a oula) positions. The informal mutual veto deployed through the threat of boycotts and violence before the Taif constitutional reforms was formalized in theory in Article 65 of the postwar constitution¹⁰¹ and in its preamble: “illegitimate is the authority that negates the covenant of mutual coexistence” or al-‘aysh al-mushtarak.¹⁰² Of course, this “covenant of mutual coexistence” is assumed among sectarian groups, a latter-day incarnation of Chiha’s “desire to live together.” Moreover, the Maronite presidency was stripped of its overwhelming executive prerogatives; these were now deposited in the cabinet in its collective capacity. Consequently, the cabinet’s traditional role as an informal but unbalanced grand coalition was formalized partially, albeit not along overlapping sectarian and political cleavages. Its operations were regulated by the provisos of constitutional Article 65, discovered only after Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon in 2005, giving rise to protracted periods of cabinet formation and many a political ruse to ensure that no political party or coalition of parties controlled the blocking one-third vote. With some exceptions, national unity governments characterized by endemic immobilism became the norm after 2005.

This formalizing of postwar consociationalism exposed state institutions and policies to complete capture by the political economic elite,¹⁰³ enabling them to colonize state institutions and turn them into an archipelago of clientelist networks staffed by their partisans in what emerged as a veritable “allotment state” or dawlat al-muhasasa.¹⁰⁴ Hannes Baumann’s contribution to this special issue explores in detail one aspect of this allotment state: the postwar elite’s accumulation strategy in the form of rent-seeking through privatized waste collection.¹⁰⁵ A consociationalism more aligned with the theory’s institutional prescriptions allowed the postwar elite to escape accountability as their reach extended deep into the state’s bureaucratic, security, and judicial sectors. Herein lies the paradox of post-Taif power sharing: the success of consociationalism “in holding together”¹⁰⁶ postwar Lebanon came at the expense of state coherence and institutional capacities and sound fiscal and monetary policies, resulting ultimately in the collapse of the whole fiscal, monetary, financial, and socioeconomic edifice.

The record of consociational power sharing in Lebanon has also worked to distort alternative modes of political identification¹⁰⁷ and organization.¹⁰⁸ Whether in the pre-war or postwar years, and despite stark economic inequalities and dislocations affecting the poor and disadvantaged, consociational power sharing served to disarticulate class disparities within and across sects.¹⁰⁹ It has done so by incentivizing one kind of politics at the expense of other types: sectarian politics. During the lead up to civil war, the consociational system incentivized sectarian modes of expression even when these operated against the class interests of the most marginalized social groups.¹¹⁰ In the postwar years, the control over fiscal and monetary policies that came with the capture of state institutions allowed the sectarian political elite to assemble a political economy of sectarianism¹¹¹ inside but also outside state institutions that supplied the “material bases of consent”¹¹² for substantial political constituencies. As long as it could be financed through capital inflows and sovereign debt, the aim of this political economy of sectarianism was to preclude the emergence of alternative types of politics and viable oppositional organizational forms.

Part of this process unfolded at the level of fiscal and monetary policies. Table 1 describes the political economy of a total of US$195 billion in government expenditures during the 1993–2017 period. The largest share of government spending, some US$71.7 billion, financed rentier profits through interest payments, mainly to those Lebanese banks heavily exposed to the sovereign debt. This was followed closely by the public sector wage bill at US$63 billion or 32.4 percent of total spending in this period. Electricité du Liban (EDL) transfers (US$22 billion or 11.3 percent) constitute a regressive indirect electricity subsidy, while operating expenses, and transfers to public and private (CSOs) institutions (US$19.6 billion or 10.1 percent) and capital expenses (US$15.2 billion or 7.8 percent) are packed with payments that serve the political economy of clientelism and corruption.

Table 1. Total government spending, 1993–2017.

Sector	US$ billions	Percentage of total (%)
Interest on debt and debt repayments	72.3 (71.7 interest payments)	37.1
Salaries, wages, pensions, compensations, and social benefits	63	32.4
EDL transfers	22	11.3
Operating expenses, and transfers to public and private (CSO) institutions	19.6	10.1
Capital expenses	15.2	7.8
Others	2.9	1.1
Total	195	100

Privately compiled for the author by economic analyst Viviane Akiki, based on the ledgers of the Ministry of Finance, the only official numbers published by the Lebanese state, although their review by the Audit Bureau remains pending. Beirut, June 2021.

If we zoom in on the makeup of government spending on salaries, wages, pensions, compensations, and social benefits for permanent and temporary employees, we can truly appreciate the extent of postwar government spending on sectarian clientelistic recruitment into the public sector. Table 2 unpacks this story empirically.

Table 2. Structure of government spending on salaries and wages.

1993–2017	US$ billions	% of total spending on this sector	% of total government spending
Salaries and wages of permanent employees of public sector and security services	28.4	44.8	14.6
Salaries and wages of temporary public sector employees and consultants	2.9	4.7	1.5
Salaries and wages of municipal employees	1.1	1.8	0.6
Salaries and wages of Lebanese university employees	2.5	4	1.3
Expenses of public officials and other benefits	0.197	0.3	0.1
Total value of salaries and wages	35.2	55.6	18.1
Compensation, offers and social benefits	11.4	18	5.9
Pensions	13.9	21.9	7.1
State contributions to mutual funds	2.9	4.5	1.5
Total expenditure on salaries, wages, retirement pensions and their derivatives	63.4	100	32.5

Privately compiled for the author by Viviane Akiki.

The salaries and wages of permanent and temporary public sector employees—excluding public officials and those in the Lebanese University and the municipalities—account for 90 percent of all salaries and wages, the equivalent of some US$31.4 billion. Whereas the salaries and wages of public sector employees do not exceed one third of that sum, around US$10.4 billion, the salaries of military and security personnel account for two thirds, around US$20 billion. More precisely, the Ministry of Finance estimates that of the US$10.4 billion that constitute the salaries and wages of public sector employees, employees in educational bodies account for 57 percent of that sum, or US$6 billion leaving the remaining US$4.4 billion for permanent, temporary and contractual public sector employees. This is not surprising, however, given that recruitment into the security services and the public educational system served as primary clientelist and job-creating mechanisms for the postwar political elite. Indeed, of a total of around 300,000 fulltime and part-time employees and retirees in the public sector in 2017, some 120,000 were security and military personnel and another 40,000 employees spread across the public educational system.¹¹³ By 2019, the public sector had grown to anywhere between 310,000 and 325,000 members.¹¹⁴

Distorting alternative modes of political identification and organization operated also at the level of civil society. This took the form of neutralizing labor movements and professional associations as sites for oppositional organization¹¹⁵ to disaggregate the working and professional classes and ensure that they did not organize as classes and professional groups. It also involved coopting and intimidating anti-sectarian groups.¹¹⁶ By contrast, those elements of civil society that serve to reproduce sectarian hegemony at the ideological and organizational levels—sectarian parties, schools, scouts, media outlets, and social service providers—operated unhindered,¹¹⁷ sanctioned by consociationalism’s prescriptive institutional technology, namely segmental autonomy. Throughout the postwar years, and until the 2019 collapse, there was a recursive relation between how power sharing enabled the sectarian political elite to control state policies and resources, and this elite’s ability to deploy the political economy of sectarianism and other consociational features to preclude the emergence of alternative politics and viable oppositional organizational forms. Ibrahim Halawi’s contribution to this special issue details how postwar consociationalism operated to limit viable alternatives to sectarian politics even after the collapse of the postwar political economy, despite propitious conditions for such alternatives.¹¹⁸

Conclusion

This paper argued that, far from being a neutral institutional strategy to manage conflict in a deeply divided society, consociationalism may be deliberately deployed by the political elite at critical junctures of state formation to justify the capture of state offices and resources. Suspending the impact of the consociational institutional package on different state forms, it traced how in Lebanon, the construction of the image of a society divided into bounded, monolithic sectarian communities justified the postcolonial adoption of consociationalism to enable elite state capture. Similarly, although it better reflected postwar political and socioeconomic realities, the recycled consociational arrangement of the Taif Accord enabled predatory capture of postwar state institutions and finances by a new overlapping political, economic, and financial elite.

This genealogy of the adoption of power sharing during colonial state formation served to compare different consociational experiences as actually existing processes and amplify the effects of variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism on state forms and political trajectories in the original European cases and in postcolonial contexts. Formal consociational arrangements in the European cases emerged after a long process of state formation that overlapped with state building and created substantial cross-pressures at the organizational levels that, in turn, militated for moderation and later de-pillarization. By contrast, in Lebanon, the postcolonial and postwar elite instrumentalized consociationalism to capture state institutions and resources to stymie state building (or rebuilding) and produce (or reproduce) sectarian politics. Unlike the experiences of the classic European states, then, and by capturing the institutions and political economy of the state in the name of power sharing and mutual coexistence as it was being formed during colonial state formation—or rebuilt during the postwar moment—the sectarian political elite denied the state any role in interest group intermediation, thus blocking the very possibility of de-pillarization and de-consociation. A number of theoretical implications follow from this argument.

This case study speaks directly to ongoing theoretical debates pertaining to prospects for de-sectarianization in the Middle East, or “the contestation of sectarian identities and the re- imagining of the role of sects in political life.”¹¹⁹ In Lebanon, consociationalism as pretext for postcolonial (and postwar) elite state capture entailed imposing an image of a society divided primarily along closed sectarian communities. Albeit historically constructed, this reimagining of the dominant role of sectarian identities is reproduced through an ensemble of material, institutional, and biopolitical practices “that discipline and cultivate sectarian forms of subjectivity.”¹²⁰ Consociational power sharing is at the heart of this ensemble, weaponized by the overlapping political economic and religious elite as a form of counter-revolution to inhibit de-sectarianization.¹²¹ Nowhere is this more evident than in the way the political economic elite used consociationalism as part of a larger repertoire of strategies to contain the aftereffects of the October 2019 protests. Consociationalism shielded them and their cronies and partners both inside and outside state institutions from accountability. By hollowing out political debate and devaluing political contestation in the name of postwar peace and mutual coexistence, consociationalism morphed into “zombie power-sharing”¹²² obstructing all attempts at political economic and financial reform. Consociational theory may not have prescribed this state of affairs, but the present collapse is nevertheless rooted in how the consociational institutional package facilitated state capture and later allowed for the reproduction of a sectarian type of politics, thus turning the outcome of a critical juncture in the country’s foundational moment into an enduring legacy. That the collapse of the postwar political economy is met with demands for building a new state anchored to the ethics of citizenship and accountability¹²³ confirms that there are always alternatives to sectarian identities and to consociationalism, then and now, in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The argument of this paper also carries broader implications to the power-sharing debate beyond Lebanon. It invites a departure from the dominant genre of binary positions that have hitherto dominated debates about the utility of consociational settlements in postwar and so-called divided places. Instead, it suggests that an analysis of consociationalism as actually existing processes sensitive to historical variations in the sequencing of state formation and the adoption of consociationalism helps explain why these settlements proved efficacious in some contexts but not others, and why they precluded state building and stateness in some contexts but not others. This study compared sequence variation between the original European cases and that of postcolonial Lebanon to explore the impact of consociationalism on the kind of postcolonial state and politics that later emerged. Much more comparative research is needed to fully appreciate the effects of this sequence variation on consociational performance and on state forms in other postcolonial contexts and in more recent consociational cases outside the Global South. Otherwise, the present sectarian divide between proponents and opponents of consociational power sharing will persist at the expense of truly historicized comparative explorations that advance knowledge production on this crucial topic.

Finally, a critical junctures agency approach that historicizes the state in its formation de-exceptionalizes the variety of postcolonial state forms that emerged in the Middle East and brings them into dialogue with other experiences in the Global South. This research agenda liberates us from the dominant image of the state inherited from the European model of state formation through imperialism and corrects a blind spot in consociational theorizing. More importantly, it opens new avenues for comparative explorations of the origins and legacies of different postcolonial state forms across the Global South. Such a comparative research agenda is not only important in the search for a new paradigm that makes sense of those ways of living and political organizing uncaptured by the “modern state” paradigm.¹²⁴ Much more importantly, it should also contribute to the search for theoretical and practical solutions out of our shared but deep socioeconomic inequalities and political dislocations.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the journal’s reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of the paper. I also thank Lisa Anderson, Toby Dodge, Ibrahim Halawi, Wadood Hamad, Steven Heydemann, Allison McCulloch, Ammar Shamaileh, and Sean Yom for the different discussions that sharpened my analysis. Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bassel F. Salloukh

Bassel F. Salloukh is Associate Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Professor of Political Science and Head of the Politics and International Relations Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Notes

1 Brendan O’Leary, “The Elements of Right-Sizing and Right-Peopling the State,” in Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, edited by Brendan O’Leary, Ian Lustick, and Tom Callaghy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–73; Brendan O’Leary, “Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places,” in Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places, edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O’Leary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1–64.

2 Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); O’Leary, “Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places”; Allison McCulloch and John McGarry, eds, Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges (London: Routledge, 2017).

3 John McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 538–55, 548.

4 McGarry considers Lebanon a case of “communal contenders” or “ethnic communities that do not make self-determination claims”; McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance” (549, fn 18).

5 McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance.”

6 Andreas Wimmer, “Who Owns the State? Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial Societies,” Nationalism and Nationalism 3, no. 4 (1997): 631–65, 648.

7 Sebastián Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); James Mahoney, “Agency and Nation-State Making in Latin American History,” Latin American Research Review 2022 (2022): 1–13. doi:10.1017/lar.2022.81.

8 Ludger Helms, Marcelo Jenny and David M. Willumsen, “Alpine Troubles: Trajectories of De-Consociationalisation in Austria and Switzerland Compared,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 381–407; Sean Mueller, “The Politics of Compromise: Institutions and Actors of Power-Sharing in Switzerland,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 67–87; Adrian Vatter, Rahel Freiburghaus, and Alexander Arens, “Coming a Long Way: Switzerland’s Transformation from a Majoritarian to a Consensus Democracy (1848–2018),” Democratization 27, no. 6 (2020): 970–89.

9 Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation in the Present,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 556–74, 568.

10 Rudy B. Andeweg, “Consociationalism in the Low Countries: Comparing the Dutch and Belgian Experience,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 408–425; Mueller, “The Politics of Compromise.”

11 Andeweg, “Consociationalism in the Low Countries,” 411.

12 Matthijs Bogaards, “Consociationalism in the Netherlands: Polder Politics and Pillar Talk,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 19–42.

13 Andeweg, “Consociationalism in the Low Countries.”

14 Mueller, “The Politics of Compromise,” 68

15 Ibid.

16 Pinar Bilgin and Adam David Morton, “Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Social Sciences?” Third World Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2002): 55–80, 70.

17 Matthijs Bogaards, “Consociationalism and the State,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023).

18 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 12.

19 Tuong Vu, “Studying the State through State Formation,” World Politics 62, no. 1 (2010): 148–75, 168.

20 Mahoney, “Agency and Nation-State Making in Latin American History,” 13.

21 Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” Archives européennes de sociologie XLIII, no. 2 (2002): 163–89, 164.

22 Mahoney, “Agency and Nation-State Making in Latin American History.”

23 Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 369–404.

24 Vu, “Studying the State through State Formation.”

25 Mark Farha, Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular State under Siege (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 89.

26 Andreas Wimmer, Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 8.

27 Wimmer, Nation Building.

28 Wimmer, “Who Owns the State?”

29 Wimmer, Nation Building, 52.

30 Ibid., 52.

31 Farha, Lebanon, 46–94.

32 Michael C. Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon. Westview Encore Edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi‘ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

33 Farha, Lebanon, 92.

34 Maya Mikdashi, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).

35 Azmi Bishara, “Fi Tatawur al-Dimuqratiya al-Tawafuqiya wa Mula’amatiha Lihal al-Sira‘at al-Ta’ifiya: Namoudhaja Irlanda wa Lubnan,” Siyasat Arabiya 30 (2018): 7–23; Toby Dodge, “Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and its Problems,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 145–52; Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, “Power Sharing and the Rule of Law in the Aftermath of Civil War,” International Studies Quarterly 63 (2019): 641–53; John Hulsey and Soeren Keil, “Power-Sharing and Party Politics in the Western Balkans,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 115–39; Allison McCulloch, “Introduction: Power-Sharing in Europe: From Adoptability to End-Ability,” in Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions, edited by Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1–18; John Nagle, “Consociationalism Is Dead! Long Live Zombie Power‐Sharing!” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 137–44; Bassel F. Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State: The Political Economy of a Very Sectarian Public Sector,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 43–60; Timothy D. Sisk and Christoph Stefes, “Power Sharing as an Interim Step in Peace Building: Lessons from South Africa,” in Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil Wars, edited by Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 293–317.

36 Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild, “Power Sharing as an Impediment to Peace and Democracy,” in Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil Wars, edited by Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 29–50; Bishara, “Fi Tatawur al-Dimuqratiya al-Tawafuqiya wa Mula’amatiha Lihal al-Sira‘at al-Ta’ifiya.”

37 Florian Bieber, “The Balkans: The Promotion of Power Sharing by Outsiders,” in Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places, edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O’Leary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 312–26.

38 Allison McCulloch, “Consociational Settlements in Deeply Divided Societies: The Liberal-Corporate Distinction,” Democratization 21, no. 3 (2014): 501–18, 513.

39 O’Leary “Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places,” 6.

40 Ibid., 6.

41 O’Leary, “The Elements of Right-Sizing and Right-Peopling the State,” 22.

42 Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Philipp Lottholz and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, “Re-Reading Weber, Re-Conceptualizing State-Building: From Neo-Weberian to Post-Weberian Approaches to State, Legitimacy and State-Building,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 29, no. 4 (2016): 1467–85.

43 McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance,” 551.

44 Ibid.

45 Toby Dodge, “The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15, no. 4 (2020): 1–17, 13; Toby Dodge, “Iraq, Consociationalism and the Incoherence of the State,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023).

46 Azmi Bishara, Sectarianism without Sects (London: C. Hurst & C, 2021); Wajih Kawtharani, Al-Itijahat al-Ijtima‘iya wal-Siyasiya fi Jabal Lubnan wal-Mashreq al-Arabi: Min al-Mutasarifiya al-Othmaniya ila Dawlat Lubnan al-Kabir (Beirut: Manshorat Bahson al-Thaqafiya, 1986); Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Elizabeth F. Thompson, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Arab Congress of 1920, the Destruction of the Syrian State, and the Rise of Anti-Liberal Islamism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020).

47 Albert Hourani, “Lebanon: The Development of a Political Society,” in Politics in Lebanon, edited by Leonard Binder (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966), 13–29, 22.

48 Iliya F. Harik, Politics and Change in a Traditional Society: Lebanon, 1711–1845 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 272; Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

49 Carol Hakim, The Origins of the Lebanese Idea: 1840–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 52.

50 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence.

51 Hakim, The Origins of the Lebanese Idea; Kawtharani, Wajih, Al-Itijahat al-Ijtima‘iya wal-Siyasiya fi Jabal Lubnan wal-Mashreq al-Arabi: Min al-Mutasarifiya al-Othmaniya ila Dawlat Lubnan al-Kabir (Beirut: Manshorat Bahson al-Thaqafiya, 1986); Makdisi, Age of Coexistence.

52 Hakim, The Origins of the Lebanese Idea, 260.

53 Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups”; Bishara, Sectarianism without Sects.

54 Mahdi ‘Amel, Fi-l-Dawla al-Ta’ifiya (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1988).

55 Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood 1926–1939 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 245.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, 131.

59 Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups.”

60 Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, 244.

61 Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 175.

62 Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, 171.

63 Michelle Hartman and Alessandro Olsaretti, “‘The First Boat and the First Oar’: Inventions of Lebanon in the Writings of Michel Chiha,” Radical History Review 86 (Spring, 2003): 37–65; Makdisi, Age of Coexistence; Fawwaz Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel: Michel Chiha wal-Idiologia al-Lubnaniya (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes lil-Kutub wal-Nashr, 1999).

64 Michel Chiha, Lubnan al-Yawm (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr wa Mu’asasat Chiha, 1994), 68 and 75.

65 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 203 and 213.

66 Hartman and Olsaretti, “The First Boat and the First Oar.”

67 Carolyn L. Gates, The Merchant Republic of Lebanon: Rise of an Open Economy (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies & I.B. Tauris, 1998).

68 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 179.

69 Hartman and Olsaretti, “The First Boat and the First Oar,” 56.

70 Chiha, Lubnan al-Yawm, 68.

71 Ibid., 73.

72 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 201–4.

73 Chiha, Lubnan al-Yawm, 20.

74 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 210–3.

75 Farha, Lebanon, 148.

76 Ibid., 150; Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 24.

77 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, 134–13; Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 207–9.

78 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 201.

79 Shafiq Jeha, Al-Dustur al-Lubnani: Tarikhuhu, Ta‘dilatuhu, Nasuhu al-Hali, 1926–1991 (Beirut: Dar al-‘Elm lil-Malayin, 1991), 39.

80 Edmond Rabbath, Al-Takwin al-Tarikhi li-Lubnan al-Siyasi wal-Dusturi. 2 vols (Beirut: Manshurat al-Jami‘a al-Lubnaniya, 2002), 162.

81 Jeha, Al-Dustur al-Lubnani, 95; Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, 136–7.

82 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, 138; Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon, 212.

83 Rabbath, Al-Takwin al-Tarikhi li-Lubnan al-Siyasi wal-Dusturi, 868.

84 Ibid., 673.

85 Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism, 110.

86 Rabbath, Al-Takwin al-Tarikhi li-Lubnan al-Siyasi wal-Dusturi.

87 Ibid., 181.

88 Ibid., 194.

89 Ibid., 215.

90 Rudy B. Andeweg, “Consociational Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 3 (2000): 509–36.

91 Jean Malha, Al-Wazarat al-Lubnaniya wa Bayanatiha: 1943–1994 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1995), 17.

92 Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, 171.

93 Hartman and Olsaretti, “The First Boat and the First Oar.”

94 Traboulsi, Silat Bila Wasel, 191.

95 Ibid., 210–3.

96 Nqoula Nassif, Jumhuriyat Fuad Shihab (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2008).

97 Michael C. Hudson, “The Problem of Authoritative Power in Lebanese Politics: Why Consociationalism Failed,” in Lebanon: A History of Conflict and Consensus, edited by Nadim Shehadi and Dana Haffar Mills (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies & I.B. Tauris, 1988), 224–39, 237.

98 Ibid., 237.

99 Kamal Hamdan, Al-Azma al-Lubnaniya: Al-Tawa’ef, al-Tabaqat al-Ijtima‘iya wa-l-Hawiya al-Wataniya (Beirut: Dal al-Farabi, 1998), 250–2.

100 Hudson, “The Problem of Authoritative Power in Lebanese Politics.”

101 Matthijs Bogaards, “Formal and Informal Consociational Institutions: A Comparison of the National Pact and the Taif Agreement in Lebanon,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 27–42.

102 Jeha, Al-Dustur al-Lubnani, 34.

103 Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-building in Postwar Lebanon (New York: Cornell University Press, 2012); Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State”; World Bank, “Lebanon - Promoting Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity: Systematic Country Diagnostic,” http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/951911467995104328/Lebanon-Promoting-poverty-reduction-and-shared-prosperity-systematic-country-diagnostic (accessed February 13, 2015).

104 Leenders, Spoils of Truce, 232.

105 Hannes Baumann, “Bringing the State and Political Economy Back In: Consociationalism and Crisis in Lebanon” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023).

106 McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance,” 552.

107 Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab, and Shoghig Mikaelian, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

108 Ibrahim Halawi and Bassel F. Salloukh, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will after the 17 October Protests in Lebanon,” Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 3 (2020): 322–34.

109 Kamal Hani, Al-Yasar al-Lubnani fi Zaman al-Tahawulat al-‘Asefa: Al-Hizb al-Shuyu‘i: Tafaqum lil-Azma … Am Infitah ‘ala al-Taghyir (Beirut: Dal al-Farabi, 2015).

110 Hamdan, Al-Azma al-Lubnaniya, 136; Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2007); Fawwaz Traboulsi, Al-Tabaqat al-Ijtima‘iya fi Lubnan: Ithbat Wujood (Beirut: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2014).

111 Hannes Baumann, “Social Protest and the Political Economy of Sectarianism in Lebanon,” Global Discourse 6, no. 4 (2016): 634–49; Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State.”

112 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 133–69.

113 Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State,” 46.

114 “106% min Dakhl al-Dawla lil-Rawateb wal-Ujur wa Khidmat al-Dayn,” Monthly Magazine, December 30, 2019.

115 Baumann, “Social Protest and the Political Economy of Sectarianism in Lebanon”; Salloukh, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon.

116 Janine Clark and Bassel F. Salloukh, “Elite Strategies, Civil Society, and Sectarian Identities in Postwar Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 4 (November 2013): 731–49; Carmen Geha, “Co-optation, Counter-Narratives, and Repression: Protesting Lebanon’s Sectarian Power-Sharing Regime,” Middle East Journal 73, no. 1 (2019): 9–28.

117 Melani Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi’ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

118 Ibrahim Halawi, “Lebanon’s Political Opposition in Search of Identity: He Who Has No Sect Among You Cast the First Stone,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2023).

119 Simon Mabon, “Four Questions about De-sectarianization,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs 18, no. 1 (2020): 1–11, 3.

120 John Nagle, “Social Theory: Michel Foucault,” SEPAD Interventions, 2022. https://www.sepad.org.uk/announcement/social-theory-michel-foucault.

121 Ibrahim Halawi, “Consociational Power‐Sharing in the Arab World as Counter‐Revolution,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 128–36.

122 Nagle, “Consociationalism is Dead!”

123 Charbel Nahas, An Economy and a State for Lebanon (Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2020).

124 Lisa Anderson, “‘Creative Destruction’: States, Identities and Legitimacy in the Arab World,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40, no. 4–5 (2014): 369–79.