Special Issue Introduction: Consociationalism and the State: Lebanon and Iraq in Comparative Perspective

Introduction

There is little doubt that the various scholars grouped under the banner of consociationalism, taking their lead from the path-breaking work of Arend Lijphart, retain a sizable influence both within Political Science and the policy community. As Dylan O’Driscoll and Irene Costantini argue in their contribution to this special issue (SI), with the upsurge in external intervention that greeted the end of the Cold War, consociational power sharing became “one of the leading mechanisms of conflict mitigation and governance introduced (often by external actors) in deeply divided post-conflict societies within the liberal peace framework.” But, as they go on to argue, this influence has been accompanied by a polarized academic debate, both for and against the veracity of the consociational power sharing approach. Michiel Leezenberg argues in his paper that the use of consociationalism by both academic analysts and policy practitioners has given rise to an accompanying tension between normative and analytical goals, further complicating the debate surrounding the utility and explanatory power of consociationalism, as both a theory within Political Science and as a toolkit for practitioners who have intervened to end violent conflicts.

This SI aims to contribute to the on-going debate surrounding consociationalism by focusing on the academic side of the argument. It has its origins in a series of detailed discussions focused on the explanatory veracity of consociational theory that we began a number of years ago, first at the Lebanese American University in Beirut,¹ then at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar and finally at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The focus of those discussions was very much on the intellectual side of this debate, the relationship between consociational theory, the state and the evolution of political settlements that shaped the state in Lebanon, since the late 1800s, and in Iraq since invasion and regime change in 2003, and their impact on political possibilities. Despite temporal differences, we were both intrigued by the similarities between the two cases, dominated, as they were, by al-nizam al-ta’ifi, a sectarian regime, justified through what Reinoud Leenders has labeled dawlat al-muhasasa, or the allotment state.² We also wanted to better understand the empirical differences between the two case studies and how they may or may not have made an impact on the capabilities of both states. This common interest grew into a joint intellectual project built around three workshops, generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation of New York, through their grant, “Managing Religious Diversity in the Middle East: The Muhasasa Ta’ifia in Iraq 2003–2018.” The first workshop was held remotely in February 2020, during the pandemic, with two in-person workshops then held at LSE’s Middle East Center in July 2021 and March 2022. We would like to recognize and thank the Henry Luce Foundation for funding these workshops, the Middle East Center for hosting them, the workshop participants for their extended contributions and especially Taif Alkhudary for all the time she personally invested in making these workshops so intellectually productive.³

Consociationalism and the state

Following on from our initial discussions, all of the papers published in this SI have, as their intellectual point of departure, consociational theory, first consolidated by Lijphart⁴ and then developed by successive generations of consociational scholars.⁵ As a testament to the intellectual diversity now contained within the consociational approach, the papers have taken a number of different points of departure, and in doing so they have interacted with a range of different consociational scholars. Lijphart, understandably remains a central focus. Bassel Salloukh, in developing his argument about the implicit assumptions consociational theory makes about the state and the centrality of state forms to consociational outcomes, argues that Lijphart’s four original cases all shared long traditions of statehood where state formation and state building proceeded in tandem.⁶ This, he contends, was clearly not the case in either Lebanon or Iraq. Michiel Leezenberg, in his paper, draws attention to the interlinked tensions within Lijphart’s work that lies between the normative and the analytical, with Lijphart’s early work showing the influence of the Cold War. This, Leezenberg argues, gives rise to a second, largely unexplored tension in Lijphart’s work: is liberal democracy a prerequisite for a successful consociational settlement or can consociationalism drive democratization forward? Hannes Baumann, in focusing on the political economy of the Lebanese political settlement, draws attention to Lijphart’s focus on the need for a “low total ‘load’ on the decision-making apparatus” in consociational power sharing,⁷ arguing that consociational theory erroneously conceives of socioeconomic issues and the wider political economic context as external to the functioning of the system and hence to their analysis.

Given that this SI’s focus is on the undertheorized relationship between consociationalism and the state, the majority of the papers examine how various consociational scholars understand the state. Both Dodge and Bogaards make the point that Lijphart himself, across the vast majority of his published work, does not overtly interact with the state, either as a set of institutions, a unit of analysis or a philosophical concept. Baumann argues that later generations of consociational scholars, shaped by a fear of state disintegration, develop a “negative conception of the consociational state as a bulwark against state failure.” In a close reading of Brendan O’Leary’s work, both Salloukh and Dodge identify his focus on “stateness and governability” as a prerequisite for the success of consociational power sharing.⁸ Dodge goes further to argue that in Lijphart’s own work the institutional capacity of the state, bureaucratic, coercive and economic, is assumed to be robust enough to remain functional as its control is divided amongst the different societal elites claiming to represent sub-state communities.

Overall, as Matthijs Bogaards’ paper indicates, the absence of the state or the inconsistent or incoherent role ascribed to it within consociational theory means the state needs to be overtly brought back into a renewed research agenda. A number of the papers do this, interacting with state theory in detail and with approaches to both state formation and state building. Salloukh, utilizing the comparative work of Sebastian Mazzuca and James Mahoney on Latin America,⁹ focuses on 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 later emerged in Lebanon. Focusing on the study of “critical juncture agency,” he argues that the application of a consociational settlement before state consolidation can undermine prospects for state building. Dodge, deploying the state theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Bob Jessop and Michael Mann,¹⁰ sets about developing a model of the disaggregated or polymorphous state to understand how consociational settlements shift the balance of power in the various fields that make up the state, as elites compete for domination. Leezenberg, after critiquing the institutionally oriented approaches of consociational theory, uses the work of Bourdieu and especially Michel Foucault,¹¹ to develop a practice approach that focuses on the competition and conflict between the ruling elites in Iraq, especially the Kurdish region. Under this analytical rubric, consociational settlements and constitutional negotiations become yet another tactic in ongoing struggles for domination. Finally, Baumann, in an attempt to better understand the role of political economy, class and elite pacts, uses the state theory of both Jessop but also Nicos Poulantzas to explain varying periods of state stability and state weakness in Lebanon.¹² All of these papers are united in their recognition of the need to develop a more overt and coherent theory of the state to better understand the varying impacts of consociationalism on political dynamics in Lebanon and Iraq.

Both Taif Alkhudary and Ibrahim Halawi, taking a more sociological approach, investigate another theme in the on-going debates surrounding consociationalism: the role of social identity and its ability to change. They do this by examining the evolution of protest movements attempting to challenge and overthrow consociational settlements in Lebanon and Iraq from 2011 to 2019. In doing so, they both deploy different aspects of Charles Tilly’s work on identity and protest, with the two case studies giving rise to intriguingly different conclusions. Alkhudary critiques consociational analysis for emphasizing the unidirectional hardening of communal identities as a result of conflict. She uses the relational approach of Margaret Somers, as well as Tilly, to examine how social identities can be transformed. Halawi, on the other hand, uses Tilly’s distinction between embedded and disjointed identities to explain the ideational difficulties faced by anti-systemic mobilization in Lebanon. In studying the evolution of Iraq’s protest movement from 2011 to the high point of the Tishreen movement of 2019, Alkhudary identifies a transformation of identities, leading to the “the emergence of a unitary nationalist protest movement, calling for a civic state, captured through the term ‘mawatana’.” Halawi, on the other hand, studying protest movements over the same period in Lebanon, identifies the continued dominance of a “deeply rooted sectarian episteme of politics,” which makes prolonged counter-mobilization along anti-sectarian lines difficult to sustain.

Lebanon and Iraq compared

The different trajectories of the 2011–2019 protest movements in Lebanon and Iraq, identified by Alkhudary and Halawi, raise the comparative issue of the empirical similarities and differences between the two case studies. Salloukh’s paper, in tracing the creation and imposition of Lebanon’s political settlement, identifies the biggest and most sustained difference between the two systems: longevity. Salloukh cites Albert Hourani’s work as identifying the first attempt at dividing political office along sectarian lines as occurring in Mount Lebanon in 1843. This was followed by the “blatant sectarian order imposed by the Règlement Organique” in 1861 and then the French Mandate from 1923 to 1946. The National Pact, cited by Lijphart and numerous others as a classic example of consociationalism,¹³ followed in 1943. Salloukh’s point is that the imposition of a consociational settlement long before the state was consolidated entailed first the construction of “the image of a society composed of internally homogeneous, externally bounded sectarian groups” which, in the postcolonial period, enabled elite state capture and later the predatory capture of postwar state institutions and finances by a new overlapping political, economic, and financial elite. The larger comparative point, made in more detail by Salloukh and his coauthors elsewhere, is that Lebanon’s al-nizam al-ta’ifi, or sectarian regime, and its ensemble of material, institutional, and biopolitical practices has had 180 years to impose what Halawi terms the “sectarian episteme of politics” on its population.¹⁴ The longevity of Iraq’s political settlement is, by contrast, a great deal shorter. The British Mandate in Iraq, from 1920 to 1932, certainly attempted, in a comparable way to French colonial machinations in Mandate Lebanon, to impose ethno-sectarian divisions on the country.¹⁵ However, the ruling strategy of Iraq’s postcolonial elites, especially after 1958, was much less ideationally coherent than in Lebanon, with the political field being heavily contested by various competing ideological groups.¹⁶ Consequently, although Iraq’s political field is currently shaped by an informal consociation, this was only imposed upon its population in the aftermath of regime change in 2003, with the national elections of the 2005 being the first to be fought under its unwritten but rigid norms. In comparison to Lebanon, then, it is the comparatively recent imposition of a consociational system on Iraq that can explain the fluidity of the “sectarian episteme of politics” in the political field and Alkhudary’s identification of a sustained ideational challenge to it in the form of the Tishreen protest movement’s call for a unitary nationalism and a civic state. Iraq’s post-2003 political field, although wracked by extended periods of violence, is still very much contested. Not that there are no similar calls in Lebanon, as the 2019 protests demonstrated clearly. Rather, they remain unorganized, infiltrated by sectarian free-riders, and consequently unable to mount a serious political and epistemic challenge to the sectarian system.

Beyond the major temporal differences between the two systems, there are certainly institutional differences between Lebanon and Iraq’s consociational architectures. However, they both operate, to a large extent, based on unwritten, informal, norms-based rules. Lijphart himself suggested informal rules “generally work better because they are more flexible” and because they could indicate higher levels of trust between the governing elites.¹⁷ In the case of Iraq, Dodge’s paper makes the point that the system is certainly regulated by “a set of powerful, consistently applied, and largely inflexible set of informal consociational rules that were put in place in 2005 and 2006.” The inflexibility of these rules is such that O’Driscoll and Costantini make the point that Iraq’s system is neither as liberal nor as voluntary as the promotors of the constitution, when it was first drafted, claimed. In fact, in a comparable way to Lebanon, a number of its guiding principles follow “corporate consociational principles.”

A second major difference between Lebanon and Iraq’s political settlement is the formal recognition of federalism in Iraq’s 2005 constitution. However, O’Driscoll and Costantini argue that the form of federalism, currently focused on one region, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, “with ambiguous prerogatives and contested responsibilities has hindered governance at the central level and negatively impacted development in the nonfederal governorates.” Debates around the shortcomings of Iraq’s 2005 constitution often focus on its lack of formal consociational institutions to mediate conflict between the different elites and to guarantee minority representation. Leezenberg identifies the constitutional absence of three such institutions: a mutual veto, the right to secession and mechanisms for resolving conflicts between central and regional authorities. However, as he persuasively argues, the example of the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court, which in February 2022, under Judge Faiq Zaydan, began playing an activist role in Iraqi politics, reflects Leezenberg’s central thesis that the drafting of the constitution in 2005 and the role of the Iraqi federal court post-2022, are better understood as fluid fields of elite competition, rather than legal institutions upholding constitutional law and delivering consociational compromise.

Conclusion

There can be little analytical doubt that Lebanon and Iraq’s political settlements have failed. This failure can be judged in terms of keeping the peace, attracting popular legitimacy from the population, delivering goods and services or guaranteeing the coherence and probity of state institutions. Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy are right that context matters, that the need to explain this failure and, more generally, the different functional and socio-political outcomes of different consociational settlements, needs to take into account both how each country has applied consociational principles and what these principles have been applied to politically, sociologically and economically.¹⁸ All of the papers published in this SI offer rich and detailed “thick descriptions” of the two case studies we use, deploying a wide variety of empirical sources to explain the context specific outcomes of the critical junctures that each paper has chosen to examine. However, all of the richly empirical studies gathered in this SI also carefully and in great detail interact with the diverse and flourishing school of consociational studies. In doing so, they have all used the case studies of Lebanon and Iraq to highlight problems of application, intellectual lacunas and unresolved issues that beleaguer the two states shaped by consociationalism. The main oversight that this SI has focused on is how consociational scholars understand the state, both as a philosophical concept, a focus of study and an empirical unit of analysis transformed by consociational settlements. In doing so, we hope to have encouraged the opening of another productive avenue for the further development of consociational studies. Beyond that, our aim is also to place the comparative study of the postcolonial state in the Middle East, of which Lebanon and Iraq are two fascinating examples, at the center of innovative debates in state theory. In so doing, we hope to not only invite more comparative knowledge production on this important topic, but also to explore practical possibilities out of Lebanon and Iraq’s current morass.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toby Dodge

Toby Dodge is a Professor of International Relations in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His publications include Iraq; From War to a New Authoritarianism (2012) and Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and A History Denied (2003). He has published papers in, amongst other journals, The Review of International Studies, Historical Sociology, Nations and Nationalism and The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Bassel F. Salloukh

Bassel F. Salloukh is an 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 Out of which came out the special issue “Challenges to Power-Sharing in the Post-Uprisings Arab World,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (October 2020): 100–68.

2 Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).

3 As well as the contributors to this SI, we would like to thank Melani Cammett, Maria Fantappie, Steven Heydemann, Reinoud Leenders, John Nagle, Aram Nerguizian, Renad Mansour, Joseph Sassoon and especially Allison McCulloch for their participation in and extended contributions to the project through their attendance at one or more of the three project workshops.

4 Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

5 For example: Allison McCulloch, “Consociational Settlements in Deeply Divided Societies: The Liberal-Corporate Distinction,” Democratization 21, no. 3 (2014): 501–18; Soeren Keil and Allison McCulloch, eds., Power-Sharing in Europe: Past Practice, Present Cases, and Future Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Allison McCulloch and John McGarry, eds., Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges (London: Routledge, 2017); John McGarry, “Classical Consociational Theory and Recent Consociational Performance,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (2019): 538–55; John McGarry, “A Consociationalist Response,” Ethnopolitics 19, no. 1 (2020): 100–06; 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, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1–64; and Brendan O’Leary, “Consociation in the Present,” Swiss Political Science Review 25, 4, (2019): 556–74.

6 On the distinction between state formation and state building see Sebastian Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

7 Arend Lijphart, “Consociational Democracy,” World Politics 21, no. 2 (1969): 207–25.

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

9 Mazzuca, Latecomer State Formation; and James Mahoney, “Agency and Nation-State Making in Latin American History,” Latin American Research Review (2022): 1–13, doi:10.1017/lar.2022.81.

10 Pierre Bourdieu, “From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field,” in Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery of Ministry, edited by Loïc Wacquant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 29–54; Pierre Bourdieu, Loic J. D. Wacquant, and Samar Farage, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (1994): 1–18; Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” in States, War and Capitalism, Studies in Political Sociology, edited by John A. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 109–36.

11 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and Michel Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique,” in Dits et écrits, vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 538–54.

12 Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978); and Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

13 Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies; Richard Hrair Dekmejian, “Consociational Democracy in Crisis: The Case of Lebanon,” Comparative Politics 10, no. 2 (January 1978): 251–65; 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 Danna Haffar Mills (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. 1988), 225–39; and Michael C. Hudson, “Trying Again: Power-Sharing in Post-Civil War Lebanon,” International Negotiation 2, no. 1 (1997): 103–22.

14 See 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).

15 See Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2003).

16 See Toby Dodge, “Bourdieu Goes to Baghdad: Explaining Hybrid Political Identities in Iraq,” Historical Sociology 31, no. 1 (March 2018), 25–38.

17 Arend Lijphart, “The Wave of Power-Sharing Democracy,” in The Architecture of Democracy; Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy, edited by Andrew Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54.

18 Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy, “Understanding Power-Sharing Performance: A Lifecycle Approach,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 2 (2020): 109–16; and McCulloch, “Consociational Settlements in Deeply Divided Societies.”