Which Lebanon do you Want?

Since 1920 when Greater Lebanon was established as an independent sovereign country, it has operated under a centralized system of government. Because of the religious and sectarian diversity of the society, a tradition of power distribution between the constituent sects evolved and later became a constitutional requirement.

Unfortunately, this system has by and large failed because once you endow a representative of one sect (e.g. Maronite Catholic) with the executive authority of the president, the other sects holding the legislative power (e.g. Shiite Muslim) or the executive authority of a Prime Minister (Sunni Muslim) try to score advantages by undermining the president, especially during unstable times (e.g. Palestinian refugee influx, Syrian refugee influx, regional instability in Israel or Egypt or Syria, etc.).

In essence, there is no national imperative in Lebanon that overrules sectarian imperatives, and the Maronites, who were the founders of Greater Lebanon, see themselves under constant challenge and threat by the Muslim sects. One ought to remember that the Maronites had their own autonomous Mount Lebanon District free of direct Ottoman Turkish rule between roughly 1840 and 1918 and enjoyed an 80% majority. The Muslim regions (Akkar, Hermel, Bekaa, Jabal Amel) and the Muslim cities (Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon and Tyre) originally rejected the idea of joining Greater Lebanon in 1920 and wanted instead to remain part of Syria. But the dominance of the Maronites and their strenuous lobbying at the 1919 Paris Conference forced the attachment of these Syrian Muslim regions to the new and enlarged Greater Lebanon.

It therefore seems that the Muslims never really accepted the idea of modern Lebanon, even though the Maronites ceded major positions of authority (legislative and executive) to the Muslims. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, the Muslims by and large rose up against the established system agreed to in 1920. For example, a mini-civil war erupted in 1958 when the Sunnis, backed by Arab nationalist Abdel-Nasser of Egypt, challenged the Maronite President. Then in 1961, a Syria-affiliated party (the SSNP, Syrian Social Nationalist Party) mounted a failed coup d'etat. Again, when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded by Yasser Arafat in 1965 and established its headquarters in Beirut in 1970, the Sunnis used the military capabilities of the Palestinians to challenge the Maronites in the 1975 War, leading to the 1989 Taif Agreement in which the Maronite President lost most of his authority to the advantage of the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister. Finally, the Shiites (Hezbollah and the Amal Movement) are nowadays inspired and funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran to challenge the new status quo and appear to be aiming to seize power and push both the Maronites and the Sunnis into second status.

What next for Lebanon? Is there a form or system of government that can accommodate the sectarian divisions of the country while at the same time ensuring some long-term stability, instead of ricocheting from one crisis to another? Discussions these days have reached a crescendo, with the Maronites sick and tired of the continuous challenges raised by the Muslims. If the Muslims want Lebanon to become a strictly Muslim country lording it over the Christians as a "tolerated" (Dhimmi) minority, you can rest assured that the Maronites will not agree and will do everything in their power to make that option impossible. The Maronites are finally beginning to take stock of the huge mistake the Maronite Church made in 1920 with the creation of Greater Lebanon, and options they are considering range from another form of accommodation with the Muslims to a pure and simple separation that would require the partition of the country and a return to the smaller and predominantly Christian Mount Lebanon.

The Maronite Patriarch is calling for an internationally-sponsored neutrality of Lebanon with the Swiss model in mind (and without calling for a change in the system), hoping that neutrality would put a distance between the country and the centripetal regional forces that keep tempting the Muslims and dislocating the country. I fear that the Patriarch and his Church are, again, improvising, without an ounce of strategic thinking. Just as they insisted in 1920 on an enlarged Lebanon where they, the Christians, became a minority, this idea of neutrality is as stupid as the Bronze Age biblical texts on which much of the monotheistic fiction and its devastating consequences are based.  To declare you want neutrality is not sufficient, because you would need the Muslims' consent to it, a very unlikely scenario. Neutrality is not part of the Muslim codex, for Islam - just like Judaism - divides the world into us versus them (Dar al-Islam vs. Dar Al-Harb, or Land of Islam vs. Land of war; In Judaism, it is Jews vs. Gentiles).  As far as I know, there are no self-declared neutral Muslim countries anywhere in the world, just as Israel as a "Jewish-only" state can never by definition be neutral. Islam, like Judaism, appear to be intrinsically counter to the idea of separating religion from political authority, an idea which neutrality takes to another height because it implies a dissociation of Lebanese Muslims from other Muslim "causes" (e.g. the Palestinian Cause) to which they are constantly drawn.

Below is a list of the systems of government to which countries with inborn diversity resort in order to manage their lives with reasonable stability and success. Lebanon today functions with a centralized system where all sects must be represented by convoluted and inefficient mechanisms in which unqualified people of the right sect are assigned their positions. As you witness the death of the diverse Greater Lebanon, what system of government do you think works best to reach a point where life can become normal again in a Lebanon that has been in constant torment since it was born in 1920?

Centralized System: A form of government in which both executive and legislative power are concentrated in a central authority (a person, a government) and are not distributed to local or regional authorities. In a national context, centralization occurs with the granting of power to a unitary sovereign nation state. Example: France, Lebanon.

Decentralization: The act of removing specific functions of government from the immediate control of the central authority and delegating them to local branches or governments. This is one of the most debated options for Lebanon, with a preference by Muslims to limit it to "administrative decentralization", while the Christians call for a broader form of decentralization that includes financial and even military aspects.

Federation: Two or more "states" or "provinces" relinquish their own sovereignty to the advantage of the federal government. In a federation, membership of the constituent states is not voluntary, i.e. a state or province cannot secede at will from the federation. Examples: Germany, the United States.

Confederation: Two or more "states" or "provinces" come together voluntarily, but without ceding their individual sovereignty. A confederation may be viewed as the union by compact or treaty of states or provinces that creates a central government with limited powers; the constituent entities retain supreme authority over all matters except those delegated to the central government. Example: Switzerland

Cantonization: It is not a form of government, it is simply the division of a territory into smaller units called cantons. Once the cantons are formed within a territory, they still have to decide whether to remain sovereign and separate, or become a federation or a confederation.

Autonomous regions: An autonomous region is neither independent nor sovereign, but it has control over some of its affairs and has the freedom to make decisions independent of the government of the larger political entity to which it belongs. Autonomous regions are sections of a nation that have a degree of independence in making decisions pertaining to specific local issues. (See: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/121-autonomous-regions-in-40-countries/1563764 for a list of such regions around the world).

Partition: Division of a sovereign country or nation into two or more separate sovereign countries or nations. Example: India and Pakistan were born out of the partition of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent in 1947.

Unique cases that do not fall into the above categories: The United Kingdom. Though a union between Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland, the UK is not easily classified into any of the categories above. It is neither a federation, nor a confederation, and is not a centralized state since each of the member countries has its own parliament and institutions.