Mount Lebanon is a region that makes up the core of the modern country of Lebanon. For a map, see: [https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2023/01/take-me-back-to-mount-lebanon.html]
Historically, Mount Lebanon has always been inhabited by members of the Druze sect (an offshoot of Shiite Islam; about 20%) and the Maronite sect (an Eastern Catholic denomination; about 80%).
Geographically it comprises the central Lebanon mountain chain, surrounded by the Mediterranean to the west, the Syrian Beqaa Valley and the Eastern Anti-Lebanon mountain chain to the east, the Syrian districts of Akkar and Hermel in the north, and the Syrian district of Jabal Amel to the south. Today's Greater Lebanon (10,452 Km2) was cobbled together in 1920 by annexing the Syrian districts mentioned above as well as the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre to the Mount Lebanon Governorate (3,200 Km2).
Politically, Mount Lebanon began its drive for independence from the Ottoman Turks as early as the mid 1500s with Prince or Emir Fakhreddine II Maan, a Druze lord who challenged Turkish rule and managed to assert his sovereignty over a large swath of the Near East, from Aleppo (Halab) in the north to Acre (Acca) in the south. That was the nucleus around which the idea of an independent Druze-Maronite entity crystallized.
In the early 1800s, following the French and American revolutions, a first wave of decolonization began: Haiti separated from the French. Latin American colonies shrugged off Spanish rule. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt sowed the seeds of anti-Ottoman occupation sentiment, and Greece, Egypt and Lebanon freed themselves from Ottoman Turkish rule.
When the existential problems facing today's Greater Lebanon since the 1975 Syrian-Palestinian War are debated today, many Lebanese lazily shrug off the idea of a return to the smaller Mount Lebanon even if today's Greater Lebanon inflicted on them nightmarish lives in endless wars and displacement. Perhaps they fear that reaching that objective demands further sacrifices and torment. Moreover, they see Lebanon (10,452 Km2) as an already very small country, so it is difficult for them to accept an even smaller country of Mount Lebanon (3,200 Km2) after slicing off the former Syrian territories.
Yet, we have many examples of smaller nations coexisting next to large countries, with their sovereignty and independence recognized by the international community. When the Maronite Church lobbied the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to enlarge the existing autonomous Governorate (Mutassarifiya in Turkish) of Mount Lebanon, it was driven by two arguments:
1 - An ideological one with two subtexts:
a) to restore the Phoenician identity of Lebanon that had been uprooted first by the Roman, then Christian occupations, then Islamized for several centuries by successive Arab, Mameluke, Egyptian and Ottoman occupations. The Maronite Church used the Fakhreddine precedent to argue that Lebanon's "natural borders" included the ancient Phoenician cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Tyre and Sidon, and therefore must be re-attached to Mount Lebanon.
b) to create a homeland for the Christians in the Near East. In fact, the Zionists used the Lebanese Christian case of the 1860s to begin thinking in the 1890s for a similar Jewish homeland somewhere around the world. The Zionists' first options were for a homeland in Africa and Latin America, but Palestine was later adopted because of the convergence of Jewish European wealth with the needs of the British Empire that had a mandate over Palestine. In a similar vein, Staline created in the Russian Far East a Jewish Autonomous Republic (Oblast) called Birobidzhan in 1934 to serve as a Jewish homeland inside Soviet Russia.
2 - An economic argument:
The Mount Lebanon Governorate had suffered severe famine during WWI, and therefore an enlargement was necessary to include rich agricultural districts like the Akkar and the Bekaa and make the new independent Lebanon self-sufficient. But the technologies and globalization of the 20th century have rendered this second argument moot.
To those skeptical Lebanese who think that a return to a smaller, demographically more homogeneous and independent Mount Lebanon is not feasible, please consider the following: There are European countries, not all members of the European Union but with special agreements with it, that are smaller than Mount Lebanon, are sovereign and recognized by the international community, and are economically successful.
In comparison with Mount Lebanon's 3,200 Km2:
Monaco - 2 Km2
San Marino - 61 Km2
Lichtenstein - 160 Km2
Malta - 316 Km2
Andorra - 468 Km2
Luxembourg - 2,595 Km2
Of course, there are many others around the world, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as small Arab Gulf countries like Kuwait and Qatar. So a smaller independent Mount Lebanon Republic would not be such an anomaly on the world stage, as long as larger, domineering colonialist countries with Fascist ideologies (China, Syria, Iraq...) leave them alone.
The skeptics also argue that by creating a Mount Lebanon Republic with a reduced surface area, Christian minority villages would be left stranded inside the Muslim regions (likely to be recovered by Syria in such a case), and Muslim villages would be left inside the largely Christian Mount Lebanon. True, but there are solutions to these situations. For one, history has shown us that population exchanges, though harsh and inhumane, have occurred and led to relatively greater stability (e.g. India-Pakistan) in contrast to the endless civil wars and massacres that preceded for example the division of colonial India into the India and Pakistan of today. Second, there are legal mechanisms that can be mutually implemented to protect those minorities: Christian villages remaining inside a Muslim-majority entity will be protected and balanced by the existence of Muslim villages that remain inside a Christian-majority entity.
Consider such diverse nations like Switzerland which is a confederation of several linguistic communities (cantons) that are not entirely segregated. There are German speakers in Italian majority cantons, just as there are French speakers inside German-majority cantons, and so on and so forth. These linguistic minorities are all protected under the law and retain significant rights.
A smaller Mount Lebanon Republic can, in theory and when political maturity - currently non-existent in much of the Near East - is reached, later federate with other countries into larger political entities similar to the Swiss Confederation or even to the European Union. Recall the off-the-cuff haphazard union (United Arab Republic) that Abdel Nasser's Egypt made with Syria in the 1950s? It was a monumental failure that lasted a few months because it did not respect each country's character and was a top-down imposition by autocratic rulers on their people. Genuine viable federations can only be achieved from the bottom up, from the voluntary joining together of otherwise sovereign entities.
In conclusion, there are no real obstacles to the creation of a smaller Mount Lebanon Republic with a more homogeneous population, a viable economy, and a peaceful existence. Two young countries come to mind that were created in recent years by breaking up their original country into two entities: Kosovo was created by slicing off the Muslim-Albanese territory from Christian-Slavic Serbia, and South Sudan whose Christian-Nubian territory was separated from Muslim-Arab Sudan. An independent Christian Mount Lebanon entity - which did already exist as an autonomous sanjak within the Ottoman empire prior to WWI - can very well be re-created by separating the central mountain with its Christian Lebanese majority from the peripheral Muslim Arab territories that were formerly Syrian.
The preceding 100 years of the Greater Lebanon monstrosity have not seen a single decade of peace between Lebanon's Muslims and Christians. The country continues to ricochet from one crisis to another, from one civil war to another, from one foreign occupation to another, with no end in sight. The massive waves of emigration resulting from these incessant crises and wars have radically eroded the demographics of the country to the point that the Christians of Lebanon, the last significant free Christian community in the East, are on the verge of disappearing after 1,600 years of existence. There are larger Christian communities elsewhere in the region, but they have either disappeared (Iraq) or are subjugated as Dhimmi or second-class citizenry (Syria, Egypt...).
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