Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (review)

Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon. By Elizabeth Thompson (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) 402 pp. $49.50 cloth $17.50 paper.

Syria and Lebanon were established as distinct political entities by the peace settlement at the end of World War I. Thompson studies the processes by which national polities were created in the two countries in the context of the ensuing French colonial rule. This analysis utilizes a multidimensional approach examining class, gender, and religion as factors in the creation of civic order. The result is a volume that is filled with specific information but, at the same time, never loses sight of the primary subject, the construction of citizenship and civic order in the context of colonial rule.

Thompson defines the book as "a study of how states and their citizens are constructed under colonialism and then bequeathed to their postcolonial successors" (1). This state construction is viewed as a process of interaction among the colonial rulers, local elites, and subaltern elements within the society. While these groupings competed with each other, they also combined in power coalitions in the process of defining "citizens." Thompson uses "gender as a primary analytical tool to integrate the many levels of political experience that shaped the colonial civic order" (3). For Thompson, this approach provides a view of "the subterranean structures of power" because "gender hierarchy was a pillar of colonial paternalism, wherein the French and indigenous elites bargained to maintain hierarchies of privilege" (3).

Part 1 examines the "crisis of paternity" created by the traumas of World War I and the imposition of French rule. Conscription, famine, and later the establishment of French rule had undermined male authority. However, by the 1930s, local elites and the French created an unstable compromise that maintained paternalistic social hierarchies. Parts 2 and 3 describe the emergence of nonelite resistance to this colonial civic order, the major forces being labor movements, women's movements, and movements of Islamic populism. In the shifting relationships among the subaltern factions, women's causes tended to be sacrificed. Parts 4 and 5 deal with the emergent "colonial welfare state" and the nature of the gendered urban landscape. Thompson provides a remarkable portrait of the society, with chapters on the urban landscape itself and street violence, the cinema--both as a public entertainment space and content, and the press as a special kind of public forum. In the end, the postcolonial state duplicated the main lines of the colonial one. The paternalistic elite nationalists maintained "the inequities of the colonial civic order" and thus "assured the perpetuation of the gendered national pacts that subordinated women in the civic order" (272).

Thompson utilizes a wide range of theoretical frameworks in her analysis. Her discussions of "public space" reflect the impact of Habermas.¹ She correctly notes the point at which she goes beyond his distinction between "private" and "public" because of the blurring of the line between state and society in Syria and Lebanon (173). However, Thompson tends not to make use of the scholarship dealing with social movements, even though it could provide an important basis for analytical comparison. There is, for example, a substantial literature explaining why women's suffrage movements have succeeded and failed, including works like Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail (Princeton, 1996).

The strength of Thompson's analysis is the broad conceptualization of the civic order. However, her conceptualization remains rooted in the Middle Eastern experience. It will be important to develop her important insights in a more global and comparative way, because, as she hints in her conclusion, her detailed study has direct relevance for understanding the full spectrum of postcolonial experiences during the second half of the twentieth century.

John Voll
Georgetown University

Note

1. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas (trans. Thomas Burger), The Structural Transformation of...