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  • Lebanon’s Contemporary Significance
  • Lucien N. Nedzi (bio)

Attentive readers of Mediterranean Quarterly since its first issue in 1989 will readily recognize some modern issues now found in the current Lebanon crisis, issues that go well beyond the particulars of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. Some of these problems are endemic to the Mediterranean region and its Middle Eastern hinterland, others not. Since Lebanon has monopolized more historical ink than most countries of its size, including coverage in this journal, it may seem more to the point of today's policy dilemmas to focus on current realities.

Over the past seventeen years this quarterly and its parent foundation, Mediterranean Affairs, Inc., have spent some time on certain significant cultural, economic, military, and political problems that have now emerged in the headlines of the latest Lebanon crisis: (1) the appearance after the Second World War of virulent nationalisms that have exploited traditional ethno-religious divisions, especially in the area of relations between the three great monotheistic faiths born in the Mediterranean Basin; (2) the introduction into these divisions of advanced military technologies from the Cold War and its aftermath for both state and nonstate actors, including missile capabilities that mock the idea of secure national boundaries; (3) an imbedding of local economies in a web of international economic regimes, or what is often called "globalization"; and (4) a severe heightening of political anxiety that reflects leadership incompetence at local, national, and international levels, leading to an increased reliance on those who build their power—even ostensibly [End Page 1] conservative power—on the shaky foundations of widespread popular alienation. In other words, readers of Mediterranean Quarterly since 1989 would not be very surprised that Lebanon today seems headed backward into the civil strife it thought it had surmounted after the Taif Accords were implemented in Beirut, under Syrian suzerainty, in the early 1990s. For the sake of understanding Lebanon's contemporary significance, let us briefly review these four problems in light of Lebanese experience, drawing not on this country's uniqueness (as is often done) but on its commonality with other contemporary Mediterranean countries, including its difficult neighbor to the south, Israel.

I

Caught in the down-draft of decolonization at the end of the Second World War and almost immediately thrust into US-Soviet competition in the Arab world, Lebanon was manifestly unprepared for its new independence in such treacherous seas. Its unwritten national covenant of 1943, the basis for a written constitution, was more a political compact between ethnic-religious tribes than a newly emergent, vigorous state, unlike the case of its neighbor, Syria, also freeing itself from French colonial rule. Confronted by three powerful ideologies on its doorstep—Zionism, communism, and pan-Arabism—all of them potentially destructive of its own loosely organized confessional system, Lebanon responded by falling back on the Eisenhower doctrine espoused by the United States, with mixed results. While Washington pushed a vigorous anticommunist agenda in Beirut, complete with heavy Central Intelligence Agency operational coverage, it proved fitful in its defense against pan-Arabism and of absolutely no use in shielding Lebanon from Israel's concept of its own defense.

The 1969 Cairo Accord, under the Arab League's sponsorship, recognized the rights of Palestinians in Lebanon to operate outside Lebanese sovereignty in some areas of the country. After Jordan's civil war of 1970–71 many more Palestinians moved into Lebanon. By the mid-1970s Lebanon was making its first tentative steps into a civil war linked to this Palestianian diaspora, now a prominent part of Lebanese politics, entering a turmoil that would last some fifteen years until the Arab League again appeared, this time acting [End Page 2] as deliverer of the Lebanese from a chaos it had partly inspired in 1969. For more than two decades the central government of Lebanon stood by helplessly as its fellow Arabs and Israel played hegemonic games—still under way today—over the fate not of the Lebanese but of the Palestinians. In the interim, all political factions of importance in Lebanon allied themselves with these outsiders, who came to include the revolutionary Iranians after 1979, and this condition continues until today. The game...

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