Lebanon's Predicament (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 293 to home conspired to give the United States the upper hand in Haiti. The strategy utterly collapsed in 1915 as Admiral Caperton landed his marines in Port au Prince. Her analysis of Haitian and European sources allows Plummer to question the basic premise of U.S. expansion of this era: what is called "protective imperialism" was not, in fact, a defensive response to a heightened European threat. On the contrary, it was an offensive response to reduced European threat. This is the level of analysis that eludes Healy. Plummer's sympathy for the Haitians is unstinting. Her determination to show us logic and purpose where others found only chaos is provocative: it makes us rethink what we know about Haiti. It is also provocative, however, in a negative sense: the stridency of Plummer's voice can be irritating. Her case for the Haitians would have been more persuasive had she argued it less insistently. This is an impressive and an important study, but it is not unflawed. It began its life as a dissertation ("Black and White in the Caribbean," Cornell University, 1981) and in its painful metamorphosis into a book, it has lost its happy lucidity. It has been fed through the mangle of political theory, and it is at times opaque to the point of incoherence. Furthermore, her assertions are occasionally inadequately supported, despite her extensive footnotes. Thus, for example, she claims that Robert Lansing formulated U.S. policy toward Haiti, and she cites his memorandum on the Monroe Doctrine. Is this it? One memo and presto? Or did her reading of the archives convince her of this? If so, how? Together, Haiti and the Great Powers and Drive to Hegemony demonstrate the complexity of Caribbean politics in the early decades of this century. Plummer's detailed analysis of Haitian strategy both complements Healy's history and reveals its ethnocentrism. Healy's kaleidoscopic overview limns the essential contours of U.S. policy in the Caribbean at the turn of the century. It is on the backs of these two scholars, and of others like them, that a more comprehensive and incisive history of the Caribbean will emerge. Lebanon's Predicament. By Samir Khalaf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 328 pp. $30.00/cloth. Reviewed by Sayres Steven Rudy, M.A. candidate, SAIS. If Americans are still baffled by the chaotic war in Lebanon, the confusion is due more to the ineffable confusion of the country and to the deep angers and mercurial manipulations— and violence—of all states and groups involved in Lebanon than to a shortage of scholarly attempts to sort out the mess. The ultimate goal of scholars, surely, is exactly that: to draw an explanation that provides order from seeming disorder. But places like Lebanon are nearly inscrutable in their emotions, and Western sociological, political, and developmental paradigms that seek to order these places eventually surrender to perceived disorder, and scholars move on to other places. Samir Khalaf is one scholar who has not only continued to explain Lebanon 's demise but also maintained, in this volume of essays entitled Lebanon's Predicament, that hope remains for the "modernization" of Lebanon and its 294 SAIS REVIEW emergence from disorder. This optimistic collection is perhaps especially reassuring given that its author is a sociology professor at the American University of Beirut and deeply knowledgeable of Lebanon. As explanations of demise usually lack prescription for cure and emphasize description of ineluctable forces and hopelessness, Professor Khalafs book and optimism merit close reading. Khalafs eloquent essays, though addressing various specific aspects of Lebanon , support two principal theses. The first, explicitly stated, is that in terms of civic rule and personal identity, "the factors that enable at the micro and communal level, disable at the macro and national level [sic.]. This is, indeed, Lebanon's predicament." The second thesis of this collection rejects the dichotomous view of the relationship between tradition and modernity and asserts the dialectical connection between them. Khalaf supports his theses by addressing Lebanon's history and social and organizational traditions, and thus connects them in a subtle conclusion that Lebanon's lost modernization is due to the persistence of familial, patronage...