Lebanon’s instability a reflection of the regional order

Lebanon at 100 is a country in distress. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister of France, the country that declared Lebanon a state on Sept. 1, 1920, has now announced that it might even disappear.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) growing influence threatens the whole region. It is manifested in Lebanon by Hezbollah’s takeover of the country. Fixing Lebanon is a step toward saving the region too.

Contrary to many other states that were created after the First World War, the Lebanese had a say in both the boundaries and the constitution of their country. They had the choice to be a small, homogeneous nation of Mount Lebanon or to form a Greater Lebanon with its coastal cities and the Bekaa Valley and a more mixed population. Not only did they choose the latter, they chose to maintain the religious diversity and political coexistence that the land had enjoyed in Ottoman days.

Today, in light of the country’s economic collapse, many people both inside and outside the country are questioning the wisdom of this decision. This may be something people trained in French laicism will never understand.

Two elements from the Ottoman past combined to give the country its character, one reflecting the culture of the mountain and the other that of the city. These were elements of the country’s founding myths of the mountain as a refuge and the city as a cosmopolitan mixture of people of all races and creeds living in prosperity and harmony.

It was also a choice between two models: One model is that of strong sovereign states built on 20th-century nationalism with a uniform citizenship and a homogeneous identity imposed on the population. The other is a cosmopolitan model with a less imposing state, which is much more in tune with the culture of the region.

This model accommodates diversity and considers it as part of the wealth of society, but it also has its weaknesses. Lebanon’s choice resulted in the open and free society that attracted all the talents from the region. Communities that were driven out by so-called secular, nationalist ideas — Zionism, Arab nationalism, Nasserism, Kemalism, and Baathism, among others — found refuge in Lebanon.

Beirut’s golden age was created by people who came from cosmopolitan Alexandria and sophisticated Cairo, and who mixed with ancient trading families driven out of Damascus, Aleppo, Smyrna, Mosul and Baghdad. Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and Jews all came with centuries of connections and experience along the old trade routes and with their global networks.

The strength of such a state is the freedom it provides, which attracted all the elites of the region and could reconcile the many contradictions that coexisted within it. Its weakness is that it is sensitive and dependent on the geopolitical environment and its stability reflects the state of the regional order.

Hezbollah is hijacking Lebanon and turning it into another Gaza, where an isolated population is besieged and boycotted and is held hostage by a similar organization, keeping it impoverished under a constant state of war.

Nadim Shehadi

Lebanon is thus an interconnected barometer for the region. It flourishes when peace and prosperity prevails, and it also anticipates regional crises as a laboratory for different ideas and trends. Many of the elements that clashed in Lebanon during the civil war emerged later in the region with greater force.

Nationalism and secularism vs. Islamism; Baath vs. Baath, tradition vs modernity; republic vs. kingdom or principality; Iranian vs Arab; Sunni vs. Shiite; freedom vs authoritarianism — Lebanon can accommodate these contradictions and, when it does, they also find a stable equilibrium in the region.

The Hezbollah phenomenon emerged in Lebanon in the 1980s, also reflecting regional cleavages, and it is now widespread throughout the region. It is more than the Lebanese system can handle and is the main cause of its collapse. It is one contradiction that the country absorbed at great cost and that eventually broke it.

The Lebanese system went through compromise after compromise to accommodate and live with Hezbollah in its midst. It became a hostage and the ransom kept growing until it completely bankrupted the country. A series of assassinations in Lebanon between 2004 and 2013, including that of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as well as ministers, MPs, journalists, politicians and security officers, were linked to members of Hezbollah and its ally the Syrian regime by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Hezbollah and its allies paralyzed the country twice — once between November 2006 and June 2008 and again between 2014 and 2017. One ended with the Doha Agreement giving them veto power in the Cabinet; the other ended with them imposing their ally Michel Aoun as president, giving them complete control over government decisions.

The group controls Beirut’s airport and parts of the port, which it uses for smuggling anything from mobile phones to kitchens. An attempt to change one officer at the airport in May 2008 resulted in Hezbollah’s “black shirts” ransacking the city. Hezbollah and its allies also blocked every attempt to privatize the electricity and telecommunications industries, as well as any reforms promised by the government in the Paris II, Paris III and CEDRE international conferences.

Hezbollah threatens war with Israel every summer, ruining the tourist season and provoking the cancelation of projects and investments. The summer war of 2006 is one example of what it can drag the country into. Its participation in the wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen on behalf of Iran also came at a huge cost to Lebanon. Hezbollah financed its involvement largely through drug smuggling, money laundering and treating its wounded at the expense of the Lebanese government.

This also alienated Lebanon from its principal economic partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council. The result was the loss of investments, remittances, aid, contracts for the Lebanese creative sector, and a boycott of the summer tourist season. The impact is also felt by 350,000 Lebanese expats working in the Gulf.

Hezbollah’s stranglehold over Lebanon has resulted in sanctions, isolation, boycott and paralysis. The smuggling of hard currency and subsidized fuel to Syria are also a huge drain on public finances and contributed to the liquidity crunch that precipitated the crisis.

Even after the crisis, Hezbollah has been blocking engagement and negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and the international community, while suggesting that Lebanon cuts its relations with the West and the Arab world and turns to Syria, Iran and China instead.

Hezbollah is hijacking Lebanon and turning it into another Gaza, where an isolated population is besieged and boycotted and is held hostage by a similar organization, keeping it impoverished under a constant state of war. It requires a weak state and so weakens the state in order to flourish. This is exactly the same in Iraq, where IRGC-linked militias play the same role and produce similar results.

On the centenary of Greater Lebanon, as many ponder the fate of a country teetering between the need for a strong state and a neutral one, my message is that the whole region is also failing due to the same phenomenon of bearded men in black preaching perpetual war. The idea of Lebanon is the exact opposite of that and, if Lebanon falls, the region will follow.

• Nadim Shehadi is the executive director of the LAU Headquarters and Academic Center in New York and an Associate Fellow of Chatham House in London.