Lebanon....the confidence game

"And so began the great confidence game in Lebanon. The game involved a succession of devious transactions between players who invariably pretended to stand for nationalist ideals and principles aimed at the common good, while they strove to outwit and overturn one another, motivated by atavistic loyalties and insecurities for which the professed ideals and principles normally served as a mere cover.

...Although the parties to the game were religious communities, the game itself did not involve debates on points of religion, except among the marginal class of the clergy who played a game which was exclusively their own. 

...The plain fact remained that the religious communities in Lebanon were essentially tribes, or in any case behaved as tribes, and the game that came to be played between them was a tribal game."

Lebanese Historian Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions

_________________________________

So here I continue a series of reflections on the country I lived in and knew so well 40 years ago, and to which I've returned. So much is the same and yet so much isn't. Sometimes what is the same masks what isn't.

My new bible on the question of Lebanon - thanks, Amal! - is Kamal Salibi's work I quoted above. Salibi captured better than ever I could the interplay of forces and the subtety of their interactions that form the politcal and social entity known as Lebanon. I chose the quote above because, to me, it summarizes with simplicity and very clearly what Lebanon was, what it is, and what faces it at the beginning of the 21st century.

Salibi's explanation of the forces that led to the Civil War is stark. And these forces are still very much in play - in fact, in some ways they have thrived, multiplied, infected new generations, and fostered a kind of social degeneration that leaves Lebanon with less to hold it together than it had before the war started back in 1975.

Pulling the operative terms out of Salibi's text we get more or less the following: 'confidence game', 'devious transactions', 'pretended', 'outwit and overturn', 'atavistic loyalties', and 'tribal game'. To the despair of thousands of Lebanon's best minds and hearts, these are still the rules of  the game today. And underlying all these mechanics is one fundamental law of politics and social interaction: there can be only one winner. I call this zero-sum politics, probably not new with me.

Zero-sum politics stems from a deep-seated belief that the goal of politics is rule, that rule proceeds from complete control of the governing apparatus (or as close to that as you can get), and that the point of ruling is to gain control of resources while barring others from access. Barring others in turn requires force, so now we have a politics of violence. In a non-tribal environment zero-sum politics might lead to the Nazis or Josef Stalin. In a society like Lebanon it leads to chaos and repeated cycles of violence aimed at either overthrowing the current winners or avoiding overthrow. As Salibi says, the game is to outwit and overturn.

I'm going to go out on a limb here (not being an historian and making sweeping generalizations is like painting a target on your chest!) and propose that this region has traditionally been very hospitable to this form of politics and social interaction. The expansion of populations out of the Arabian peninsula into the Levant, both pre and post-Islamic, was fundamentally tribal in nature. As were population movements from the east and the west, including Africa and those mentioned in the Bible. Above the tribal structure there has been since the beginning of recorded history a succession of imperial super-authorities wielding absolute, but often distant, power. These empires, up to and including the Ottomans and even the English and French, were generally very tolerant of the tribal organization below them. In fact, they often encouraged and used it as a means of ensuring the supremacy of their rule.

Kamal Salibi notes that the exception to this is Egypt, where, since the time of the pharaohs, the population has been quite de-tribalized. It's a commentary on the persistence of history into the present that this is still true and very visible in the events that have been going on there recently.

The consciousness of the uniqueness of Egypt has been fundamental in Arab society for decades, and never more than today. Here in Lebanon many people see the only chance for salvation coming out of Egypt.

Getting back to my original point, one that Salibi makes: because the tribal structures in the area were indigenous to the population and useful to the rulers they never dissolved. In what the British charmingly used to call 'the Lebanon' they thrived, as incoming groups jockeyed for space and access to resources. In historical terms, the country is made up of a high proportion of 'newcomers'. I mean that relatively, over centuries. In many cases, of course, the newcomers melded with existing populations, but the end result always seems to have been to encourage differences rather than soften them. Religion plays a role, but it seems that tribal allegience is usually paramount, with religion serving as the 'cover'under which struggles for power have played out.

So, for example, the Druze are originally an Egyptian phenomenon from a thousand years or so ago, with a strong component of northern Syrian and Kurdish influence. Salibi, Sami Makarem and others have pointed out that the original Druze presence must have come from an existing population, since the religion began as a conversion faith. However, the call to conversion was soon closed entirely (there's literally no way to become Druze now other than to be born into the community), leaving a mixed population with a unique identity and an essentially tribal allegiance which only grew stronger over the centuries. Over the last hundred and fifty years or so the Druze have repeatedly demonstrated a cohesiveness and a willingness to go to any lengths to maintain their communal security that mark them as one of the most redoutable 'tribes' in the Arab world.

The Christians in Lebanon display a similar process of development, with the exception of the fact that their religious identity is much older and precedes the arrival in the area of both Druzism and - much more significantly - Islam. The short story about the Christians in Lebanon is that since long before the crusades they have seen Christian Europe as their allies and protectors. Many Christians will tell you today that nothing significant has changed and in some ways things are as dire as they've ever been. With the flight of Iraqi Christians from the homeland they've inhabited since the early days of Christianity, and with the increasingly vulnerable situation of Christian communities in Syria and Egypt they see themselves as the last bulwark of their faith in the region. This feeling of having your back to the wall doesn't encourage ecumenical and non-sectarian feelings. Some of my Christian friends see no option but a Christian protectorate in Lebanon, essentially cut off from its natural hinterland and guaranteed by Western powers. However, even they acknowledge the enormous price that solution would incur: even greater suspicion and animosity from the other communities in Lebanon and the Islamic world generally, as well as a very dicey reliance on notoriously fickle Western powers prone to dither until problems go away of their own accord - usually through war, massacres and destruction.

The Christians face an additional obstacle: they are not a single 'tribe'. When I returned to the US during the Lebanese Civil War I always had a difficult time explaining the cross-overs and dis-continuities between the warring factions. The tendency then, as now, was to see the war as a Muslim-Christian battle, with the Palestinians cast as the evil fomenters. Reality was much more complicated. The Christians, for example, were bitterly divided, with one faction - generally Maronite - fighting on what we called the 'right' against the Palestinians and their various Muslim and Druze allies. The Greek Orthodox, however, sided with the 'left', which led to internecine battles, massacres and counter-massacres between the Christian forces.

The same could be said of the Muslims to some degree, though not of the Druze. Various Sunni and Shia' factions and militias fought at various times with or against each side, until, by the end of the war's first decade it became impossible to clearly identify who the sides were. By that point, the original debate about Lebanon as a shared home - the facade, as Salibi would have it - had pretty much evaporated, leaving behind a zero-sum struggle in which every faction and militia seemingly had to engage every other in a tribal battle for turf and power.

The results are manifest everywhere in Lebanon today, from the built and natural environment to the world of personal and social interactions. To some degree, as I mentioned earlier, attempts to rebuild and reconstruct a polity have acted to mask this fact, but anyone who knew Lebanon in the days before the war remembers and knows. One result: an ongoing exodus of the young and the engaged, who refuse to accept the limits placed on them by the constant struggle to assert their view of life against the rising waters of communitarian, mutually antagonist worldviews. As my friend Karma, who's in her twenties, phrased it: 'it's like swimming underwater and never being able to come up for air. You can only do it so long, then something has to give.'

From one perspective, Salibi's confidence game has run out of steam, in the sense that a confidence game depends on fooling the marks. Lebanon's confidence game consisted of pretending to have an inclusive vision of national life, while actually striving for narrow, sectarian dominance. At this point, almost no one here seems interested to talk of social regeneration or debate the virtues of socialism vs the free market. In the current environment all that is now utterly beside the point. The masks worn by the major players in the civil war which served to encourage and attract followers have fallen away, and what's left is very ugly, indeed. Until the outbreak of the Syrian war next door, a certain stasis had been reached. No one had given up on the zero-sum game, but everyone had agreed to abide, more or less, by certain rules as generally specified in the 1989 Taif agreement that officially put an end to the civil war. With Syria now aflame next door, allegience to those rules is evaporating. Inter-communal messages are once again being sent via car bombs and areas of the country are essentially off-limits to one sect or another. However, the map varies according to what sect or community you belong to. Thus, everyone's map of Lebanon is different, when it comes to freedom of movement and everyday life. Even Beirut, where everyone still meets to do business, is being infected by this cancer. For the moment, it is still navigable, but the general feeling is that it's only a matter of time before Beirut, too, succumbs to sectarian dissection.