It’s an entirely novel experience to first read about Lebanon and study its history and then to come here and truly glean only the tiniest bit of it. I feel as though I’m a nervous dilettante, skirting around the edges of something formidable in its sheer complexity. My dorm(ish) apartment thing (hereinafter “Sam’s building”) is located in the Hamra district of Beirut, next to Lebanese-American University. I learned recently that Beirut didn’t become part of greater Lebanon until the 1920s, when the French decided that the nation needed a harbor.
There’s no way for me to really explain the protracted sectarian strife in Lebanon except to call it the strange by-product of internal dissatisfactions and external pressures. The narrative of Lebanese history has, at its locus, a fear that the bonds tying the Lebanese people together won’t withstand the inevitable interplay of domestic and international power shifts. When the communal identity is as important as–if not more important than–the national identity, peace is both precious and fragile. The people of Beirut, at least, seem to have an understanding of life unlike anything I’ve ever encountered: They’re simultaneously connected to and separated from everyone around them; open, yet cautious; lighthearted, yet oddly burdened. There’s a shared experience that can’t be duplicated–the experience of 15 years of civil war, 30 years of military occupation by Syria, an assassinated prime minister, and a devastating invasion in 2006. Largely because foreign powers in the early 20th century adopted local groups–with the Russians protecting the Orthodox Christians, the Brits protecting the Jews, the French protecting the Maronites and the Ottomans protecting the Sunnis–many of the ethnic groups today create alliances outside of Lebanon. They view each other as different states inhabiting the same system. Then, too, there are the altogether common problems of mandate territories: arbitrary political boundaries, lack of a larger identity that can withstand factionalism, and a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape that forces exchange on a world stage. There’s also the question of who the Lebanese are–whether they’re ancestrally Arab and Syrian, Phoenician, African, or Asian–and how feasible the political structure will prove to be, with the constitution mandating that the president be Maronite, the speaker of the house Sunni, and the Cabinet and House seats split 50-50 between Christians and Muslims.Â
Interesting things to come, with Lebanon. The calm is young, yet, and the nation’s foreign policy is an enormous point of contention between local groups. The domestic balance of power changes with international alliances, and Lebanon’s political and historic position in the Middle East, as well as the personal beliefs of its citizens, are very much at odds with its desire to remain both (arguably) the most open economy in the region and a modernizing force in the eyes of the “West.”
