Lebanon and the price of peace

There are two parallel tracks through which an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon is being discussed. One in Washington, where Lebanon, Israel and the US have signed a trilateral framework agreement aimed at bringing about an Israeli withdrawal and ending the state of war between Tel Aviv and Beirut. The second track introduces complications in that, in Islamabad, Lebanon was also on the agenda of America’s negotiations with Iran. There, it was Iran that was negotiating an Israeli withdrawal on behalf of Lebanon.
For the Lebanese state, the process is a balancing act with local, regional and international players, in which Lebanon is curtailed from acting as a fully sovereign state. But this is not new and one of the country’s foundation myths explains it well.
Philippe Takla was one of the principal architects of Lebanese foreign policy. He held the post of foreign minister in 11 governments following independence. According to him, Lebanon’s political system was formed in the early Ottoman era, when Fakhreddine II obtained from the sultan a special autonomous status for the Emirate of Mount Lebanon. He then united the country by creating a council, in which the notables of various communities and regions met and consulted with him and with each other irrespective of their differences and external alliances. He also established alliances with European powers and sought guarantees for the Lebanese emirate’s existence.
For Takla, these were the foundational elements of Lebanon’s internal and external policies: balancing special privileges and autonomy from regional powers with internal consensus recognizing the interests of communities, combined with the security of Western protection. The same elements existed in the 1860s, when European protection guaranteed the autonomy of Mount Lebanon in negotiations with the Ottomans, leading to the establishment of a council of representatives of the communities working toward political consensus.
These elements of power-sharing also became embedded in the constitution of the Lebanese state in 1926. After independence, maintaining Western protection was the main task of its foreign policy. We saw these principles in action after the 1958 civil war, when American Marines disembarked in Beirut to protect the country from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was by then the regional hegemon and was popular in Lebanon’s streets. Internal consensus was reestablished when Lebanese President Fouad Chehab met with Nasser on the Syrian border.
The pattern was that the establishment in Lebanon restored internal consensus by compromising with the regional power — which elements of its population were following — and with the leverage of Western protection. This was repeated with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Cairo Agreement of 1969, then with the Syrian regime in the Taif Agreement of 1989 and with Hezbollah in the Doha Agreement of 2008.
In the Washington talks, the Lebanese government is trying to break from that pattern by acting independently as a sovereign state. In Islamabad, Iran is trying to restore the pattern with itself as the regional hegemon the West has to deal with when it comes to Lebanon’s security.
Lebanon as a state has avoided participation in any of the four major Arab-Israeli wars, which is a recognition of its special status. But it was often a battleground involving both internal and external players. Israel invaded the country no less than six times without directly clashing with the Lebanese army. The Lebanese state may have been neutral but its territory was not.
Wars with Israel were not with the Lebanese state but with nonstate actors linked to one of its communities and external participation. The Lebanese political system allowed for this, which was another legacy of the Ottoman era, when communities of millets had a certain autonomy that involved external relations and protection. The Lebanese state has been in a state of war with Israel but never at war in practice.
Officially, relations between Lebanon and Israel were governed by the 1949 Armistice Agreements, but these were abrogated after the 1967 war. They were to be replaced after the Israeli invasion of 1982, when direct state-to-state talks between Israel and Lebanon resulted in the May 17 Agreement of 1983. But this was also abrogated by Lebanon under pressure from Syria, which was then the dominant regional power, and its internal allies.
This was on the pretext that the Lebanese and Israeli tracks needed to be “coupled” or coordinated with the Syrian track, as Lebanon was in its sphere of influence. This is almost precisely what Iran is trying to establish in Islamabad — a coordination or coupling of the two tracks that limits the ability of Lebanon to act independently as a sovereign state.
The Hezbollah camp wants to join the Islamabad track and keep Lebanon as part of Iran’s sphere of influence, while the anti-Hezbollah “sovereigntist” camp wants Lebanese-Israeli relations to be settled by a sovereign Lebanese state independently of Iranian influence.
For Lebanon, the price of peace has always involved a compromise on the country’s sovereignty in favor of both internal and external actors. This is a characteristic that was built into the politics of Lebanon several centuries before the official creation of the state in 1921. It has been given the label of hybrid sovereignty by scholars of international relations and political geography. This is where although sovereignty is formally vested in the government, in practice it is shared, contested and constrained by powerful nonstate actors and external powers.

Wars with Israel were not with the Lebanese state but with nonstate actors linked to one of its communities.

Nadim Shehadi

The overall results have been catastrophic for the country. The last time it tried to challenge both internal and external forces was when it negotiated with Israel in 1983. The main element then was US support for the agreement, as it is now, echoing the historical Western protection for Lebanon. But that was also the element that failed and led to the collapse of the May 17 Agreement.
The stakes are very high and include the return of more than a million displaced people. The outcome still depends either on internal, regional and international elements coming together or on the Lebanese government breaking that cycle and acting as a sovereign state.
In the late 1980s, I met Takla in Paris and he said that the Lebanon we knew no longer exists — everything has changed. The price of peace today is a choice between another compromise or a political confrontation with Hezbollah and Iran. And it still rests on the continuity of US and Western support for the Lebanese state.

• Nadim Shehadi is an economist and political adviser. X: @Confusezeus