Ta'ifah or nation? The lebanese maronite community in the twentieth century, 1918-1975

• Autores: Borja W. González Fernández
• Directores de la Tesis: María Isabel Fierro Bello (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2018
• Idioma: inglés
• Número de páginas: 861
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala (presid.), Luz Gómez García (secret.), Richard Louis Anton Van Leeuwen (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias Humanas: Geografía, Antropología y Estudios de África y Asia por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Materias:
  • Historia
    • Historia de países
    • Historias por especialidades
      • Historia del derecho y de las instituciones jurídicas
  • Ciencia política
    • Instituciones políticas
  • Sociología
    • Grupos sociales
      • Elites
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • On October 22, 1989, the still living deputies of the 1972 Lebanese Parliament approved, in the Saudi city of Ta'if, the document that would put an end to the fifteen year-long Civil War that had been ravaging the country. The Ta'if Agreement, as it became known, confirmed the fundamental pillars that had characterized the Lebanese polity ever since its formal constitution in its present form, in 1919, and even before: power-sharing, arbitral leaderships and the legitimacy of traditional bonds of a para-political nature, thus revealing how the much maligned Nizam Lubnani had become embedded in the day-to-day political practice of the Bilad al-Arz, despite the misgivings of political theorists on both sides of the ideological divide.

    This thesis does not aim, however, to analyze the inner workings of the Treaty of Ta'if, but to study the construction, evolution and consolidation of the National Pact (al-Mithaq al-Watani) as the founding bloc of a specifically Lebanese approach to political modernity during Lebanon's First Republic (1926-1975). In this context, it will be argued that, beyond the historiographical myths portraying it as the consequence of the generosity and political acumen of two patriotic and gifted men: Bishara al-Khuri and Riyad al-Sulh, or as a mere device for power-sharing, the National Pact is but the concrete embodiment of the traditional political practices of the Lebanese people, the specific understanding given to the Lebanese Unwritten Constitution - in the sense defined by Hegel, Savigny or Jovellanos - in the historical period when Lebanon stood out as the only true democracy in the Middle East, in the era when Lebanon remained the solitary tower of Smithian Liberalism amid a backdrop of interventionism, both in the Levant and the Western world.

    In order to do so, our attention has been focused on the Maronite community, which held, in the period herein under consideration, what was doubtless the most important position in the political equation: the Presidency of the Republic. Neglected by the Academia, when not portrayed in openly orientalistic terms, the experience of the Maronites, from being a small and persecuted group of heterodox Christians living off the meager fields of their mountainous homeland - a community "of goatherds and peasants" in Ahn Nga Longva's expression - to becoming the protagonists of a revolutionary movement analogous to the bourgeois revolutions of nineteenth-century Europe, as well as the torchbearers of a nationalist stream that contributed to shape the current borders of the Middle East, deserves a closer analysis that, going beyond the generalizations and rough depictions that still predominate in both the specialist and journalistic discourses, portrays them not as a power-hungry and hegemonic group, but as a community among others, participating in the delicate give-and-take mechanisms defining Lebanese politics both historically and in the present.

    With the support of the relevant primary and secondary literature, this thesis aims at dispelling myths and at defining a new understanding of the Lebanese system that rejects the exceptionalism so often attributed thereto. By putting the Lebanese political framework within a comparative perspective, it will be argued that the Bilad al-Arz, while certainly defining a peculiar approach to political modernity, did reach solutions not so dissimilar from those adopted by other pluralist polities, whether in Europe, Africa or the Middle East. In so doing, it will be, moreover, proven how the Lebanese recipe offers a ray of hope for the preservation of the demographic heterogeneity that had allowed Xavier de Planhol to call the wider Middle East region a mosaic.