The Dutch-American political scientist Arend Lijphart developed what he called “consociational democracy,” a democratic system in which the leaders of prominent social communities share power in order to ensure that no single group dominates the others.
Accordingly, consociational democracy has been presented as a governance model for societies whose stability emanates from cooperation among the elites of its various communities rather than from majority rule. Its defining features include the formation of broad coalitions among community leaders, each community’s right to a veto over decisions it considers a threat to its interests, a sensible distribution of political power and resources, and a degree of autonomy or self-governance for each community.
The Netherlands was Lijphart’s original model. It was a society split into several “pillars”: Catholic, Protestant, socialist, and liberal. Each pillar had its own schools, media, and organizations; at the top, however, the elites of each pillar worked together. Lebanon was a key case study of consociationalism of Lijphart’s, alongside Belgium, Switzerland, and of course, the Netherlands, as well as less complete cases such as Malaysia, Cyprus, and Canada. Later, other scholars added Bosnia, post-2003 Iraq, and South Africa during its transition.
This theory has faced and continues to face criticism. However, its fundamental assumption is its most compelling idea: distinguishing between cases where consensus is limited, and there are many subcultures, which demand some sort of consociational arrangement, and cases of broad consensus and few subcultures, where majority rule can function more straightforwardly. Lebanon is not the only country in our region that falls into the first category, though it is the most conspicuous.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that one of the surest ways to undercut this “consociation” is for one component of a divided society to wage a foreign conflict that the other components, for whatever reason, have not endorsed. The decision to declare neutrality for Switzerland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which reshaped Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, was implicitly partly driven by the fact that the country is home to several national communities, each of which is an extension of a neighboring country: France, Germany, and Italy. Accordingly, very little daylight separates embroiling the country in foreign conflicts from civil war, rendering neutrality a fundamental need and a national doctrine for a people who chose not to be an outpost of their neighbors.
Despite the criticisms, some well-founded, of how consociationalism has been practiced in Lebanon, the architects of the Lebanese system were always mindful of this need, and this was reflected by the fact that both Beshara al-Khoury and Riad al-Solh’s names have been coupled with the independence of 1943.
Nothing did more to hinder addressing the grievances of Muslim communities than prioritizing foreign alignments, first with Nasserism and then the Palestinian revolution. When these tensions, in the mid-1970s, morphed into a long and bitter war that did not end until the late 1980s, much of those grievances were addressed by the Taif Accord that improved the terms of the consociational framework.
It is no exaggeration to say that today, Hezbollah’s arms are the single biggest impediment to the emergence of any form of consensus. These arms aggravate fears and replace the trust that should prevail among citizens of what is supposed to be a single country with mutual suspicion, and they push the country into foreign wars that make consensus all but impossible. That much can be said before getting into how the anguish of displacement, an extension of the war, is fodder for latent civil conflicts.
The fact that consensus, in the Lebanese case, is the ultimate requisite for any viable form of patriotism renders ascribing patriotism to Hezbollah and its war, as some have, wholly untenable. Indeed, they become a textbook case of patriotism’s antithesis. A war that at least two-thirds of the Lebanese do not believe in and had been dragged into cannot also be “patriotic,” nor can disregard for the elected institutions that have banned the party’s weapons – to say nothing of Hezbollah’s ties to Iran and its Revolutionary Guard that the party itself does not deny.
Three interlinked premises underpin the argument that the party and its war are “patriotic.” The first is an implicit definition of the nation that ignores the pluralistic nature of its society and the sub-cultures of its communities, presenting the country’s divisions as a split between “right” and “left” or “dignity” and “humiliation.” The second is branding a large majority of the population traitors and slandering them for rejecting a fateful choice made by a small minority and imposed by force of arms. The third is a definition of patriotism founded not on consensus, but on dominating and subjugating “the enemies of the people.”
Here, the definition of patriotism is flipped on its head; it is determined on the basis of one’s hostility toward some foreign actor – “patriotism is hostility to imperialism and Zionism” – rather than the extent to which one complies with and develops national consensus. This definition is not, of course, subject to consulting the various communities’ views; rather, it brands those who demand such consultation as traitors.
These qualities, since they add authoritarianism and misrepresentation to this anti-patriotism, threaten, through perpetual war and the staggering human and economic costs that come with it, to drive the majority of the population toward a civil conflict that would destroy any notion of a nationhood and sense of national identity. That is precisely what is happening in Lebanon today.
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