Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 2 | Page 15

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon
By: Rola el-Husseini
Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012. 319pp. $ 45.00. ISBN:
978- 0815633044.
Volume: 1 Issue: 2
June 2013
Review by
Ihsan Ali Alkhatib, PhD
Murray State University
Kentucky
Rola el-Husseini, assistant professor in research at the City University of New York Graduate Center, has made a valuable contribution to the field
of study of Lebanese politics based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Lebanon in 2001-2003, and 2006. El-Husseini interviewed 56
political elite and had “twenty-two informal discussions with journalists, academics, and other observers of the Lebanese political scene” (p. xviii).
One is tempted to see el-Husseini’s work as historical, given that the Syrian regime withdrew its armed forces from Lebanon in 2005. However, as
el-Husseini states, the political order that the Syrian regime built is more or less still in place, and the Syrian regime still retains an “extensive
network of agents and allies”— therefore “the legacy of Pax Syriana remains” (p. 22).
It is not possible to understand the Second Lebanese Republic (the Taif Republic) without understanding the political order that the Syrian regime
engineered. El-Husseini’s thesis is that the Second Republic did not develop Lebanon’s democracy due largely to Syria’s negative influence: “The
Taif Agreement attempted to institute a new formula of power sharing among the various segments of Lebanese society, but this agreement was
undermined by Syrian interference in the political process, and by Syrian clientelism in the recruitment of new elites” (p. 22).
El-Husseini’s book consists of: a Foreword by Ryan Crocker; an Acknowledgments section; a Note on Transliteration; an Introduction; seven
chapters; a Conclusion; Who’s Who of Lebanese Politics; a Lebanese Political Timeline (1989-2005); Notes; a Glossary of Arabic Terms; a
Bibliography and Index. Chapter 1, The Lebanese Political System: the Elite Pacts of 1943 and 1989 begins with the two words “Arend Lijphart”
indicating that el-Husseini’s work is grounded in theory and is not merely descriptive. Indeed, el-Husseini engages the theory of consociationalism
and examines whether Lebanon’s polity is consociational (she agrees with others that it is a “consociational oligarchy”) and concludes that
Lebanon’s consociational democracy is neither stable nor a democracy (p. 6). El-Husseini blames the First Republic’s breakdown on political
sectarianism. Scholars have attributed this failure to internal or external factors, or a mix of both. She believes that “the refusal of traditional elites
to incorporate emerging groups into their cartels undermined the political system from within” (p. 11). However, going beyond the Lebanon case,
the focus on internal and external factors, and examining the Confrontation States—in addition to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt—one
notes that none of these countries has been a beacon of democracy or stability due to the regional turmoil of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the
challenges of political and economic development. Taking the regional context into account, it is doubtful that Lebanon, consociational democracy
or any other system, could have withstood the regional turmoil.
In Chapter 2, Postwar Elite Interaction, the author studies post-Taif elite interactions using the “notion of elite settlements” (p. 23). She conceives of
this elite interaction between 1989 and 2005 in three stages, the third of which involved a “realignment of members of previously excluded groups
and their co-option by other political forces, a process I call ‘factionalization”’ (p. 23). El-Husseini writes “the dissident [Christian] elites… came to
recognize that participating in the settlement would be the most direct route to empowerment” (p. 31). Perhaps, but it is also plausible that at the
time, the realization began to sink in that the Syrian presence was a stubborn reality to which they needed to adjust. The work of the strategic media
elite, allied with Syria, promoted the Syrian presence as a guarantee against further erosion of Christian political power and as a check on Lebanese
Muslims—especially the Shi‘a—and political ambition undoubtedly had some influence in shaping the reality.
Chapter 3, Political Parties, is a particularly welcome addition to the literature due to the dearth of writing on Lebanese political parties. This
relative lack of attention is perhaps grounded in the reality that these “parties are mostly organized around the charisma and patronage networks of
individual leaders” which makes, in “most cases, the examination of individual elites… of greater significance than is the examination of party
organizations” (p. 39). One of the parties she focuses on is Hezbollah, a group which she claims was born “in response to 1982 Israeli invasion of
Lebanon” (p. 65). This assertion is inaccurate. Hezbollah emerged in the context of the Iranian attempt to export its revolution, as Wright’s Sacred
Rage: the Wrath of Z[][