A Deal With the Devil: The Political Economy of Lebanon, 1943-75

This dissertation is a contribution to the reframing of the history of postcolonial Lebanon, and in particular the era between independence from France and the outbreak of the civil war of 1975-90. The dissertation’s central argument is that rather than seeing postcolonial Lebanese history as a product of the contentious interaction between sectarian social groups, as is common in much of the literature on Lebanon, it is more useful to see that history as a product of the struggle to impose and maintain a liberal, laissez-faire economic model by the dominant faction of the postcolonial ruling elite, the commercial-financial bourgeoisie. This economic model entailed, in essence, appending the Lebanese economy to those of other regional powers, particularly the oil states of the Gulf, in order to continue the country’s colonial-era role as an entrepôt for the broader Middle East. As a result of its attachment to the economies of regional states, and its concentration in finance, trade, and the service sector, the Lebanese model was both highly unstable and grossly unequal. As a consequence, the Lebanese ruling elite struggled to impose and maintain this model, and they did so only by crafting a highly rigid political system that denied space to even the more moderate reformist forces. These features of the Lebanese system, its instability, inequity, and its rigidity, played a determining role in shaping Lebanon’s postcolonial history.The dissertation uses archival sources from Western diplomatic archives, the archives of the World Bank Group, and the private papers of the head of Lebanese General Security, along with published sources, to describe how this laissez-faire model came into being, to explore its key features, as well as efforts to oppose it. The dissertation provides an analysis of the ways in which the model’s inequity and instability impacted Lebanese society, through a discussion of the Litani River hydroelectric project and the Intra Bank crisis of 1966 respectively, and uses an account of the fate of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), as well as some of the major struggles within the Lebanese labor movement, to expose elite efforts to maintain the status quo and to enforce a high degree of political rigidity. Ultimately, the dissertation is an attempt to argue that Lebanese exceptionalism is rooted, not in the sectarian cleavages within Lebanese society, but rather in the laissez-faire economic model which set postcolonial Lebanon’s experience apart from that of its neighbors elsewhere in the Arab worl