Leonard Colquhoun
Let’s morph that into something more down-to-earth: “OK, fellow Tassie Devils, first team meeting, and we want to be all playing from the same rule book. As you know, I’m Nigel and I’m coach because I come from the South, Sanjay’s captain by being from the North, and Nguyen is deputy ‘coz he was born in Burnie, right ?”
ABOUT 160 years ago, in discussing the “Italian Question” with British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, the Hapsburg statesman Count Metternich famously and memorably remarked that “Italy is a geographical expression”.
At the time, he was 100% right — there was an Italian peninsula very prominently jutting in a generally SE direction from the Alps into the Mediterranean, inhabited by people who could, in a definite cultural sense, be termed “Italian”; there had, however, been no polity that could be called Italia since the province of that name ceased to function as a distinct entity in the break-up of the (western) Roman Empire. Instead, there was a succession of statelets, city-states and foreign occupations; some were to be remembered in history for their brilliance and/or power, such as Florence and the Venetian Republic, some as historical curiosities, such as the Papal States (of which the Vatican City is the last remaining vestige), and others as best forgotten, such as the Bourbon territories in southern Italy weirdly called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies1.
“To create a country is one thing; to create a nationality is another”.
Isn’t that what we’ve seen with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, those two post-Versailles creations full of the hope and the expectation that the long-submerged Slavonic peoples of central and SE Europe had, at last, nations of their own ? And look where they are now: the former amicably enough split by the 1993 Velvet Divorce; the latter rent asunder by the bloody carnage of the somewhat delayed post-Tito Balkan wars, with the likely imminent de iure independence of Kosovo being the last act of that bloody geopolitical tragedy.
And take Belgium: this month there was a media item somewhere positing the question “What’s it for ?”
Driving there, as does driving in any foreign country, has its own special hazards: in Belgium, it’s the painting out of helpful road signs by adherents of one of the country’s main languages defacing material in the other.
“Belgium”, the word, was coined when the southern provinces of the post-Napoleonic all-inclusive Kingdom of the Netherlands wanted to break away because they were Catholic and the Kingdom was predominantly Protestant. After the usual argy-bargy, these RC provinces, once called the Spanish, and later the Austrian, Netherlands, won their right to a nation, and had to call it something. “Belgium” sounded good: it had classical associations from the hardy and virile Belgae who’d given the mighty C Julius Caesar so much stick.
But lately, as much of western Europe moves into a post-Christian phase, being RC or not is no longer of much importance.
However, language is.
The Walloon (southern) half of Belgium speaks French; the Flemish (northern) half speaks Dutch — it’s the “narcissism of small differences”2 at work again — well, they seem small to us. (Anyway, who are we to talk, who get all worked up over which side of Oatlands is kosher ?) “To create a country is one thing; to create a nationality is another”. Belgium has now constitutionally acknowledged this by being divided into two main language-based regions plus Brussels (think ACT). How long before the Dutch-speaking Flemings decide to re-join the Kingdom of the Netherlands — “Welcome back, after all these centuries !!”
Take Pakistan, another “confessional” state.
Younger readers might be surprised to learn that what we currently call Pakistan and Bangladesh were, from 1947 to 1971, West and East Pakistan, the two parts of one nation separated by 1500 km of India. In the last days of the Indian Empire, the Raj’s Muslims preferred (or, at least, were represented as preferring) a country of their own.
Which they got. In two parts. Which is not the case now, “to create a country [being] one thing“.
Metternich, were he around now, would reckon that “Lebanon is a [something] expression”; he’d not reckon it a nation. He’d think, perhaps, of the famed cedars and call it an “arboricultural expression”, or of those two majestic mountain ranges, the Lebanon and the anti-Lebanon, and consider it an “orographical” one. But not a nation. He’d probably reckon that any country that permitted an out-of-control militia to do what it verdammt-well liked didn’t add up to a nation, either.
Was there a “Lebanon” in Metternich’s lifetime (1773-1859) ?
In short, yes and no.
The Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean had been the Ottoman province of Syria since 1517, and was to remain so for four centuries until the closing stages of World War I. From 1770 (for those readers whose school history got SoSE’d and/or EL’d, that was the year of Capt James Cook’s voyage up the east coast of Australia) to 1842, Maronite Christians controlled the central part of the mountainous inland, then, after 20 years of civil war — sounds familiar — in 1861, the Ottomans formed the Maronite areas into a separate, and expanded, district.
Harmsworth’s New Atlas of the World [pre-WWI, but with post-1919 updates] describes the region thus: “Modern Palestine and Syria belonged before the Great War to the Turkish Empire, and were included under Syria as a general term. They were divided into the vilayet [see below] of Aleppo, in the north; the independent sanjak of Zor on the Euphrates in the north-east; the vilayet of Syria south of the Aleppo vilayet; the district of Lebanon south and west of the Syria vilayet, and the independent sanjak of Jerusalem in the south.” [Population and area statistics omitted.]
Wikipedia has this information on vilayet and sanjak:
“A wilāyah (Arabic) or vilayet (Turkish vilâyet) is an administrative division, usually translated as ‘province’. The word derives from the Arabic waliyah, meaning ‘to administer’. Sanjak and Sandjak are the most common English transliterations of the Turkish word Sancak, which literally means ‘banner’. Sanjaks originally were the first level subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire; they arose in the mid-14th century as military districts that were part of a military-feudal system.”
The map in the Harmsworth Atlas shows, from the south, three areas : “El Quds” (the Arabic name for Jerusalem) with its northern border running west-east from about 15 km N of Jaffa to meet the Jordan at the 32N parallel of latitude; “Beirut”, with its northern border running from the town of Sidon; and “Libnan” continuing north to Anatolia. Curiously, it looks as if the city of Beirut was not in map area of that name. [Maybe a reader with a 1911 EB can elucidate. Googling ‘Lebanon’ and ‘Sykes-Picot Agreement’ produces a range of (often conflicting) maps, but Harmsworth and the 1911 EB have the advantage of being contemporary and of pre-dating the Israeli-Palestinian situation.]
So, yes, Victoria, there seems to have been a “Lebanon” — it was a smallish district of a larger province. But was this district inhabited by “Lebanese” ?
Another pre-Great War account of the area is in The World of Today — a Survey of the Lands and Peoples of the Globe as seen in Travel and Commerce3 by A R Hope Moncrieff [Gresham Publishing Company, London, Dec 1904, updated 1911; too early for an ISBN].
Beirut is described in volume II, pp 172-174 as, among other features, of having “gas-works and other signs of progress to show. The population … is a very mixed one of Turks, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Armenians4 and Europeans, among whom the French take the lead. … The caverned cliffs of the Lebanon [the mountain range — LC] naturally afforded a congenial refuge to retiring or persecuted creeds. Its Maronite inhabitants, as we have seen, hold a peculiar Christianity. … Christians of some sort or other form the majority of the population; and European influence being also so strong here, the Turkish Government has been moved to form the Lebanon into a separate district under a Christian governor.”
(Interestingly, this discussion of European interests in what we now call the Middle East at the start of the last century ended with “it is a painful thought that the ground where ‘peace on earth’ was proclaimed may any day become cause of an Armageddon among Christian nations”. A century on, we can make that “among a Jewish and Muslim nations” as well.)
Halfway through that Armageddon known to its contemporaries as the Great War, the British and French governments partitioned the Levantine and Mesopotamian areas of the Ottoman empire by the now notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement, the full text of which with a very clear map can be seen at http://www.mideastweb.org/mesykespicot.htm [There’s about 63,400 English pages for you to peruse in Google]. Note that what is now Lebanon was to come under direct French control.
For various reasons, the S-P Agreement didn’t work out quite as planned in the League of Nations mandates after the post-WWI treaties, but France got the northern part of former Ottoman Syria, and within that area proceded to set up a separate largely Christian State of Greater Lebanon in 1920, proclaiming it a Lebanese Republic in 1926.
This seems to have engendered two related and continuing problems.
“Greater” Lebanon had too many Muslims to remain a “Christian” state [read Salibi below], and it looks as if the French and their Christian Lebanese allies made a similar error as did the British in the 1920s in setting up their Protestant province of Northern Ireland5: making this new Lebanon economically viable turned it into a demographic time-bomb. Its constitution recognised this, as the Wikipedia article explains:
“Lebanon is a republic in which the three highest offices are reserved for members of specific religious groups: the President must be a Maronite Catholic Christian, the Prime Minister must be a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the Parliament must be a Shi’a Muslim.”
Let’s morph that into something more down-to-earth: “OK, fellow Tassie Devils, first team meeting, and we want to be all playing from the same rule book. As you know, I’m Nigel and I’m coach because I come from the South, Sanjay’s captain by being from the North, and Nguyen is deputy ‘coz he was born in Burnie, right ?”
Wikipedia goes on: “This arrangement is part of the ‘National Pact’, an unwritten agreement which was established in 1943 during meetings between Lebanon’s first president (a Maronite) and its first prime minister (a Sunni), although it was not formalized in the Lebanese Constitution until 1990, following the Taif Agreement. The pact included a promise by the Christians not to seek French protection and to accept Lebanon’s ‘Arab face’, and a Muslim promise to recognize independence and legitimacy of the Lebanese state in its 1920 boundaries and to renounce aspirations for union with Syria. This pact was thought at the time to be an interim compromise, necessary until Lebanon formed its own sense of a national identity.”
To us outsiders, this looks more like a “Confessional” or “Sectarian” Pact than a “National” one, with those highest offices of the State being allocated according to which version of which Holy Book potential office-holders follow. Lebanese are judged primarily by creed — so, can a Lebanese be an agnostic, or an atheist, or, after an extended and soul-searching holiday in, say, Thailand or Cambodia, a Buddhist ?
The second big problem for Lebanese is so obvious that it is expressly dealt with in its constitution: its relationship vis-à-vis Syria. There can be absolutely no doubt that, despite all the diplomatic niceties, Syria scarcely regards the Lebanese State as a legitimate Arab political entity. No government in Damascus, whether vaguely socialist as the current Baathists claim to be, or Islamic, and especially Islamist, as the next could be, would ignore any chance to restore the pre-1920 provincial unity. Yes, there might be, in a secular Greater Syria, a largely autonomous Maronite district in the Mountains — as there was in later Ottoman times — but not a separate nation.
“To create a country is one thing; to create a nationality is another”: that’s what Kamal Salibi wrote in ch 1 (pp 19-37) of his A House of Many Mansions — the History of Lebanon Reconsidered [1993, ISBN 1 85043 091 8]. His discussion of the various factors which influenced the formation of the modern country of Lebanon, and continue to affect its prospects is both detailed and concise — visit http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/900/902/Kamal-Salibi/ . His examination of the roles of pan-Arabism and Maronite identity are particularly helpful.
If, of course, al-Qaeda has its way, or Hezbollah, the Caliphate will be restored, the whole of the Levant, including the Crusader Maronite pseudo-state and the hated Zionist entity, will be rescued from the Dar al-Harb and fully re-join the Dar al-Islam. In such a world divided between the House of War and the House of Islam, nations will, to use a Marxist, yet fully appropriate, expression, “wither away”: Bernard Lewis’ “The Muslim Discovery of Europe” [ISBN 1 85799 116 8], pp 59-64, explains this Weltanschauung in precise detail.
It would appear that any Lebanese Christians whose choices and actions strengthen the position of Hezbollah are asking for both political and national suicide. They are also asking for eventual second-class status — unless, of course, they ‘submit’6. And secular Muslims in today’s Lebanon are asking for a full-on Taliban-style treatment if the Hezbollah parasite takes over the Lebanese host.
So, is there a majority in the current Al-Jumhuriyyah al-Lubnaniyyah — the Republic of Lebanon — who value Lebanese nationality ? Are there enough citizens of the Republic who regard themselves publicly and primarily as Lebanese, with religion, or even no religion, a private or personal matter ? Can the Lebanese state hope to survive if the Lebanese army is both unable and unwilling to defend it against its internal enemies ? Are military commands dished out on the same sectarian basis as is political office ? Is this the way to “create a nationality” ?
What sort of “expression” is Lebanon ?
1. The setting for Giuseppe’s de Lampedusa’s magnificent novel The Leopard.
2. “Freud coined the phrase “narcissism of small differences” in a paper titled ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ that he published in 1917. Referring to earlier work by British anthropologist Ernest Crawley, he said that we reserve our most virulent emotions – aggression, hatred, envy – towards those who resemble us the most. We feel threatened not by the Other with whom we have little in common – but by the “Nearly-we”, who mirror and reflect us.” [I’ve noticed that sort of vitriol in rugby union and rugby league adherents.] http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-14-2005-68543.asp
3. This is one of Margaret’s most loved old treasures, great for dipping into and chuckling at some of its claims and statements with the benefit of hindsight, such as volume IV’s reference to Australia’s “meat-fed men and strong deep-bosomed women” (p19); in the same volume, of course, there are statements that’d be scorned now as vilely racist, but there’s also this: “ . . . [the aboriginals] have been classed among the lowest of the human race; yet those who know them best often protest against this estimate as unjust.”
4. In the Harmsworth, a large country labelled “Armenia” straddles most of far-eastern Anatolia, showing that its updates pre-dated Ataturk’s victories.
5. When the border was drawn up between the Irish Free State and the British province of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Loyalists wanted to include two areas well outside the contiguous swathes of identifiably Protestant territory: one, a large group of Protestants in far-off (in Irish terms) county Fermanagh, but who came with an even larger group of Catholics; and, two, the city of Londonderry (‘Derry’ to the Catholic Nationalists) on account of that city’s historical associations with Protestant victories in the 1690s, a city now two-thirds RC. The Ulster Loyalists made their own beds for future ‘Troubles’ in more ways than one. (Serbia’s claim on Kosovo is similar, as they see that area as the cradle of the Serbian nation.) See Ruth Dudley Edwards’ An Atlas of Irish History, 1981, ISBN 0 416 74050 2.
6. In Arabic, Islam derives from the . . . root Sīn-Lām-Mīm, with a basic meaning of “to surrender”; Muslim, an agentive noun meaning “one who submits wholeheartedly [to God]”. [Wikipedia]
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
August 2006
A relevant article from a recent NY Times: Waiting for Jacques – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/opinion/21mon1.html?th&emc=th
