The concept of citizenship in so-called “ethnically divided societies” – of which Lebanon is a long-standing member – transcends the attributes commonly ascribed to “uniform” states. Traditionally, the study of citizenship has focused on the relationship between the individual as a member of a certain polity and the state, within the framework of relatively straightforward quid-pro-quo: the citizen enjoys the rights of membership while the state is owed its duties. Over time, the concept has been subjected to numerous processes of intellectual modernization, ranging from the introduction of the notion of “multicultural citizenship” which accommodates structural changes in the social fabric of Western societies to recent discussions on disability and animal rights. Although certain academic contributions have encompassed both “new countries” faced with the challenges of immigration as well as ethnically divided societies in “ancient homelands”, the latter remains a field of exploration in its own right.[1]

In addressing the challenges of citizenship, the focus in the literature on ethnically divided societies has been on attempting to reduce or eliminate sectarian-cultural differences among individuals by seeking to integrate or assimilate members of ethnic communities into a new transcendent identity. Modest societal engineering has sought to create a common national or patriotic identity through civic integration. This has encompassed ideas such as children of rival ethnic communities sharing the same schools, socializing in common conventions, and integrating into the workplace. This is deemed necessary even by the most ardent consociationalists, who contend that no form of ethnic power-sharing can succeed if individuals do not share a modicum of allegiance to the state.[2] It is within that context that Theodor Hanf, an expert on power-sharing, has called for “voluntary patriotism” in Lebanon.[3] A more ambitious approach, often guided by self-proclaimed enlightened despots, has sought a far-reaching merging of identities through a form of ethnic assimilation. Political engineers in both approaches have endorsed electoral formulas which would enable the empowerment of “catch-all”, cross-communal political parties.[4] It is only through such parties, they contend, that members of ethnic or sectarian communities can fulfill their full potential as citizens.

More recent – and pertinent – contributions to the literature have argued that the challenge in certain ethnically divided societies is not the nature of the adopted power-sharing arrangement per se, but rather weaknesses in the ability to enforce the rule of law, namely that about the constitution.[5] In this regard, it is both notable and commendable that the Good Governance and Citizenship Observatory (GGCO) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) has chosen to explore the role of constitutions (in Lebanon and the region) in enabling a society of civic-minded individuals that could lay the foundations for the “development of a cohesive political, social, and civil community”. Kachar and Haddad have aptly described the indispensable endeavor the GGCO has chosen to embark on as “re-imagining citizenship”’, an innovative paradigm that is certainly well served through the study of constitutional constructs and their relationship vis-a-vis the promotion of liberal citizenship.

Much of the debate surrounding the Lebanese constitution has been submerged with criticism about its consociational nature. This widespread condemnation of the so-called “political regime” (as opposed to the constitution per se), mostly originating from well-meaning liberal bias, suffers from two structural defaults. First, it treats power-sharing as a one-size-fits-all arrangement, with little attention paid to the particularities of different mechanisms in various states, including Lebanon.[6] Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Belgium, Iraq, Bosnia, and Lebanon (among others) all fall within the rubric of “power-sharing regimes”, but some differ fundamentally from others in terms of constitutional and institutional constructs. Second, it offers very little in terms of intellectual contribution to the development of constitutional-institutional constructs in a way that would advance the cause of liberal citizenship.[7] Upon closer examination, it becomes evident that the conundrum of the Lebanese constitution – and its affiliated power-sharing arrangement, the Taef Agreement  – about citizenship is one of non-application. While so-called “sectarian” clauses in the constitution – such as the ethnic quota system of distribution in government –  gather pervasive attention, what goes by generally unnoticed in that political practice exhibits far more stringent “sectarian” practices than the text or spirit of the constitution allows. Especially in the context of citizenship, it makes little sense to ponder about improvements that could be made to the current constitutional construct whereas numerous progressive elements within it have not yet concretized. In that sense, we ought to institute a paradigm shift in the thought process within the liberal sphere, one based on “reimagining” clauses in the current constitution being enforced.

Five key areas are worthy of being highlighted here. The first relates to the state extending its exclusive sovereignty over all of Lebanon’s territory. In Taef’s section on “spreading the sovereignty of the state of Lebanon over all Lebanese territories”, it is asserted that the “militias’ weapons shall be delivered to the State of Lebanon within a period of 6 months”. The failure to implement this clause, first by the Syrian guarantor to the agreement and later by successive Lebanese governments, has grave consequences not only vis-à-vis state sovereignty per se but also towards enabling the flourishing of the concept of citizenship. Whereas the foundational idea regulating being a citizen in a certain polity is that of rights versus duties, this is inevitably supplemented by the notion of equality between citizens with regards to this understanding. Moreover, whereby the concept of citizenship is inherently linked to theories of the state, the state itself – in a Weberian sense – ceases to exist once it no longer claims “monopoly over violence” in a defined geographical area.[8]

The second area is concerned with the interpretation of the constitution text. Whereas different political actors in various states hold fundamentally different views with regard to interpreting constitutional clauses – as is famously the case in the United States over the Second Amendment – these disputes are continuously resolved by having a definitive arbitrator in the form of a constitutional council.[9] By definition, this council (as opposed to the text itself) is the guarantor of citizenship in any particular polity. In its section on “courts”, the Taef Agreement clearly states that “a constitutional council shall be created to interpret the constitution”. However, political actors saw this clause as an infringement of their ability to define and redefine constitutional prerogatives at will and therefore limited the role of the court to observing the constitutionality of laws. It was later claimed that interpreting the constitution is the prerogative of parliamentarians, a theoretical oxymoron that is universally unprecedented. If no party is legitimately entrusted with interpreting the constitution, then Lebanon is left to the rule of the most powerful, hereby gravely undermining any constitutionally guaranteed practice of citizenry.

The third relates to the role of the public sector in shaping responsible and engaged citizenship. Is it uncoincidental that the GGCO has placed “good governance” in the bureaucracy as one of its foundational pillars, stressing its role in cultivating a culture of participatory citizenship? Article 95 of the Lebanese constitution asserts that excluding limited exceptions, the “rule of sectarian representation” in the public sector is “abrogated” in favor of meritocracy. This assumes that citizens will participate in the bureaucracy based on ability and suitability with no regard for ethnic affiliation. To ensure that recruitment processes are not subject to ethnic favoritism, thereby rendering the reform counterproductive, numerous states have instilled stringent judicial mechanisms that aim to prevent discrimination. In Lebanese practice, however, this crucial reform has been entirely unobserved for over two decades. Citizens continue to be barred from public service solely because the appointment does not fit into unconstitutional ethnic quota arrangements.[10] Making matters substantially worse, the practice has not been restricted to the need to meet quota configurations – therefore ensuring that the most able within each community are recruited – but has rather evolved into a multi-layered process of clientelist practice in which every za’im appoints his or her loyal cronies into the bureaucracy. This has led to a bloated and unbelievably inefficient public sector, a factor that gravely undermines the bureaucracy’s crucial role in serving as a mechanism that enables active and responsible citizenship.[11]

The fourth element pertains to the need for a unified code of civil law to which all citizens abide. Numerous scholars have rightfully opined that while the Lebanese constitution ensures that the state guarantees “respect” for different sects’ personal status laws, it does not in any way limit its ability to enact a parallel unified civil code of law.[12] Moreover, a majority of Lebanese support civil and optional civil marriages.[13] Civil marriage is already legal in Lebanon; what is missing is for parliament to create the body of laws needed to regulate related processes such as child custody in case of divorce and inheritance in case of death.[14] So far, parliament has failed to vote on any of the numerous draft laws which have been presented by many of its members.[15] This issue goes to the heart of the concept of citizenship; if individuals within a particular state are forcibly subjected to different laws based on ethnic pre-determination, a practice known as non-territorial ethnic federalism, then is it worth asking whether they can be labeled as citizens in the first place. Furthermore, a unified code of civil war is not inconsistent with ethnic power-sharing. Even in states with high levels of ethnic consociation, such as Bosnia, intermarriage has been regarded as the most reliable proof of ethnic assimilation (or lack thereof).[16]

The fifth and final element is concerned with the electoral law. The Taef Agreement stipulates in its section on “political reforms” that “with the election of the first Chamber of Deputies on a national, not sectarian, basis, a senate shall be formed and all the spiritual families shall be represented in it.” The agreement therefore clearly indicates that parliament shall be free of sectarian quotas, although it fails to indicate when such reform should be undertaken. In 2017, parliament passed a new electoral law that replaced the old, majoritarian first-past-the-post system with a proportional one. Interestingly, the much-loathed historical quota system present in the Lebanese parliament was counterintuitively considered by integrationist thinkers to be anti-sectarian, in that it prevented members of the same sect from bitterly competing over seats and enforced cross-sectarian list formation.[17] In any case, the proportional system of 2017 makes the distribution of sectarian quotas redundant and obsolete, as proportionality itself guarantees the “appropriate” representation of sectarian groups on the condition that this is the will of voters.[18] This is why states with the most rigid consociational structures, such as Bosnia, do not have a sectarian quota system in parliamentary elections.[19] In the Lebanese case, guaranteeing the over-representation of Christians, and thereby ensuring mounasafe (parliament being divided equally between Christians and Muslims) can be achieved by simply keeping in place the geographic distribution of electoral districts, with some minor amendments.[20] Therefore, by removing the sectarian quota system from the electoral law, parliament would not only be taking a step forward in the promotion of a culture of citizenship, but also implementing reforms that are mandated in the Taef Agreement.

The five aforementioned areas in no way constitute an exhaustive to-do list concerning enabling the practice of citizenship in Lebanon. As the GGCO’s pillars indicate, issues about good governance, migration, and education also require further exploration and activism. Nor do they suggest that the Lebanese constitution does not – as all constitutions – hold within it the potential for adjustments and improvements vis-à-vis laying better foundations for individuals to practice their role as active and engaged citizens. They are, however, a list of constitutional basics that enable us to engage in the process of “reimagining” a constitution that allows for the concept of citizenship to thrive. In ethnically divided states, the debate over whether a civic-minded citizenry allows for constitutional reform or whether is it constitutional reform that enables a civic-minded citizenry is redundantly ubiquitous. In the case of Lebanon, a substantial cross-sectarian civic-minded core of young citizens has spectacularly voiced its aspirations both in the October uprising of 2019 and the parliamentary elections of 2022.[21] Concurrently there exists a list of unimplemented reforms present in both the political agreement that ended the civil war and the text of the Lebanese constitution itself.  It is through the activism of these individuals most immersed in the concept of citizenship that those reforms can see the light of day, thereby transforming a society of sectarian subjects into a polity of active and responsible citizens. 

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[1] Scholars have stressed that experiments of integration in “new countries”, especially immigrant states such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and others, cannot be compared to those undertaken in states where ethnic groups have existed for centuries. The latter would apply to indigenous populations in immigrant countries, such as Native Americans in the United States and Canada. See John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation, eds. John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary (London: Routledge, 1993), 19.

[2] See Matthijs Bogaards, “The Favorable Condition for Consociational Democracy: A Review,” European Journal of Political Research 33, no. 4 (September 2003): 475–96.

[3] Theodor Hanf conducted extensive surveys of economically active Lebanese in 1987 and 2002. He concluded that “the desire for unity is stronger than might be assumed” and that the “new (postwar) consensus is “more solid” than that of 1943 as it is “rooted in common suffering, a common yearning for peace and a common desire for independence from everybody”. See Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 640–41. When he revisited the question twelve years after the war, he wrote that “the Lebanese may be a skeptical nation, but all the findings show that a nation is what they now are.” See Theodor Hanf, “The Skeptical Nation: Opinions and Attitudes Twelve Years after the End of the War,” in Lebanon in Limbo: Postwar Society and State in an Uncertain Regional Environment, eds. Theodor Hanf and Nawaf Salam (Germany: Baden-Baden, 2003), 228.

[4] McGarry and O’Leary, “Introduction,” 17.

[5] Donald L. Horowitz, “Ethnic Power Sharing: Three Big Problems,” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 2 (April 2014): 5–20.

[6] The critique about evaluating the power-sharing regime as a “one-size-fits-all” model is not particular to Lebanon but encompasses all similar cases. See Donald L. Horowitz, “Constitutional Design: Proposals versus Processes,” in The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy, ed. Andrew Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6176&context=faculty_scholarship&httpsredir=1. For a critique of the approach, see Arend Lijphart, “Constitutional Design for Divided Societies,” Journal of Democracy 15, no 2 (April 2004): 99, Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2004.0029.

[7] Most of the serious scholarship that has been written in that regard offers progressive recommendations in line with the constitutional construct, such as proportional representation and decentralization. For example, see Bassel Salloukh and Renko A. Verheij, “Transforming Power Sharing: From Corporate to Hybrid Consociation in Postwar Lebanon,” Middle East Law and Governance 9, no. 2 (2017): 147–73.

[8]  Max Weber defines the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” See Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

[9] The constitutional court is so central to managing multi-ethnic states that even countries such as Canada have power-sharing customs in its supreme court, namely the appointment of three judges (out of nine) from Quebec. See John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: Liberal Consociation as Political Prescription,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5, no. 4 (2007): 696. States such as Bosnia have three foreign judges on the court (in addition to two from each of the three ethnic communities) to ensure that no two sects can discriminate against the third. See Constance Grewe, “Foreign Judges in the Constitutional Courts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo ‘Mission Impossible’?” in The Cambridge Handbook of Foreign Judges on Domestic Courts, eds. Anna Dziedzic and Simon M. Young (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 103–23.

[10] For an overview of the sectarianism in the Lebanese public sector, see Bassel F. Salloukh, “Taif and the Lebanese State: The Political Economy of a Very Sectarian Public Sector,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 25, no. 1 (2019): 43–60. The most egregious case took place in 2017 when 106 civil servants passed the Civil Service Council examination to become forest guards but were barred from appointment because a majority of them were Muslim. See Bilal Al-Bkaili, “106 Forest Guards: They Succeeded, but “Sectarianism” Prevents their Employment,” Al-Modon, December 22, 2017.

[11] Although national statistics are notoriously unreliable, it is estimated that the size of the public sector in Lebanon has doubled between 2010 and 2020, from 170,000 to 350,000. See Richard Salame, “Lebanon’s Civil Servants Are Leaving in Droves. They Won’t Be Replaced Soon,” L’Orient Today, November 5, 2022.

[12] See Bassel Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 37–43.

[13] Ibid, 41. A 2013 survey indicated that some 51% support civil and optional civil marriages, although the proportion is misleading. It is reasonable to assume that it would be much higher if citizens were asked whether they “approved of other Lebanese citizens having the option to a civil marriage in Lebanon.” 

[14] In a symbolic gesture, between 2009 and 2013, Interior Ministers Ziyad Baroud and then Marwan Charbel registered a dozen civil marriages between Lebanese citizens. See Sunniva Rose, “Lebanon: New Interior Minister Rekindles the Debate on Civil Marriage,” The National News, February 20, 2019.

[15] The latest draft proposal was presented in 2022. Parliament speaker Nabih Berri so far refuses to allow parliamentarians to vote on the draft law. See Richard Salame, “Breaking the ‘Sect and Sex Bargain’: Personal Status Draft Law Seeks Sweeping Change,” L’Orient Today, December 23, 2022.

[16] McGarry and O’Leary, “Introduction,” 17.

[17] Horowitz, a leading integrationist thinker, has hailed the Lebanese system because it ‘gives politicians very good reasons to cooperate across group lines, for they cannot be elected on the votes of their own group alone.’ See Donald L. Horowitz, “Electoral Systems: A Primer for Decision Makers,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (October 2003): 115–27.

[18] Saleh El Machnouk, “Electoral System Reform in Lebanon: Dilemmas of a Consociational State,” Ethnopolitics 17, no. 1 (2018): 1–20.

[19] Northern Ireland forces MPs to register as Unionists or Nationalists. Bosnia’s parliament elects five Croats, five Bosniaks, and five Serbs to the upper house.

[20] Christians are now estimated to constitute around a third of voters in Lebanon. See Alistair Lyon, “Lebanon Muslims Outnumber Christians 2 to 1-Survey,” Reuters World, August 10, 2017.

[21] See Ibrahim Jouhari, “2022 Lebanese Parliamentary Elections Analysis of Change Movement Voting Trends,” Conference Paper – Who Voted for Change?, Beirut, Lebanon. The so-called changed movement received 254,698 votes or 13.59% of the total vote. Although voter analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, it is safe to assume that the percentage of votes given to non-ethnic parties – one which increased 600% between 2018 and 2022 – is significant in the context of an ethnically divided society.