University of Wyoming/Laramie, Spring Semester 2001
Course : Government and Politics of the Middle East

The Lebanese Civil War 1975-1990:
Its Causes and Actors

by

Andrea Becker, Maren Reyelt

Table of Contents Page

1. Introduction

2. The Lebanese Sectarian System: The Failed Balancing Act

3. Socioeconomic Reasons for the Civil War

4. Contributing Forces I: The Palestine Issue

5. Contributing Forces II: External Actors
5.1 The Influence of the United States
5.2 Israel and the PLO in Lebanon
5.3 Syria′s Role as a "Peace-Broker"

6. Concluding Remarks

Bibliography

1. Introduction

"The war in Lebanon was the result of several highly connected internal and external conditions that have been in the making for a long time. ... Causal ... forces rooted in the existing social and political structures of the country, while [contributing forces] aggravated the internal conflicts and set the process of confrontation into motion, triggered a set of events already in the making that awaited only the proper time and place."¹

Regarding this quoted statement, the purpose of our paper is to show the reasons that led to the Civil War in Lebanon from 1975 till 1990. Usually, four causes can be found throughout the literature we used for this paper: the social context within Lebanon itself, namely the unbalanced sectarian or confessional system and socioeconomic problems, the role of the Palestine refugees and the PLO, and several external actors, namely the United States, Israel and Syria. This paper mainly deals with the causes expressed above. We do not want to describe the war itself in all its details or provide a historical chronology, instead discussion of the war will be restricted to the description of landmark events.

However, the named causes worked together in waging the Civil War. One cannot separate them from one another. Mutual interactions took place between them leading to bloodshed and hatred. The Lebanese people needed almost five decades to settle down these causes from which almost all were already present since the independence in 1943. The first attempt to resolve some of the problems with the National Pact of 1943 did not last long, before the second Civil War broke out in 1958. The latest peace agreement, the Taif Accord from 1990, reviewed most of the causes, trying to adopt political measures to prevent another outbreak of violence. Still, the accord did not get rid of the sectarian problem so far.
This paper will not deal with these events in great details. References will be made according to their importance for the topic. In this regard, we try to answer not only the questions of the causes but also how they interrelated and how they contributed to the escalation of the situation in Lebanon. Our paper describes first the social context starting with the unbalanced confessional system, followed by the socioeconomic problems. Afterwards we want to write down how the Palestine issue contributed to the Civil war and how the external actors USA, Syria, and Israel caused more and more troubles, which led to the extent of the conflict.

2. The Lebanese Sectarian System: The Failed Balancing Act

The state of Lebanon is build upon a “mosaic social structure”.² Diverse religious and ethnic communities with a hierarchical mode of organization play the key role in social life. Instead of developing a national identity this system produced only vague loyalties towards the government as a whole but strong sectarian identifications. Moreover, the sectarian structures led to inner conflicts among the different groups.³

Lebanon’s political system is based upon confessionalism, a term that describes “a social system that recognizes the principle of religious communities being vested with political authority.”⁴ This system evolved with the specific Lebanese set of population. The country consists of many sects of whom neither one can claim to be the majority population. Each community can regulate its own matters and is allowed to have its own courts and laws. The sects function as social organizations, developing more and more into “semiautonomous sociopolitical communities with distinct political and administrative functions.”⁵ Within the Muslim-Christian relationship, a struggle over meaning and importance and supremacy of one of these two groups came into existence, produced through the historical events and foreign interventions.

The creation of Greater Lebanon under the French Mandate in 1920 brought a big proportion of Muslims in the new state, and thus, ended the old order of a Maronite majority. A Druze minority centered on Mount Lebanon.⁶ Reacting to pressure of the Maronite population, France strengthened the status of its natural allies. As a result, the Maronite’s resentment against the incorporation of the Muslims in their Christian dominated state developed. This happened on the cost of the political status of the Sunnis and Druze, which diminished where they had once been the ruling elite under the predeceasing colonial powers.⁷

[...]

1 Halim Bakarat: The Social Context, in: Edward P. Haley/Lewis W. Snider: Lebanon in crisis. Participants and Issues, Syracuse/New York: Syracuse University Press, p. 3.

2 Ibid, p. 5.

3 Latif Abul-Husn: The Lebanese Conflict. Looking Inward, Boulder/London: Lynne Rienner Publishers 1998, pp. 29-30.

4 Dilip Hiro: Dictionary of the Middle East, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 71.

5 Abul-Husn: The Lebanese Conflict, p. 29.

6 Andrew Rigby: Lebanon: Patterns of Confessional Politics, in: Parliamentary Affairs. A Journal of Comparative Politics (ed. F.F. Ridley), Volume 53, No. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2000, p. 170.

7 Helena Cobban: The Making of Modern Lebanon, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1985, pp. 61-75.