Introduction | Iraq and Lebanon’s tortuous paths to reform

The streets of central Beirut and Baghdad are still strewn with reminders of the protests that rocked both cities between October 2019 and February 2020.[1] The centre of Beirut is covered in revolutionary art, including a phoenix poised to take flight, made from the pieced-together remnants of protesters’ tents destroyed by government supporters. In Baghdad, Iraqi artists have transformed the tunnel leading to Tahrir Square into a revolutionary art gallery. A large mural on the square itself celebrates the month the protests began, declaring simply ‘October!’. Labelled as ‘sister-protests’ by some, there are a lot of parallels between the respective predicaments of both countries. Protestors chanted ‘from Baghdad to Beirut, one revolution that never dies’, as they faced the formidable task of changing entire political systems to address their grievances.[2] In both countries, the demonstrations cut across class and sectarian lines, and grew from a shared sense of frustration with high levels of corruption, dire socioeconomic conditions and the constant effects of foreign interference in domestic politics.

One year on from the start of the protests, the optimism that prevailed has largely subsided. Although many rejoiced over the resignation of both countries’ prime ministers (PMs), many protestors recognise that a long and complicated road lies ahead. Unlike much of the Arab world, Iraq and Lebanon are not ruled by autocrats but by democratically elected kleptocrats who are securely embedded in deeply entrenched and convoluted sectarian power-sharing systems. Paradoxically, a change in government rarely heralds a shift in domestic politics. In Iraq, the government of PM Mustafa Al-Kadhimi is best viewed as a caretaker government, with limited prospects for bringing about meaningful political reform. The PM is part of the country’s oligarchic and clientelist system of rule and has so far played within the boundaries of the existing distribution of power while trying to expand his own base. In Lebanon, despite the Beirut port blast and a plummeting economy pushing more than 55 per cent of the population below the poverty line, Saad Al-Hariri has been reelected as PM in a tacit power-sharing agreement, a year-minus-one-week after his last resignation.[3]

In both countries, it has proved difficult to disrupt the ossified structure of permanent elite collusion. With this in mind, our report examines core mechanisms that entrench elite capture in both countries and bring about deadlock. We focus on a review of selected institutional and legal structures that sustain sectarianism in political life (Section 1), analysis of the practical tools that political elites use to dominate socioeconomic interactions to their benefit (Section 2), and foreign interference that exacerbates such interactions and structures (Section 3). The paper concludes with a set of feasible short- and long-term opportunities for reform that could offer a way out of the present conundrum. To contextualize the discussion that follows, Box 1 below provides a brief summary of Lebanon and Iraq’s consociational models of rule.

Box 1

Revisiting Lebanon and Iraq’s consociational models

Over the past year, Iraqi and Lebanese protesters have made their slogan, ‘no war, no violence, no sectarianism’, famous the world over.[4] Bringing this about would generate a new paradigm for the Lebanese and Iraqi political order. Both countries expanded their present sectarian arrangements in the wake of civil war (Lebanon) and brutal autocracy as well as civil war (Iraq) to restore a measure of peace and stability. The thinking was that explicitly recognising the ethno-sectarian identities that led to conflict in the first place, and which became more salient because of it, would dampen their destructive confrontation. It is not hard to understand this logic if one recalls Iraq’s bloody 2005–2009 civil war, which claimed on average about 3,000 civilian lives per month, and Lebanon’s 16-year civil war between its ruling Maronite Christian elites and its Arab Muslim population, which led to an estimated 200,000 fatalities.[5]

However, sectarianism – i.e. the primacy of ethno-religious considerations in the formation of personal and group identity – rapidly became the overriding criterion for the organisation of consociational governance – i.e. cooperative governance between key sociopolitical groups based on power sharing. In other words, governance is organised on the basis of the principles that: 1) a clearly delineated set of ‘agreed’ sectarian groups is guaranteed a minimum level of representation in national politics; 2) policies and politics respect the interests and red lines of sectarian elites; and 3) such groups are allowed a considerable level of social autonomy.[6]

Apart from their conceptual advantage of conflict mediation, the sectarian systems of Lebanon and Iraq suffer from notable disadvantages. Consociational political structures are rigid because they are tied to group identities and do not respond easily to social developments within such groups, let alone to their diminishment or disappearance. They assume that sectarian salience is ‘natural’ and ‘permanent’ instead of ‘created’ and ‘maintained’. The associated norms and structures prevent the emergence of a unifying ideology that can bridge social divisions. Moreover, ruling elites actively and easily use an ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric to keep their constituencies in line, supported by their ability to provide physical security and patronage. While this has kept social instability more or less manageable, it has also created artificial stability. This is evident in the lack of post-conflict reconciliation initiatives in both countries. In brief, the institutionalisation of sectarian systems after civil conflict has both forestalled and blocked the de-politicisation of their underlying ethno-sectarian identities.

In addition, sectarian systems in Lebanon and Iraq have often obstructed good governance. Preventing direct conflict between groups is time and resource consuming. In a consociational democracy, citizens are incentivised to accept ethno-religious identities because the political structures reward cohesive groups with access to state power and resources. Sectarian communities have a stake in running the state as an overarching administrative entity, but they also retain significant autonomy from the state, especially in the cultural and religious realm. Sectarian leaders both lead their communities and are also part of peer networks that run the entire system. The consociational systems of Iraq and Lebanon thus serve communities at the expense of the nation, which results in minimum denominator compromises, short-term horizons in terms of political decision making, and many unresolved problems. Paradoxically, in the longer term, these systems render the state prone to instability. Moreover, if ethno-religious groups are run by a relatively fixed set of leaders, it is easy for elite capture of government to occur. Indeed, the permeability of the democracies of Lebanon and Iraq to new political groups or leaders has been low. In consequence, governance systems are ossified and premised on the interests of sectarian groups as articulated and mediated by their elites.

Source: [7] Lijphart, A, 1969. ‘Consociational Democracy’, World Politics 21(2): 207–225;[8] Lijphart, A, 2006. ‘Self-Determination versus Pre-Determination of Ethnic Minorities in Power-Sharing Systems’, Dekmejian, R, 1978. ‘Consociational Democracy in Crisis: The Case of Lebanon’, Journal of Comparative Politics 10(2): 251–265; Bogaards, M, 2019. ‘Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: The Case Against Consociationalism Light’, Journal of Ethnopolitics DOI: 10.1080/17449057.2019.1654200; Jabbra, J and Jabbra, N, 2001. ‘Consociational Democracy in Lebanon: A Flawed System of Governance’, Journal of Developing Studies 17(2): 71–89; Dodge, T, 2020. ‘Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Special Issue link; Salloukh, B et al., 2015. The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, London: Pluto Press; Haddad, F, 2012. Understanding Sectarianism: Sunni-Shi’a Relations in the Modern Arab World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.