From Lebanon, With Pessimism And Hope

By Waleed Hazbun from Beirut
This commentary was published in The New York Times on 03/03/2011

On the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 11, I received a text message from a colleague. The dinner she was hosting would be delayed a hour “on account of revolution.” The delay was not a surprise since everyone I know had been riveted by the dramatic events shaking the Arab world. As scholars of Middle East politics and culture we have been following them since long before 9/11. And in recent weeks, we have formed a transnational social network tracking, taking part in and commenting on events in real time.

Like most of our American academic friends, both my wife and I have lived in various countries in the Middle East — including Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. It was largely a desire to more closely follow and experience the ongoing geopolitical changes in the region that drove me last September to relocate from a previous academic position in Baltimore to the American University of Beirut. It is both challenging and exhilarating to teach international relations and U.S. foreign policy here. The students come from many different national backgrounds and political orientations. Lessons about war and geopolitical change are not abstractions here; they penetrate our fears and hopes on a daily basis.

As it turned out, our dinner on that Friday evening felt like a New Years’ Eve party. Colleagues and friends, many with friends and family in Egypt, celebrated what felt like the dawn of a new era. After decades of stifling authoritarian rule in the region, there was now hope for a future full of creative possibilities across the Arab world.

Many who are critical of the U.S. role in the Arab world have been joyful. A week before the events of Feb. 11, I spent an afternoon at a local café frequented by leftist intellectuals and activists. Projected on a large wall, Al Jazeera footage showed live scenes of the mass protests in several cities across Egypt. As a Lebanese friend was heading out with a group to protest at the Egyptian embassy, I overheard him declare, “If Egypt falls that will be the beginning of the end of the American empire in the region.”

Here in Lebanon and elsewhere, there is a strong hope that Egypt will return to a role as a major political and intellectual force in the Arab world. Many Arabs still hold memories of the Egypt of the 1950s. Under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and sought to rid the region of the remnants of colonial influence. Cairo was the center of vibrant Arab cultural production, such that many understand the Egyptian dialect from the Egyptian films that often play on Arabic television. In recent decades, however, Egypt’s regional role has been constrained by its domestic system, limited by its economic and strategic dependence on the United States and overshadowed by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf States that have used their wealth to dominate much of the region’s media, buy political influence and build shiny urban enclaves packed with showy high-rise buildings staffed by expatriate professionals.

The influence of petrodollars and the pull of the Gulf are felt across the Middle East, but its effects reverberate sharply here in Beirut. Before its civil war, Lebanon played a central role in the Arab world, sustained by its economic openness, cultural vibrancy and political pluralism. But now, as Beirut rebuilds itself, the cities of the Gulf are overshadowing it with their new museums and universities. While visitors from the Gulf sustain Beirut’s tourism and real estate market, businesses there draw many of our graduates who cannot find work elsewhere.

So even as uprisings spread day by day across the region, the view from Beirut is a mixed one.

It is not clear what the uprisings will mean for political life here. While many are excited about the potential for transformation, Lebanon’s pluralist, democratic political system, fragmented state and weak military mean that Lebanese have not suffered in the same way as the rest of the Arab world, where repressive authoritarian states have been the norm. Some Lebanese suggest that they launched the region’s first people’s uprising in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The mass demonstrations that followed at Beirut’s Martyr’s Square and beyond led to the rapid evacuation of Syrian forces, who had been in Lebanon since 1976. In the wake of the protests, Hariri’s son Saad became the leader of what has often been referred to as the “Western-backed” March 14 coalition (named for the date of the largest anti-Syrian rally). But in recent years the power of the March 14 coalition has waned.

The week before the Egyptian revolution, Saad Hairi lost his position as prime minister in a “unity government” when 11 ministers, most tied to the Hezbollah-backed March 8 coalition, walked out of the government. Their resignations were largely due to opposition to the U.N.-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon that is investigating the assassination of Hariri and the 22 others who died with him.

In response to the fall of the government, Hariri’s supporters launched their own “day of rage.” It included blocking roads with burning tires and attacks on Al Jazeera journalists. Even in unaffected neighborhoods, businesses shuttered as people retreated to their homes. My daughter’s day care center, located next to the A.U.B. campus, called to say they were closing “on account of the events.” These protests had little political impact and may have led to a further erosion of the coalition’s popular support. After a number of defections from the March 14 coalition, Hezbollah and its allies in parliament were quickly able to elect a friendly figure to replace Hariri.

While Hariri’s movement might have come to power on the back of a people’s revolt, his close ties to Saudi Arabia and strong U.S. backing have limited the enthusiasm he and his supporters can muster for the Egyptian revolution. At the same time, Hezbollah praises the bravery of the Egyptians while their allies in Iran suppress opposition protests inspired in part by developments in the Arab world.

So despite the promise of change sweeping our region, the view from of many Lebanese is dampened by pessimism. I have observed this diminished hope among students on campus here. In 2007, for instance, the country was sharply divided by “pro-Syrian” and “anti-Syrian” coalitions and politics was deadlocked. A number of car bomb assassinations, mostly targeting anti-Syrian politicians heightened the tensions. One explosion occurred next to a seaside café I was visiting with friends and nearly knocked me to the ground. Nevertheless, many of our graduate students were active in civil society groups and efforts to mobilize citizens to define political alternatives. Today, after three more years of divided government and armed clashes in 2008 that saw Hezbollah’s weapons turned on fellow Lebanese, it seems the fount of enthusiasm and hope for domestic political change that burst forth in the spring of 2005 has nearly dried up.

Today, many of my students seem disenchanted with the country’s political elite who maintain political movements largely defined by sectarian loyalties. It seems that even when the ossified political systems across the region finally succumb to pressures for change, Lebanon will maintain a non-authoritarian, but nevertheless dysfunctional, corruption-ridden state paralyzed by a divided government, run by a political class largely isolated from popular accountability.

My own feelings about the future are not limited by the potential for change in the Lebanese system. I see my role as a member of the cosmopolitan faculty at this hybrid American-Lebanese institution in terms of the broader challenges and possibilities of the region.

In recent days, I have often recalled the numerous times that Arabs of my father’s generation, who came of age in the 1950s, told me that they felt they had “failed” the Arab causes they grew up supporting. My father, a Palestinian who later became a naturalized U.S. citizen, came to A.U.B. to study civil engineering, perhaps with the idea of helping to build a modern Arab world at a time of much optimism. He and his friends took part in campus politics driven by concerns that spanned the Arabic-speaking world.

My hope is that the current generation of students — not only Lebanese but those also from other Arab countries, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere — might again feel a larger commitment; that they may be moved by something beyond the desire to find a job and raise a family, and revive the project of my father’s generation: reshaping the political and intellectual life of the Arab world so that it can again play an important role in the future of the global political order.

Waleed Hazbun teaches international relations at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of “Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World.”