Rarely cited beyond the Lebanese context, confessionalism is a democratic system that distributes positions in the government, legislature, and civil service proportionally among religious communities. For instance, if a certain confession is said to make up 20 percent of the population, its political leaders are guaranteed 20 percent of legislative seats. That’s the theory, anyway. And though this framework was originally devised to promote peaceful coexistence among disparate communities, it really does just the opposite; it deepens sectarian differences and weakens the state by encouraging allegiance to one’s confessional group over the nation.
Historical Perspective
For a country of only four million people, Lebanon is intensely diverse religiously, culturally, and politically. The country is a mosaic of seventeen confessions of various Christian and Muslim stripes, none of which comprises a majority (see Figure 1). Rivalries—Christian versus Muslim, Christian versus Christian, and Muslim versus Muslim—date back to the first millennium and have long hindered the development of a unified national identity.
Confessionalism is the political embodiment of this fractured reality. An offshoot of consociationalism, it is a form of government involving guaranteed group representation. Other consociational states include Belgium, Switzerland, and Nigeria—all of which are divided along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, with no group large enough to govern alone. To remain stable, these countries rely on consultations among the political elite of each major group to conduct the messy work of governance. When consociationalism is organized along religious lines, it is called confessionalism.
As early as the thirteenth century, Lebanon adopted various forms of confessionalism to protect the identity of its diverse communities and ensure a balance of power. The system in its modern form was established under the 1926 constitution. When a census in 1932 identified Christians as the majority, the ratio of Christians to Muslims in parliament was set at six to five, with subgroups within each faith receiving their own guaranteed number of seats. Intense wrangling ultimately led to a compromise stating that the Lebanese presidency would always go to Maronite Catholics (the largest among the Christian sects), the prime ministry to Sunnis, and the presidency of parliament to Shiites.
The state functioned, barely, until its collapse in 1975 with the outbreak of a civil war. While the war was precipitated by myriad internal and external forces, a central factor was the inter-communal tension institutionalized by the confessional framework. A growing Muslim population—fueled by lower emigration and higher birth rates—felt neglected and demanded a greater share of the political power. Sectarian rifts exploded. In all, the war claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The war ended in 1989 with the Taif Accord, which diminished Christians’ relative power. Muslims and Christians were now to have equal representation, and the Christian president was stripped of some executive authority. A bright spot for Lebanon at large, however, was that the accord identified the elimination of confessionalism as a national priority. The divisive framework that helped lead thousands to their deaths and many more to emigrate was supposed to be consigned to the dustbin of Lebanese history. But twenty years later, still no progress has been made in this direction.
The Case against Confessionalism
Proponents of confessionalism insist that with no group constituting a majority of the Lebanese population, representation of every confession must be guaranteed to ensure that each group has a political voice. Coexistence, we’re told, is crucial. And indeed it is. The problem is that confessionalism has bred perverse incentives that undermine the very possibility of harmonious coexistence.
Almost by definition, a nation depends on the development of overarching economic, social, and cultural structures of cooperation that transcend intra-national factionalism. Confessionalism, however, promotes the primacy of religious identity. In Lebanon, religious institutions exercise direct control over many facets of daily life, such as marriage and inheritance. Confessionalism has also institutionalized patronage in the political system. Indirect controls and clannish clientelism are plentiful, as jobs, housing, and education are often obtained through appeals to confessional political leaders. These zouama provide favors and protection to their constituents in return for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This encourages close vertical assimilation within confessional communities and obstructs horizontal integration across them, incubating religious-based “states” within the state. As a result, the country suffers from a weak national identity and anemic levels of integration across its communities.
Another source of division is that in a confessional state, the proportional power of each religion must (in theory) be perpetually recalibrated to account for changing demographics over time. But because the matter of religious balance is a sensitive political issue, a national census has not been conducted in Lebanon since 1932 (see Figure 2). A Christian majority in that census gave Christians the highest number of representatives, but as the century progressed and the Sunni and Shiite populations increased, Christians were wielding a disproportionate amount of power. The Taif Accord adjusted the shares of representation, primarily in favor of Sunnis, but today, Christians (who make up the majority of the diaspora) and Shiites feel disenfranchised. This bitterness is further aggravated by the widening Sunni-Shiite divide across the Middle East—a divide that, according to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, is particularly acute in Lebanon. How long before the eruption of a new calibrating war?
A perpetually delicate confessional balance makes the state extremely sensitive to internal and external stressors. Minor changes in the political environment can trigger instability, and there have been several attempts at artificially bloating population numbers of specific communities to gain greater political clout. In the 1950s, for instance, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun naturalized Christian Palestinians in an effort to boost the number of Lebanese Christians. Similarly, in 1994, the naturalization of Syrian workers and Sunni Palestinians aimed to bolster the Sunni population. Although no census took place to recalibrate power based on these demographic changes, inflating the number of a confession’s members provides more votes for that demographic and strengthens its leaders’ political power in negotiations.
Externally, foreign actors have further contributed to Lebanon’s instability by applying pressure to the confessional structure. Israel collaborated with the Christians in 1982, seeking to empower them as it invaded the country. Western countries have long favored the Christians, the Arab world has backed the Sunnis, and today Iran supports the Shiites. Amidst this playfield of foreign interference, the loser is the Lebanese state.
The Path Forward
Many contend that a secular solution can be found only once the Lebanese are “mature” enough to more fully separate religion from the state. In a December 2009 article in the Lebanese Daily Star, the patriarch of Lebanon’s Maronite Church asked, “What is the advantage of abolishing political confessionalism in [national] texts before doing so in [people’s] minds?” But the maturity argument is self-fulfilling. The more entrenched the Lebanese are in a confessional society, the more solidified their prejudices become and the harder it is to cultivate national unity that transcends religious lines. A sustainable nation depends on the development of common interests across communities. Confessionalism should therefore be abandoned.
Still, the secularization process needs to be gradual and inclusive. As required by the Taif Accord, parliament should put forth a transition plan. Under parliament’s oversight, a task force of leading political, intellectual, and religious figures would present proposals for a secular framework. A bicameral transition government would be formed—one chamber based on the current confessional framework and the other elected without confessional quotas. The chambers would work jointly on a strategy for national reconciliation to reaffirm the Lebanese identity through substantial reforms in governance, electoral law, and civic education.
Of course, this proposal assumes widespread political will, which thus far has been lacking. Public opinion is (predictably) divided along confessional lines. With changing demographics, former critics of confessionalism have become its strongest enthusiasts, while its former advocates are now its opponents. Shiite Muslims, with their plurality of the population, lament their current level of power compared to what they would exercise under a majority rule. Previously secularized Christians, on the other hand, are now fearful of the rising power of Muslims and are more willing to accept the confessionalized status quo.
In fact, a recent survey by the Lebanese Opinion Advisory Committee found that more than 50 percent of Lebanese agree that political confessionalism is rooted in Lebanese culture and cannot be removed. This political landscape is reflected in Lebanon’s parliamentary maneuvering. When the debate about abrogating confessionalism surfaced in January 2010, as it often does, the Shia speaker of parliament called for the formation of a national committee to oversee the process of ending this framework. Threatened by what they perceive would be the Islamization of the country, Christian leaders were quick to veto such a move.
Change will require a revitalized political and civic culture. If the champions of reform remain confessional leaders demanding a bigger piece of the pie, the result will be more knee-jerk defensiveness that exacerbates inter-communal hostilities. Perhaps, as Nawaf Salam, a Lebanese academic and diplomat, has written in “Deconfessionalizing the Call for Deconfessionalization” for the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, “Deconfessionalization is too serious an issue in Lebanon to be left to traditional politicians. Instead, it is a challenge for civil society and new social forces.” According to Salam, deconfessionalization will depend on the emergence of strong nongovernmental organizations that cut across sectarian barriers, collectively acting both as pressure groups and as a successful model for what a nonconfessional state would look like.
This path to a secular and sustainable Lebanon would be long and tortuous but, one hopes, possible. After all, when confessionalism was embedded in the country’s constitution, it was regarded as an interim political arrangement whose architects emphasized the need for its swift riddance. That was eight decades ago.
Michel Chiha, a Lebanese thinker, once wrote in Politique Intérieure, “A nation is a guarantee for confessions, but confessions are not a guarantee to the nation.” Indeed, without reform, they just might be the nation’s undoing.
