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Oliver, Dominique Shane (2018) Transforming Lebanon. PhD thesis. SOAS University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/26661 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. 1 TRANSFORMING LEBANON DOMINIQUE SHANE OLIVER Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2017 Department of Politics and International Studies Schol of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 3 Abstract This work will disclose the ambiguities of the modern exercise of power in the context of the French colonial encounter in the Middle East during the interwar years. The French administration in Lebanon attempted to expand its rule through the build-up of a large bureaucracy designed to oversee social, economic and political affairs in the country. At the same time, it hoped to establish among residents of the different territories brought together within the country a new relation of power according to a chain of command that extended from the remotest village to the Quai d’Orsay. The new modern bureaucracy would be anathema to the myriad of laws, statutes and religious interpretations that had governed the vanquished Ottoman Empire. In addition to these formal structures of power, the French sought to reproduce their rule and consecrate their position through informal networks with new and traditional political bosses in the region. Although the French had hoped to employ informal arrangements to strengthen the formal institutions of governance, in practice, something different emerged. The bureaucracy empowered informal networks to alter and, ultimately, undermine the efforts of the high commission to administer the country. In these ways, it can be seen that the reproduction of space in the colonial setting was not a function of the imposition of formal institutions of government, but emerged through the capacity of informal networks to re- shape and re-appropriate the practices that underpinned this supposed new order. As a result of these often latent networks operative within the reproduction of power, the post- colonial moment appears as the evolution of—and not rupture with—the inequalities of colonial rule and contradictions of modern forms of power. 4 Table of Contents A Note on Translation 5 Introduction 6 II. Order on the Barricades: A Summary of French Designs of Urban Public Space in Syrian Tripoli 45 III. A Combination of Many Evils: Land Reform under the French Mandate 87 IV. Their Silence ought not Signify Innocence, Our Silence ought not Signify Cowardice 138 V. Eventual Reform 205 VI. Westward Expansion 254 List of Abbreviations 265 Bibliography 266 Appendix 281 Figure 1. Unofficial Population Estimates of Lebanon by Region and Town 281 Figure 2. Estimated Population Growth in Tripoli 282 Figure 3. Expansion of the Lebanese Public Budget 283 Acknowledgements 284 5 A Note on Translation The work that follows incorporates phrases, names and titles that were (and remain) freely translated and transliterated between French, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish at a time in the first part of the twentieth century when no universal transliteration standards existed. Rendering these words into English has proven complicated and complex. Rather than presenting these terms from nearly one century ago according to current linguistic tastes and standards, I have selected for the sake of simplicity and coherence what I remember from my research as the most commonly used transliterations while also including in the footnotes alternative renditions. All translations unless otherwise stated are my own. 6 Introduction 7 MAKING THE STATE IN THE NON-WEST “It is the state that makes the nation,” says Sami Zubaida.1 In keeping with Zubaida, statecraft in much of the world did not emerge from an imagined community or popular nationalist movement or awakening, but from imperialism, especially in many parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas. And if state-formation in some parts of the world was not a function of nationalist awakening but a product of imperial design, then how was colonial space produced in terms of discourse and practice? And what processes were instrumental to the reproduction of power within the colonial space? In order to address these questions, it is worth thinking about how colonial space was linked to modern forms of statehood. In terms of theory, the first task is to explore how statehood is related to the colonial experience. Critical in this examination is the capacity to understand the state as a series of practices and regulations that impact a social body of individuals. The second task is to analyze different schools of thought regarding the reproduction of power within a given space. Furthermore it remains necessary to examine the interplay between colonial mechanisms of authority, opposition to colonial rule and pre- existing forms of political mobilization. To give context to these questions, one potential area worth examining is colonial Lebanon. The history of the colonial period in this part of the eastern Mediterranean reveals something about the nature of the reproduction of power relations through the production of space. In particular, the mechanisms to administer colonial space were integral to practices of domination and strategies of resistance. The different forms of contestation to the mandate administration challenged and in some ways redefined the exercise of power. As will be seen later, the practices that defined the national borders effectively divided the country between 1 Zubaida, Sami. “The Fragments Invent the Nation.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 34 (2002) 206, 214. 8 Mount Lebanon and the annexed territories. The attempt to enforce these divisions not only transformed relations of power, but altered colonial designs as well. Seen from this perspective, examining the history of Lebanon raises the question of how statecraft is linked to colonial control as well as how the rearrangement of space affects political struggle? Whatever the goals of the metropole, colonial governance as practiced did not operate according to the designs of the mandate. Examining colonial state-building will highlight the ambiguities of power and resistance that underpin the production of space as well as the contradictions of colonial rule and their consequences for the post-colonial state. Colonial governance was not achieved through an overarching centralized logic that supplanted pre- existing understandings of space or through the cultivation of new systems of subjectivity and citizenship among the population. Institutional meddling and maneuvering complicated and challenged the exercise of power whatever extent it bolstered the new world order that the French had envisioned for the Levant. That the informal networks and alliances that Paris had assumed would strengthen its foothold in the country actually undermined its connection with the population illustrates the ambiguities of colonial modernity. In this way, it can be seen that the reproduction of space in the colonial setting was not a function of the imposition of formal institutions of government, but emerged through the capacity of informal networks to re-shape and re-appropriate the practices that had underpinned this supposed new order. As a result of these often latent networks operative within the maintenance of power, the post-colonial moment appears as the evolution of—and not rupture with—the inequalities of colonial rule and contradictions of modern forms of power. THE LOCATION OF POWER Rather than an anachronism to the modern exercise of power within the system of nation-states, colonial rule was constitutive in the practices and techniques of controlling the population associated with the modern state. One the one hand, historically within academia, 9 the experiences of statecraft in the non-west is often considered to be outside of the trajectory of modern state building in Europe and North America, in general.2 The genealogy of what is known as the west has no space for the colonial experience.3 For, the commonly assumed facets of the modern state—such as territorial sovereignty, the separation between domestic and foreign affairs, and the capacity to guarantee social order within its domain4 —are assumed to be absent in the colony. On the other hand, the bodies of scholarship dealing with post-colonial thought assert that colonialism in the non-west can be considered an aspect of modernity out of place with common representations of the west. In an allusion to the scholarship of Homi Bhabha, political theorist Timothy Mitchell asserts that, “the non-west must play the role of the outside, the otherness that creates the boundary of the space of modernity.”5 That is, the boundaries and the processes that produce the non-west are vital to understanding what it means to be modern and western. Indeed, this tendency to revert to binaries of traditional- modern, non-west and west is indicative of representations of differentiation. Such representations obscure the practices and discourses linking east to west. In turn, these latent links give rise to what Mitchell has described as colonial modernity. What is distinctive about colonial modernity, he contends, is that “the colonial- modern involves creating an effect we recognize as reality, by organizing the world endlessly 2 See Homi Bhabha’s criticism on the erasure of the colonial experience in the thoughts of modernity of Michel Foucault.