“‘Our 1789’: The Transitional Program of the Lebanese National Movement and the Abolition of Sectarianism, 1975–77”
ABSTRACT Were the events of 1975–77 in Lebanon, commonly thought of today as an internecine sectarian war between Christians and Muslims, more comparable to the furies of revolution and counterrevolution? This article reframes the Lebanese National Movement's (LNM) “Transitional Program” as a revolutionary, anti-colonial, and radical republican challenge that sought to implement a new constitutional order based on popular sovereignty. Internally, it severed the link between sectarian affiliation and political representation that was the hallmark of the Lebanese regime. Externally, the program announced a commitment to popular struggle against imperially sustained settler colonialism in Palestine while calling into question the authoritarian practices of most regional regimes. Drawing from periodicals, memoirs, diplomatic sources, and interviews, this article considers the efforts of the LNM-PLO alliance to push the Transitional Program in the political sphere and on the battlefield. In turn, it demonstrates how the United States, Syria, Israel, and Lebanese counterrevolutionaries worked in concert to ensure that the sectarian regime would be preserved at the moment of its greatest challenge. Against a historiography that either dismisses the venture as predestined to fail or considers the period only within the shackles of post-defeat melancholia, it reevaluates the history of one of the most explicit emancipatory challenges to the Arab order.
Nathaniel George is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He was previously an Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies and holds a PhD in History from Rice University.
CITATION Nathaniel George; “Our 1789”: The Transitional Program of the Lebanese National Movement and the Abolition of Sectarianism, 1975–77. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2022; 42 (2): 470–488. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-9987957
IMAGE CREDIT “Against Imperialism and Zionism.” Lebanese National Movement, 1977. Clockwise from top left: Kamal Junblat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Che Guevara, nineteenth-century Mount Lebanese peasant rebel Tanyus Shahin, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba. Source: SignsOfConflict.com and the PSP Archives.
