The Inescapable Dilemma: Consociationalist Power-Sharing in Lebanon between 1989 and 2009

Abstract

Throughout this study, it is argued that the consociational nature of Lebanon’s post-war regime has failed to effectively transform political decision-making power away from the country’s confessional groups towards the state as a cohesive entity. By the institutionalisation of consociational power-sharing institutions, confessional groups have been allowed to continue to preserve the interests and needs of their confession at the expense of those of the state. Put concretely, confessional leaders have been unwilling to implement major reforms that would deplete their guaranteed local power-base and have, in fact, used consociational power-sharing institutions to block any formal attempts to do so. In other words, for the sake of restoring political relations, power-sharing accords risk constructing decentralised governments that are not able to arrive at meaningful decision-making for the collective good, a fatal flaw that is insufficiently accounted for in the consociational debate.