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When U.S. envoy Tom Barrack speaks of Syria as if it were an organic nation and Lebanon as the colonial hodgepodge, he has it precisely backward.
U.S. envoy Tom Barrack keeps warning that Lebanon will be “reabsorbed” into Syria unless Hezbollah is disarmed, a historically unfounded threat from someone who derides the Sykes-Picot boundaries as colonial nonsense yet treats Syria’s borders as sacrosanct. His selective anti-colonialism spares Syria, disregards Kurdish and Druze self-determination there, and happily erases Lebanon’s sovereignty entirely.
A brief history of Lebanon shows how it emerged as the Levant’s first nation-state—a 17th-century Western concept that later reached the region—and remains its oldest still standing, with every historical right to stay that way. Lebanon is not perfect, but it is not the illegitimate upstart in the room.
In its prehistory—beginning 3,200 years ago with the Phoenicians—what is now Lebanon was organized into competing city-states: Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and later Carthage. At times, one Phoenician city-state took over or unified with another, resulting in a thalassocracy, a maritime empire. Yet, like all ancient kingdoms and empires, the Phoenicians were not a nation-state.
In the ensuing millennia, empires invaded one another continuously. Dynasties that anointed themselves God’s shadow on earth—like the Ottoman Turks in the Levant—subdued other kingdoms. This was the only system of human government, until warring European kingdoms stumbled, in 1648, upon a more peaceful arrangement: the Treaty of Westphalia.
The Westphalian state is the modern sovereign nation-state model, characterized by territorial exclusivity and by states pledging not to interfere in one another’s domestic affairs. It took nearly two centuries for the nation-state concept to reach the Muslim world, beginning with Napoleon’s 1799 invasion and three-year rule over Egypt.
Confronted by a far more advanced West, Muslims split into two camps: Islamists, who blamed decline on the abandonment of what they considered pure seventh-century Islam and demanded its militant revival, and modernizers, who urged the adoption of Western secular ideas. The modernizing current spread most rapidly among the empire’s long-oppressed non-Muslim communities, who had endured centuries of subordination.
In Mount Lebanon, where Christians and Druze formed the densest concentrations, European ideas sparked a powerful drive for autonomy and eventual secession, backed by European powers eager to secure commercial footholds along the routes to India.
Beginning in the 1700s, Lebanese tribal chiefs, who doubled as tax farmers for Istanbul, started acting independently. European powers supported them while the Ottomans turned Muslims against them. Mount Lebanon thus suffered two rounds of civil war in 1840 and 1860, but after each round, the area coalesced as an autonomous entity that eventually emerged as the nation-state of Lebanon.
None of the other territories in the Levant had large enough non-Muslim communities pushing for independence. Levantine Muslims were content living under the Turkish sultan. Syria continued to be two or more Ottoman provinces, and so were Palestine and Jordan.
When France was granted the Levant mandate in 1920, it did not invent Lebanon out of thin air. It simply enlarged the already existing, historically recognized Mount Lebanon entity, known as the Mutasarrifiyyah, by adding Beirut, the north, the south, and the Bekaa – regions that had strong economic and cultural ties to Mount Lebanon and, crucially, large Christian and Shia populations who largely welcomed inclusion in Greater Lebanon.
Syria, by contrast, had never existed as a nation-state before 1927. Even after independence in 1946, Syria’s Sunni Arab majority never fully accepted its borders. This fueled endless Baathist and Nasserist dreams of swallowing Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine into a “Greater Syria.”
Palestine followed a similar path: it had no prior unified statehood, its borders were drawn in 1920, its Sunni Arab majority rejected the state, while its Jewish, Druze, and Christian minorities endorsed it. The binational Arab-Jewish Palestine ultimately failed. In 1948, the Jews declared their own nation-state, Israel. In 1964, the Arabs demanded an explicitly Arab and Muslim Palestine within the 1920 borders.
Lebanon alone entered the twentieth century carrying the markers of an already mature national identity: a centuries-old cedar emblem, long used as the official seal of the Maronite Church; a distinctive flag, free from the pan-Arab Hashemite colors that would later dominate every neighbor; and an uninterrupted tradition of locally elected councils stretching back to the 1860s.
So when Barrack speaks of Syria as if it were an organic nation and Lebanon as the colonial hodgepodge, he has it precisely backward. Lebanon’s core, Mount Lebanon, was the first part of the Levant to achieve recognized autonomous proto-statehood in the modern era. Syria is the newer, more artificial construct – and the one whose pan-Arab nationalist, and now Islamist, myths have caused endless trouble for its neighbors.
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