Read on Twitter
THREAD For years, governments who describe themselves as “friends of Lebanon” groomed the country’s ruling class to behave as it is doing today. Foreign officials now condemn Lebanese politicians for the exact same behaviors they used to condone
Constant foreign meddling has fueled the Lebanese establishment’s tendency to blame all its problems on external schemes—even the country’s financial collapse, which is straightforwardly due to a homegrown, well-documented Ponzi scheme
Similarly, foreign interventions have fed a reflexive belief that solutions to Lebanese problems are to be found abroad. Historically, local political agreements generally required external brokering—and, most often, foreign funds to sweeten the deal
Accordingly, Lebanese leaders and their foreign partners alike have long prioritized high-up deal-making at the expense of the most basic governance, drawing on orientalist references to Lebanon’s complexity, fragility, and resilience to gloss over the latter
Foreign states meanwhile played a key role in legitimizing Lebanon’s most problematic figures: greeting them with great pomp or even decorating them with medals, despite their lacking any real accomplishment beyond sectarian credentials
Until recently, Lebanon’s establishment also enjoyed uninterrupted access to an unconditional stream of foreign funds: to finance infrastructure and equipment that would quickly decay, or to draft new laws and grand visions of reform that would immediately be shelved
Foreign money would goes as far as to refurbish Lebanon’s military tribunal and expand its cybersecurity bureau, while they were used to harass critics and silence the most benign, legitimate concerns over festering problems like poor waste management
Both Lebanese politicians and their external partners took to explaining away the lack of any progress by pulling up a set of cliched excuses: the legacy of the civil war (although most governance-related problems precede it), geopolitics, terrorism, and refugees
Even as the risk of imminent bankruptcy became evident, in 2017, foreign officials were reluctant to grapple with the perils of an increasingly self-destructive rentier economy, based entirely on attracting foreign currency to spend it unaccountably
Although some may argue that the CEDRE conference held in Paris in 2018 testifies to the contrary, this attempted bailout had in fact all the hallmarks of past complacency, and could only guarantee more of the same
Granted, the loans pledged at the conference included some conditionalities—austerity and perfunctory transparency measures. But donors never required the Lebanese government to produce essential financial data, or to close and audit any of its past budgets
Nor did they even demand an economic plan per se. Instead, Lebanon’s ruling class produced an long shopping list of seemingly random, expensive infrastructure projects, meant to profit Lebanon’s many networks of crony capitalists at the cost of more public debt
In any event, the bailout conference was less of a financial than a political exercise. It was triggered by the abduction in Saudi Arabia and forced resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister, rocking a national unity government seen as essential to stability
CEDRE was convened as part of an intense international effort to cobble that government back together. It took place just one month before parliamentarian elections, and likely helped the current political class win a crushing victory, for which they didn’t even campaign
In parallel, two other pledging conferences occurred: The same donor states who met in Paris sat again in Brussels to finance refugee-related programs, and then in Rome to support the Lebanese security apparatus. Both events produced unconditional funding
This choreography contained an unmistakable message: While development money had strings attached, Lebanon could count on securitization and humanitarian aid to feed its rent economy, and on its international partners to rally to the political status quo for fear of instability
It is no surprise, then, that the national unity government recreated on this basis would fail to implement the smallest reform during the 18 months of looming financial disaster that separated CEDRE from the late-2019 uprising
Nor have the country’s politicians taken any steps since, for a simple reason: Their entire political culture flows from cashing in on rentierism. None has demonstrated any experience with, understanding of, or clear interest in state governance and economic productivity
In that context, the growing chorus of condemnations from Lebanon’s partners does little more than distract from their own responsibility in today’s impasse. Any transition calls for change not just in Lebanon, but in how its purported friends claim to help it
Pour les francophones, voici notre analyse detaillee publiee lors de la reunion CEDRE : "Il s’agit de donner un peu de temps au système, en lui apportant un soutien symbolique et politique, tout en renforçant ses travers." https://www.synaps.network/post/liban-cedre-paris-conference-dette
