The Mandate for Syria and Lebanon in Global Perspective
Panel 079, sponsored bySyrian Studies Association (SSA), 2014 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 23 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
Daniel Gorman describes internationalism as a reigning "leitmotiv" of the 1920's. This panel proposes looking at changing notions of state and society in the mandate of Syria and Lebanon. More specifically, it asks how situating the mandate globally allows for a better understanding of the ways in which understandings of citizenship, civic order, and nationalism were negotiated locally but also internationally as well. To what extent were new understandings of citizenship and civic order fostered by the advent of the League of Nations and mandatory power, and to what extent can these articulations be attributed to an Ottoman legacy? What role did the significant Syro-Lebanese diaspora community play in the politics of the mandate period? How did people under mandatory rule situate themselves in relation to each other, the state, and international society?
Paper 1 looks at the spread of the Syrian Revolt of 1925 to the south Lebanon. It explores the participation of Syrian-Lebanese communities abroad, uncovering the critical role transnational propaganda and donations played in debates over the colonial civic order. Paper 2 looks the Syro-Lebanese immigrant community in Argentina during the interwar period, highlighting the ways in which press organs from multiple Latin American communities dialogued about their civic roles in both Latin America and the Mandate. Paper 3 examines the development of the welfare-state in Syria and Lebanon during the mandate period, with a specific focus on poverty-alleviation and the role of Syro-Lebanese immigrants in the slow transformation of legal structures during the Mandate era. Paper 4 looks at the graduates of the Université Saint-Joseph (such as Yusef Sawda, KT Khairallah, and Antun Gemayel) as a network in Beirut, Cairo, and Paris that promoted the idea of post-Ottoman federal Syria. With a focus on literary production, it explores the eventual articulation of a new Lebanese national identity. Paper 5 offers a reconsideration of citizenship in the early twentieth century Middle East, elaborating upon the idea of ‘citizens without states." It argues that the nation-state and the League of Nations were not the most important nineteenth and twentieth century developments in relation to citizenship and national identity.
In this paper, I examine the Syrian Revolt of 1925 through a different geographic lens. Heretofore, the history of the revolt has been generally limited to the boundaries of modern-day Syria. This paper will take the village of Rashaya, now part of Lebanon, to broaden the geography of the revolt. More specifically, I will explore the history of the revolt in light of the interaction between Syrian-Lebanese immigrant communities with those in Syria and Lebanon. In situating the revolt globally, the paper uncovers the critical role of propaganda and fundraising which took place across oceans and ultimately conditioned the outcome of debates and events surrounding the revolt. In turn, the flow of donations from the Americas prompted a dynamic debate over questions of homeland, nationalism, and sectarianism--and more particularly of the role of the mandatory government and international community in the compensation of Christian victims from south Lebanon. I will finally argue that diaspora activism played a critical role in influencing debates over the "colonial civic order" in south Lebanon, thereby spreading and deepening the confessional characteristics of Lebanese nationalism.
This paper is an attempt to offer a new theoretical framework for the study of citizenship in the early twentieth-century Middle East. The paper focuses on both the theoretical possibility of ‘citizens without states’ and various methods of ‘speaking to the state.’ Throughout the paper I develop the idea of ‘citizens without states’ by referring to the structural barriers to full international citizenship placed on individuals in the mandated territories of the former Ottoman Empire. At best these individuals were colonial citizens, yet more often than not their basic political rights were denied for various political and security reasons. With this in mind, the paper then develops the idea of ‘speaking to the state,’ a process through which individuals both asserted and attempted to claim their basic rights despite the various obstacles put in place by the mandates system. These methods varied from individual to individual, and place to place, but they nonetheless display certain similarities. These similarities are traceable to the legacies of the formation of Ottoman citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century. These connections, both across time and space, challenge notions of temporality and locality, and provide us with a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness of the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the age of globalization, the connections between the emerging states of the mandate period were indeed strong, and they displayed a remarkable resilience despite the resistance of the mandate authorities. The paper draws upon archival sources and unpublished personal records as a background for a substantial reworking of citizenship theory in the early twentieth-century. The paper speaks across disciplines, and incorporates literature from political science, anthropology, and sociology to formulate a more dynamic historical understanding of citizenship and the effects of globalization on a region that is traditionally left of this particular historical narrative. By moving the focus of citizenship away from the nation-state, I hope to offer an alternative framework that truly speaks to the global connections of the early-twentieth century.
In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, a loose group of authors in the Syro-Lebanese diaspora including Chékri Ganem, Nadra Moutran, and Joseph Saouda constructed an Orientalizing discourse to promote a Francophile Catholic vision of Syria’s future, emulating the values and rhetoric of their adopted homeland. At various points, these authors in the mahjar demanded self-rule, increased representation in the Ottoman administration, independence, and French mandatory rule over a federalized Syria. In both political publications and literary works including poetry, novels and theater, these authors drew upon their missionary educations in the schools of the Jesuits, Lazarists, and other French orders in Syria, as well as the memory of the 1860 massacres to express a hybrid identity. They revered France as the pinnacle of civilization and culture, while drawing Orientalist images of Syria and ‘Arabia’ as a wild and untamed land, taking a measure of pride in their Arab heritage. While they have been dismissed as shysters in the pay of foreign governments, Ganem and his cohort from Cairo to Paris engaged at times with Young Ottoman and CUP discourses on Ottomanism and modernization in Tanin for an Ottoman audience as well as Correspondance d’Orient and other newspapers for a French audience, while challenging Hamidian and Unionist centralization and the dearth of Arabs in positions of power after 1908. In their political activism in the 1910s and their shaping of the French Orientalist discourse during the First World War, they led a colonization of the mind, reproducing the values of their missionary education. Finally, this group of authors’ close association with the colonial lobby within the French Foreign Ministry, academic groups and commercial organizations meant they pursued a different agenda than their Young Ottoman and CUP contemporaries – autonomy, decentralization, and eventually the mandate system.
In this paper I examine the underlying notion at work when the French authorities began setting up the structure of Syria and Lebanon's welfare services.I have a specific focus on poverty alleviation. My sources are primarily based on French diplomatic records which are often intelligence reports so I provide caveats on this.I begin setting the context by looking at the pre-existing Ottoman system and the significant role of Anglo-American philanthropy in the Near East. There will be a short discussion of the conceptual frameworks, both European and Islamic, that tended toward welfare for the poor. I then examine the concrete initial expedient measures taken by the post-World War military administration as well as that administrations slow and variegated transformation into bureaucratic legal structures that allowed a greater degree of participation and intervention from Syro-Lebanese political channels. I expand on this Syro-Lebanese role, examining the important popular demand for amelioration of public policy as reflected in the contemporary press, and finish with an extensive look at the use of international networks by Syrians and Lebanese to put pressure on the authorities. This final section will look at the Syro-Lebanese immigrants in the Americas as well as Syrian and Lebanese lobbyists in Geneva, Paris and London. I conclude by considering the impact of the outbreak of the 1925 revolution on these efforts. I also offer tentative conclusions regarding the nascent welfare state and welfarism and its importance for Middle East Studies.
