Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon

By Reinoud Leenders

In Spoils of Truce, Reinoud Leenders documents the extensive corruption that accompanied the reconstruction of Lebanon after the end of a decade and a half of civil war. With the signing of the Ta’if peace accord in 1989, the rebuilding of the country’s shattered physical infrastructure and the establishment of a functioning state apparatus became critical demands. Despite the urgent needs of its citizens, however, graft was rampant. Leenders describes the extent and nature of this corruption in key sectors of the Lebanese economy and government, including transportation, health care, energy, natural resources, construction, and social assistance programs.

Exploring in detail how corruption implicated senior policymakers and high-ranking public servants, Leenders offers a clear-eyed perspective on state institutions in the developing world. He also addresses the overriding role of the Syrian leadership’s interests in Lebanon and in particular its manipulation of the country’s internal differences. His qualitative and disaggregated approach to dissecting the politics of creating and reshaping state institutions complements the more typical quantitative methods used in the study of corruption. More broadly, Spoils of Truce will be uncomfortable reading for those who insist that power-sharing strategies in conflict management and resolution provide some sort of panacea for divided societies hoping to recover from armed conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801465437

Reinoud Leenders

Reinoud Leenders is Reader in International Relations with a focus on Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He is coeditor of Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation, and Regime Resilience in Syria and Iran.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Corruption: A Window into the State of Postwar Lebanon

For many years Lebanon featured as a textbook case of civil war and sectarian conflict. It is less likely, however, that the country will be a model for postwar recovery. Some would argue that given the magnitude of destruction from which Lebanon awoke in the early 1990s, any step toward normalization and recovery should be regarded as a major accomplishment. The events (al-hawadith), as the cycles of killing and atrocities in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 are often euphemistically referred to, left this small country with approximately 150,000 people killed, tens of thousands of others displaced, most state institutions paralyzed or collapsed, its physical infrastructure largely destroyed at an estimated cost of $25 billion, and with an estimated fall in per capita income by two-thirds compared to prewar levels (Lebanese Republic 2002; Labaki and Abou Rjeily 1993, 25).

Not that the early 1990s were devoid of political violence. Yet with the notable exception of the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon’s infrastructure in the summer of 2006, which caused the deaths of over one thousand Lebanese, the scale of violence paled in comparison with the much bloodier 1970s and 1980s. The relative improvement of the country’s security conditions, not least thanks to the remarkable reconstitution of the Lebanese army, allowed many ordinary Lebanese to return to a modicum of normalcy. Following the Ta’if peace accord of October 1989, named for the Saudi resort that hosted the survivors from Lebanon’s Parliament (fifty-eight out of seventy deputies elected in 1972), and the birth of Lebanon’s Second Republic one year later,¹ Syrian armed forces helped keep a lid on recurring political violence, even though their increasingly heavy-handed approach earned them the label of an occupation force. Beginning in 1992, under relatively peaceful conditions, parliamentary elections were held every four years, mostly on time as prescribed by the country’s amended constitution. The large coalition governments formed after 1990, comprising most of the country’s political elites, have been less stable and often short-lived, but the rapid succession of leadership did not prompt a return to the level of political violence that the country had endured throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, Lebanon’s ambitious postwar reconstruction program, initiated after the end of major intra-Lebanese clashes in the early 1990s but gaining speed from 1992 on, improved general living standards, although some benefited far more than others.

It was these accomplishments that Rafiq al-Hariri—a gifted businessman-turned-politician who served five times as prime minister in this period—underscored and took credit for when, in 1999, he drew up a balance sheet of achievements and successes in Lebanon’s struggle for recovery (Hariri 1999). In view of a disturbing trend in which postwar countries return to armed conflict within a few years, his claims seemed justified. Perhaps fearing that this progress was at risk six years later, many Lebanese remembered Hariri for these same accomplishments after a huge bomb blast in the center of Beirut hit his motorcade on 14 February 2005, killing him and more than twenty others. Lebanon was to enter a new era marked by the departure of Syrian troops only a few months later—yet, it soon appeared, not necessarily for the better. Internal and often sectarian frictions among Lebanese, to a significant degree ignited by outside forces, again turned violent and effectively put the country’s stunted recovery on hold.

Looking back at the past twenty years or so, and irrespective of their diverging views, most Lebanese agree that the achievements in terms of their country’s recovery and reconstruction came at too high a price. The most frequently and persistently expressed grievance concerns political corruption, which has come to be widely perceived as endemic. As shown in table 1.1, numerous opinion polls and surveys since 1992, registering the views of Lebanese and of outside observers, confirm this broadly shared impression.

Even a casual visitor to Lebanon will not be surprised by the overwhelming and damning consensus suggested by these surveys. Many Lebanese look at their political leaders and state institutions predominantly through the prism of omnipresent corruption, and they are quick to share this view with visitors. For their part, Lebanon’s political elites have similarly acknowledged corruption as a key problem. Battles among political leaders in the various governments after Ta’if were often fought by exchanging allegations over corruption. Individual denials were just as frequent, but taken together the accusations were tantamount to an embarrassing confession that the reconstruction of Lebanon had brought about an insupportable degree of corruption.

TABLE 1.1.

Surveys and polls on corruption in Lebanon, 1992–2008

The Backdrop to This Book

This book presents an assessment of political corruption in postwar Lebanon and offers an explanation for its pervasiveness. In this respect it engages with a growing body of literature on the study of comparative corruption, bribery, rent-seeking, and crony capitalism, primarily in less developed countries (LDCs). Until the late 1970s, social scientists working on corruption in LDCs routinely complained about their colleagues’ lack of interest, prompting one of them to talk about a conspiracy of silence (Andreski 1978, 347). Such complaints are no longer justified. An overwhelming quantity of studies has transformed the onetime conspiracy of silence into a cacophony of views, models, and opinions dealing with corruption. A great deal of this relatively recent academic interest in corruption evolved out of concerns that in many LDCs, efforts to boost modernization or development—repackaged and made pertinent by the World Bank and the IMF’s structural adjustment programs—had failed to deliver.² Against this background, it has increasingly been asserted that corruption raises serious obstacles to economic growth and associated good governance, and that the phenomenon constitutes a drain on emerging economies.³ Most economists have focused on assessing or demonstrating the economic costs of corruption or—using an inverse logic—highlighting the economic virtues of corruption’s assumed antitheses: transparency, accountability, and good governance. Other analysts have taken a moral or more overtly political interest in the subject, driven by outrage over a host of other disastrous effects attributed to corruption.

In Lebanon, politicians, activists, intellectuals, journalists, and the public at large have echoed such views, primarily in search of an explanation for the country’s unsatisfactory economic performance and mounting debt burden since its supposed recovery from war in the 1990s.⁴ In 2004 the Lebanese economist Samir Makdisi succinctly summarized Lebanon’s economic slump in reference to a series of indicators showing that the economy [is] relatively stagnant, fiscal deficits [are] running high, the public debt burden [is] rapidly mounting, the [Lebanese] pound [is] under pressure, and the Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves [are] under pressure (2004, 107). My research is not designed to support or to take issue with those who blame poor economic performance on endemic corruption, either in Lebanon or generally. Nor do I necessarily agree or disagree with a range of political activists who denounce corrupt politicians when, for example, conflicts of interest and corrupt transactions damage the environment or perpetuate socioeconomic disparities. Such arguments certainly increase the relevance of any study on corruption. Yet I must emphasize that my own interest in political corruption originated in a different set of considerations.

In their zeal to condemn corruption, Lebanon’s activists appear intuitively to underscore a way to analyze and understand the fundamental roles and qualities of the Lebanese state. Challenging corruption can be seen as a first step toward a reappraisal of state-society boundaries and accepted standards of political behavior. Not coincidentally, the still inconclusive debate in comparative political thought about fundamental questions pertaining to the state has interrogated the paired opposition between public and private (Weintraub 1997, 4). A focus on corruption condenses some of these questions by exploring whether, how, and where this supposedly clear dichotomy is maintained when state institutions are being built, altered, and put into operation. It is this background that prompted me to look at the extent and causes of political corruption in postwar Lebanon.

A focus on political corruption and Lebanon’s state institutions promises an added value: in contrast to the lively debates raging in Lebanon, academic research on the country’s society, economy, and politics seems to suggest that the state is of little relevance and not worth further analysis. The result, as one Lebanese economist put it, is that generally speaking, the Lebanese [state] administration is a victim of clichés and remains largely unknown (Nahas 2005, 109). Studies of Lebanon have pointed out a vast range of interesting aspects of its turbulent politics and political economy, and many of them contributed to my own understanding of the country. But I found no detailed characterization of the contemporary Lebanese state or its institutions, and especially none that covers the postwar period. This relative lack of interest in the Lebanese state also marks much of the literature on Lebanon’s sectarian or confessional politics. Thus the Lebanese state is virtually absent in studies evolving out of the school of consociational democracy, which cast Lebanon, particularly in the prewar period, as one of its major examples in the Third World.⁵ This is less of a surprise when we realize that this comparative and essentially normative approach to conflict management rarely showed much interest in the state anywhere, not just in Lebanon.⁶ In sum, the virtual absence of the state in the study of Lebanese politics may simply suggest that others do not share my research interest in how the state in Lebanon has manifested itself and why. Yet while the literature implies that the Lebanese state was of secondary importance, the fierce political battles over the role of the state indicated quite the contrary. To find guidelines for studying political corruption in postwar Lebanon, I had to look elsewhere. I found some consolation in the fact that Lebanon is not the only country believed to sustain high levels of political corruption.

Key Concepts of My Approach

My approach to the subject of rampant political corruption in postwar Lebanon is simple and straightforward. This simplification is deliberate, as I aim to offer a persuasive elucidation of the causes of corruption with reference to as few independent variables as possible while capturing the widest possible manifestation of the dependent variable (corruption). In essence, I contend that political corruption in postwar Lebanon has been rampant, and is mainly due to the high degree to which public institutions diverged from the criteria of bureaucratic organization. In turn, the debilitating nature of the political settlement initiated in the early 1990s, and evolving since, explains the limited extent to which corruption-prone public institutions in postwar Lebanon met these criteria. Put differently, the ways in which politics, or the political game, is structured and organized tells us a great deal about why institutions fail to curb, and indeed generate, ever-proliferating opportunities for corruption. In light of this central argument, a few reflections on theory and methodology are in order.

Political corruption is defined here as the use or abuse of public office for private gain. This shorthand designation is in line with many current approaches. I employ it despite its unresolved shortcomings and pitfalls. In locating corruption at the boundaries between the public and private spheres, I differ from dominant approaches within neoclassical economics that often equate corruption to rents, rent-seeking, or directly unproductive profit-seeking (DUP) activities (Krueger 1974; Bhagwati 1982; Buchanan, Tullock, and Tollison 1980; Colander 1984). DUP activities may include corruption but also entail other forms of supposedly unproductive or inefficient profit-seeking activities.

To limit the study of such an unwieldy phenomenon as political corruption to manageable proportions, I decided to concentrate on high political corruption, that is, forms of corruption occurring at the top of the state’s bureaucracy and its agencies (for example, among ministers, directors-general, and other senior officials), rather than those that occur at lower echelons of state bureaucracies.⁷ The reasons for doing so are mainly pragmatic, not because I believe that low political corruption is necessarily any less important, less harmful, or less worth studying.

Many studies, including those that adhere to a similar definition of the phenomenon, treat corruption as a rather abstract notion without stating explicitly that the term refers to an aggregate of extremely diverse transactions and forms of conduct, occurring in equally varying institutional and political contexts. Economists especially favor regression analyses aimed at establishing correlations between corruption and variables such as the extent of government interference in the economy. One important advantage of such aggregated approaches may be that they allow for general and universal claims about corruption and correlating variables. Yet they fail to unpack the different manifestations and meanings of corruption. As a result, they assume rather than demonstrate a commonality between various forms and contexts of corruption. As Ed Brown and Jonathan Cloke argue, too much is expected of corruption as a single term[;] it cannot encompass so many different types of behaviour and motivations (2004, 284). Accordingly, one could plausibly counter that political corruption refers to such a heterogeneous category of practices that there is no reason to assume a priori that those categories share a common denominator warranting all-embracing causal explanations. To address this problem, we need first to disaggregate existing corruption in its various manifestations and analyze it in the specific contexts in which it occurs. Only after we show that individual occurrences of corruption share certain characteristics can we move to a higher level of abstraction. This excursion will inevitably explore the seemingly endless manifestations of corruption—ranging from bid rigging, influence peddling, collusion, extortion, theft of public funds, and nepotism to outright bribery. It is in this sense that I hope to contribute to a small but growing body of qualitative literature on corruption, within the Middle East and beyond, that does not shy away from detailed and disaggregated approaches to corruption.⁸

It is also worth stressing that political corruption will be explored here in terms of identifiable and structural conditions that explain its pervasiveness. This may appear to be self-evident. Yet in this respect I take a course very different from the dominant literature on corruption, particularly writings emanating from the new political economy or neoclassical economic thought. The latter in its various branches uses profit-seeking and utility-maximizing assumptions in the study of corruption, primarily toward the end of designing effective remedies against corruption. Indeed, some of those preoccupied with the perilous effects of corruption admit to their impatience when it comes to understanding its causes (Klitgaard 1991, 123). In contrast, I insist on seeking a causal explanation for pervasive corruption in a particular context and restricted time period. Likewise, formulating policy proposals to reduce corruption is not my main preoccupation. Nevertheless, I believe that a successful anticorruption drive should start with an understanding of the causes of rampant corruption and then address them. Indeed, as I demonstrate, anticorruption reforms in postwar Lebanon have not done this and therefore were doomed to fail.

Furthermore, I postulate that corruption, as defined and approached here, is ultimately a political phenomenon. Explanatory variables for widespread and persistent corruption are thus to be found in what can be loosely termed the political process. In essence, I suggest a two-track approach to this political process in which I emphasize the qualities of state institutions and the ways in which these institutions are being built, shaped, and contested.

Earlier modernization theories on corruption, more recent approaches within the New Institutional Economics (NIE), and adherents to the notion of good governance alike have drawn attention to certain qualities of state institutions to explain the prevalence of political corruption, especially in settings of underdevelopment. Against this background, the notion of a Weberian-style state bureaucracy has regained currency in the study of corruption and anticorruption reforms. Modern public administration, as Max Weber saw it, is associated with making decisions based on neutral, universalistic, and clearly defined criteria. Accordingly, he argued that the distinction between an objective legal order and the subjective rights of the individual…presupposes the conceptual separation of the ‘state’…from all personal authority of individuals ((1978, 998). This, in essence, is brought about by a state bureaucracy, which he defines as a hierarchical organization that meets six main criteria (956–58). Following one authoritative study on the subject (Page 1985, 9), I suggest grouping Weber’s criteria into three main components: (a) clear goal formulation and rules governing the operations of state agencies, (b) the existence of control and audit mechanisms, and (c) strict separation between public office and private interests. State institutions that fail to meet these three criteria of bureaucratic organization, or meet them insufficiently, are likely to be prone to political corruption. Institutions characterized by discretionary powers, lack of oversight or impunity, and conflicts of interests are bound to be corrupt.

Weber, of course, designed his conceptualization of bureaucratic organization as an ideal type, a concept that helps us to understand real-existing institutions but should not be equated with them. Hence, the use of these criteria calls for some caution. Most important, no real-existing public institution is likely to match the three criteria perfectly; nor, perhaps, is it desirable that it does so. Even in the most highly developed bureaucratic organizations, clear mandates, regulations, and external checks are all important, but some scope for flexibility and adaptation survives (Pierre and Peters 2000, 18). This degree of flexibility has indeed been stressed by adherents of new public management as desirable if public administration is to be more effective, efficient, and service-oriented (Barzelay 2001; Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996). In fact, analysts of Western public institutions who study the demise of the welfare state have observed a trend toward the weakening of bureaucratic organization, to make room for smaller scales, flexibility, diversification, informal exchange rather than formal control, and sharing power between state and market rather than maintaining a strict division between the public and the private (Pierre and Peters 2000, 15). In line with these developments, neoliberal policies, primarily articulated and enforced by the World Bank, have until recently deemphasized bureaucratic features in LDCs and insisted on reform programs aimed at removing the perceived inefficiencies and rigidities attributed to the overregulation and excessive centralization of bureaucracies in LDCs (El Ghaziri 2007, 32–36; Hirschmann 1999). Yet in the study of public administration this approach has now been largely discredited, in both normative and analytical terms. As Jon Pierre and B. G. Peters (2000, 18) argued over a decade ago, the notion of flexibility should not replace bureaucratic organization but should be seen as complementary to it. Moreover, institutional realities may be at variance with bureaucratic organization, but they can still be perceived as deriving from Weber’s ideal type (Meyer and Rowan 1977). That is to say, as long as notions such as transparency and accountability are valued as desirable, bureaucratic organization will continue to function as a benchmark for how public institutions operate. Furthermore, as Weberian bureaucratic features constitute an ideal type, my claim regarding their association with rampant corruption needs to be qualified in probabilistic terms and to entail a continuum. In other words, I suggest that the more public institutions deviate from the criteria of bureaucratic organization, the more likely it is that these institutions will be marked by high incidences of political corruption.

Nor is the precise meaning of the third criterion of bureaucratic organization—the distinction between public office and private interests—cast in stone. Weber explained, The civil service separates the bureau from the private domicile of the official and, in general, segregates official activity from the sphere of private life (1978, 957). Failing this distinction, a conflict of interests denotes a situation in which an official has a private…interest sufficient to influence, or appear to influence, the exercise of his public duties and responsibilities (Williams 1985, 6). Of course, a conflict of interest does not equal corruption. Whereas the former refers to a situation that may feed suspicions of corruption by increasing its probability, the latter is an act in which an official has intentionally and in fact used his office for his private benefit. Yet it needs to be emphasized that even in developed bureaucratic environments, only since the 1970s has the notion of conflict of interest been sharpened to prevent officials from using their office for private gain. Discussions of specific forms of alleged conflicts of interest, such as officials taking jobs in business after a career in the civil service, continue unabated. Moreover, there is no clear consensus among countries as to where the boundary between public office and private interests should be drawn, as witnessed by relatively lax regulations in the United States compared to most European countries (Williams 1985, 113ff.). More generally, the distinction between public and private domains is itself subject to change and is far from universal. I maintain, however, that it is still possible to demonstrate blatant conflicts of interest empirically, even when a country’s legal system would not categorize them as such.⁹ A conservative approach nevertheless seems advisable in this respect so as not to subject the cases to unrealistically high standards. Also, a study of conflicts of interest can be informative by showing the extent to which and ways in which the boundaries between public and private are drawn. Through this third criterion of bureaucratic organization, it thus becomes possible to assess the separateness of the state, or its status as a distinct entity.

Modernization theorists who focused on Weberian-style bureaucracies were often found guilty of a Western or Eurocentric bias in dismissing non-Western attempts at state institution building. I hope to steer clear of such a bias; I see no analytical virtue in simply observing that a non-Western setting, in this case Lebanon, fails to comply with Western standards. Neither do I share the assumption of modernization theory that bureaucratic organizations in LDCs inevitably develop in linear fashion, as if developing countries followed some imaginary path toward modernization. Nor do I adhere to related approaches wherein the negation of Western genealogies in settings of development or modernization is supposed to account for the low quality of public institutions. On the contrary, an explanation of how and why certain public institutions are built should be placed within the political contexts of those countries themselves. In short, by using the concept of bureaucratic organization, I will ultimately be better able to conceptualize how particular institutions operated as they did. As Sudipta Kaviraj put it in a different context, By using a familiar concept, and by carefully observing the processes and reasons for its disconfirmation, we can begin to inflect or change the concept, or see that in its logical place we need some other concept, not the one we have used (1990, 51).

Many studies of the appropriate structures of state institutions, particularly those associated with administrative reform and good governance packages advocated by the World Bank, end here: institutional qualities and their desired modifications are habitually portrayed as matters of technical or managerial interest and subjected to expert interventions without regard to their political ramifications. By contrast, in this study of political corruption in postwar Lebanon, I seek an explanation for the changing qualities of state institutions, to the extent that they are relevant for understanding rampant corruption, by placing the creation, modification, and functioning of state institutions firmly into the political process.

We know from NIE that institutions, once created, can have a tremendous impact on how resources will be generated and distributed (North 1981, 1989, and 1990; Bardhan 1989; Nabli and Nugent 1989). Moreover, institutions are durable and have a tendency to be sticky; they often have long life spans, exceeding their usefulness from the perspective of efficiency. NIE theorists add that political actors, of course, are not unaware of these characteristics, which is why institutions should be regarded as political to the core (Shepsle 1999) and, consequently, why battles over them are so hard fought. In other words, an analysis of conflicts over distributional gain and of the way these conflicts are resolved needs to be placed at center stage (Knight 1992, 123). All these observations, I contend, are relevant to the formation of one specific set of institutions: state bureaucracies. What political processes can account for the building of public institutions with a specific location on the continuum of bureaucratic organization?

NIE generally answers this question by giving primacy to decision-making rules. Emphasis in this context is given to the formal rules, compliance procedures, and standard operating practices that structure the relationship between individuals in various units of the polity and economy (Hall 1986, 19). Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo (1992), two historical institutionalists, assert that by mediating relations of cooperation and conflict, rules structure political situations and leave their own imprint on political outcomes, that is, on institutions. As Douglass North puts it, rules "constitute ex ante agreements about cooperation among politicians" and will therefore affect political outcomes in general (1990, 50). For our more modest purposes, it is necessary to identify the rules affecting the decision-making process and political struggles in the creation of new state institutions and/or the initiation of institutional change. Formal rules such as those embodied in the constitutional framework, laws, and bylaws governing public decision making are important. But one also needs to identify how such formal rules are applied, used, or manipulated and consider possible other factors that can impose or shape rules of institution building. The rules (both written and unwritten) and their application, and possible externalities, which in concert determine the process of institution building I call the political settlement. The nature of this political settlement, I will argue, ultimately explains institutions’ location on the bureaucratic continuum.

Certain moments of dramatic change (such as institutional breakdown or the sudden rise of new political actors) can have a fundamental and lasting impact on the political settlement. Political settlements can be expected to emerge in a piecemeal fashion over a long period of time; their analysis thus warrants a historical approach. As Elisabeth Clemens and James Cook put it, Historical analyses demonstrate how choices among institutional arrangements [i.e., political settlements] may be ‘constitutive moments’ or branching points that channel subsequent political and economic developments, that is, institutional outcomes (1999, 447). I suggest that the 1989 Ta’if Accord, and the subsequent constitutional changes of the early 1990s, signified such a constitutive moment; it therefore serves as the starting point for my inquiry into Lebanon’s postwar political settlement.

My focus on the making and effects of Lebanon’s political settlement has determined the time period covered by this book, October 1989 through April 2005. When reference is made to postwar Lebanon, the 1989 Ta’if Accord marks the beginning of this time frame. It was at this moment that Lebanon embarked on a new political experience that profoundly affected state institutions and associated levels of corruption. Hence we can circumvent the ambiguities associated with a more literal application of postwar as designating a strict end to violence and the start of recovery or reconstruction. Conditions in Lebanon after 1989 do not qualify as peaceful, however defined. With continuing political violence and recurrent armed clashes, we might think that the country’s status is probably better described as a lengthy truce, and an imperfect one at that.¹⁰ Nor do I choose April 2005 to suggest that Lebanon’s postwar era has come to an end, although speculation about looming violence and sectarian clashes suggests that the country may be pushed in that direction. Instead, April 2005 was chosen because it produced another turning point that affected Lebanon’s political settlement, marked by the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

The Perils and Pitfalls of Corruptology

Hard facts are a rare commodity in most research on the politics of developing countries, and fully reliable data on corruption are even harder to obtain. Lebanon is sparsely endowed with information on its political, economic, and social life that in many other countries is often taken for granted. This hampers an investigation into corruption, particularly one that insists on disentangling real manifestations of corruption in full detail. Yet a focus on corruption, typically concealed from the public eye and constituting at least a significant part of Lebanon’s omnipresent non-formal economic transactions, can help to address the data gap and, in turn, become the basis of a more detailed, more comprehensive, and better understanding of the country’s state-society relations and politics.

This is not to play down the contentious nature of corruption and the problems this may cause the researcher. Indeed, no indicator of corruption goes uncontested. Moreover, on the one hand, state officials and politicians do not like to advertise shady deals that others may classify as corruption. Their opponents and critics, on the other hand, may have a clear interest in exaggerating reports of corruption or fabricating them altogether in an attempt to discredit rivals. The tasks for the researcher on political corruption are made even more difficult as he or she (or his or her informer) is confronted not only by the standards regarding verifiable analyses prized by academic colleagues, but also by real or potential actions (including threats, intimidation, violence, or libel suits) taken by politicians, senior officials, and their sympathizers who feel called to account. Indeed, at least a dozen Lebanese whistleblowers about real or alleged corruption have been subjected to such sanctions.

Readers accustomed to countries where the rule of law is commonly upheld may suggest that, in order to circumvent the problems associated with politically informed slander and untrustworthy allegations, research on corruption is better limited to cases that have been proved in court. Anyone familiar with Lebanon’s largely defunct judiciary and legal process will know that putting one’s faith in the Lebanese courts, for research purposes or indeed with the aim of seeking justice, is not a viable option. Perhaps most tellingly, the number of politicians and/or state officials brought to trial on corruption charges is negligible; actual convictions have been even less frequent. This is not for lack of relevant legislation. The country’s Penal Code (art. 351) makes corruption and related misconduct a criminal offense. In December 1999 the Lebanese Parliament amended a largely defunct law, the Illicit Wealth Law (Legislative Decree 38 of 18 February 1953, commonly referred to as the law on where did you get this from?—min ween lika haida?), purportedly to ensure more effective enforcement of existing anticorruption legislation. It obliged ministers and senior public servants to declare their personal wealth prior to taking up and immediately after leaving office. In addition, the Lebanese constitution (art. 80) allows for establishing a Supreme Court, composed of members of Parliament and senior judges and invested with the authority to revoke the political immunity of presidents, ministers, and members of Parliament and try them for offenses ranging from treason to corruption. Yet a host of factors—including loopholes within existing legislation, persistent political interference in the judiciary, judicial mismanagement and inefficiency, and indeed judicial corruption—has consistently worked against the use of these legal tools (Taqi ad-Din et al. 1999; Takieddine 2004; Mugraby 2000; UNDP 2001; World Bank 2005a; CDL 12 March 1998).

In the absence of one comprehensive and reliable indicator of corruption, I concur with David Kang’s observation that only a variety of indicators can give us a sense of the size and pattern of corruption (2002, 19). In the period under study, many allegations have been raised in a wide range of sources: local and regional media, a few books, reports by NGOs, private consultancy agencies, and the World Bank, and reports prepared by various ministries, the state’s auditing and inspection agencies, lawyers, and, albeit to a lesser extent, the judiciary. I make use of all these sources, in addition to unstructured interviews and available state documents. Yet even when immense caution is taken in interpreting and contextualizing such sources, data obtained from informers and written sources are still likely to reflect the always controversial and often risky nature of debating corruption. For this reason, all the corruption cases referred to in this book come with such obligatory adjectives as allegedly and reportedly, thereby testifying to the sorry state of corruptology as a science. In addition, the names of directly accused politicians and officials have largely been withheld.

Some attentive readers may notice that several alleged corruption cases are not covered in this book. This may simply be a matter of oversight, a risk looming large in any qualitative assessment of corruption. But in some cases I concluded that allegations had been made too hastily or indeed were contradicted by the facts on which they were purportedly based. Other frequently expressed complaints about corruption were omitted because, on closer inspection, they turned out primarily to involve petty corruption rather than the high political corruption under investigation. In other cases, high political corruption did appear to be the issue, yet it did not seem to be part of a wider trend involving the affected institutions sufficient to warrant systematic analysis. Furthermore, some cases were simply resistant to this researcher’s scrutiny owing to a lack of access to essential sources or because of my own limited technical knowledge.

To those who still feel unfairly treated by this book’s account of the politics of corruption in postwar Lebanon, and to those who may cherry-pick data hoping to discredit their political opponents, the following deserves further emphasis: This book is not about pinpointing individual culpability for corruption; it is about understanding the collective and structural failure of Lebanon’s political class—as it has maneuvered within political constraints since 1989—to bring about the strong state institutions Lebanese citizens deserve.

---

1. The Second Republic came into being after changes to the constitution in 1990. It followed the First Republic, founded in 1945.

2. For an overview of the many reasons behind the reemergence of interest in corruption, see Tanzi (1998), Brown and Cloke (2004). The World Bank’s renewed interest in corruption coincided with its reevaluation of the role of the state in development. See World Bank (1998, 99–110).

3. See, among others, Tanzi (1998), Lambsdorff (2001), Andvig and Fjeldstad (2000), Mauro (1998), Bardhan (1997), Ades and Di Tella (1996), Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1993).

4. After the decrease in armed hostilities in 1991, annual growth in GDP peaked in 1994 at 8 percent but then declined sharply, to 3 percent in 1998 and then to a mere 1 percent in the early 2000s. In 2005 the International Monetary Fund (2005) estimated the GDP growth rate for Lebanon at around zero percent. Such unsatisfactory figures are even more striking in light of the considerable expenditure made on reconstruction since 1992—exceeding $7 billion (or on average nearly $1,750 for each Lebanese) in state capital investments through 2005. These expenditures helped fuel a total public debt topping 180 percent of GDP in 2006, up from 40 percent in 1991, and an overall budget deficit since 1993 averaging around 20 percent of GDP. The international credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service in 2006 estimated Lebanon’s gross public debt at 727 percent of government revenues, the highest level in the world (cited in Banque Audi Lebanon Weekly Monitor, 23–28 January 2006). Figures cited here are from the Lebanese central bank and the Lebanese Ministry of the Economy and Trade, available at http://www.bdl.gov.lb/ and http://www.economy.gov.lb/MOET/English/ and CDR-PR (July 2005). State capital investments exclude expenditures made by state institutions other than the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR). For Lebanon’s population I use the rough estimate of 4 million, as suggested by Lebanon’s official statistics agency (Administration Centrale de la Statistique 1998).

5. See Lijphart (1977, 154). Studies and critiques of Lebanon’s consociational democracy include Picard (2001 and 2002), Jabbra and Jabbra (2001), Seaver (2000), Messara (1982 and 1994), Dekmejian (1978), and Hudson (1976).

6. Designed in response to Gabriel Almond’s equally society-centered approach to political modernization, Arend-Jan Lijphart’s consociational democracy model explored the relationships between its dependent variable (stability in extremely divided societies), its four explanatory variables (grand coalitions, mutual vetopower, proportionality, and segmental autonomy), and a whole range of favorable conditions, all largely ignoring the nature and role of the state and