Miscount in Toynbee’s Prediction

In 1957, the historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee delivered a lecture at the Cénacle Libanais entitled « Le Liban, expression de l’Histoire ». After exploring the complexity of Lebanese history and its interactions with surrounding civilisations, and after analysing how Lebanon—owing to its geographic position and its multi-confessional composition —has long served as a meeting point as well as a battleground for competing religions and identities, Toynbee concluded his talk with a remarkably prescient warning.

He said: If, in the Levant, the frontier between the two global empires—American and Russian—were to be drawn along the crest of Mount Anti-Lebanon, the Lebanese Republic would risk sharing the fate of the State of Israel. Like Israel, Lebanon would not be viable if it were to find itself in a permanent state of hostility with its neighbors to the East.

This lecture was given, of course, amid the gloomy atmosphere of the Cold War, with all its geopolitical tensions and ideological rivalries between the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective camps. During that period, while the Soviet Iron Curtain had fallen over nine European countries, turning their borders into zones of repression and hostility, wars had also broken out along the frontier dividing the two Koreas and across the shifting borders of Indochina. At the same time, the line of demarcation between the American and Russian empires settled, as Toynbee had feared, along the crest of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range—on what is the Lebanese-Syrian border.

In this inextricable situation, Lebanon opted for a position squarely in the American orbit, declaring on 16 March 1957 its adherence to the Eisenhower Doctrine, and that after having briefly flirted with the Baghdad Pact as part of the Western alliances of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the border that separated the two spheres of influence, the West’s refusal to assist the Arab states—including Syria—and Washington’s unconditional support for Israel pushed Syria, then dominated by the left, as well as the United Arab Republic (UAR) created in 1958 through the union of Egypt and Syria to turn decisively towards the Soviet Union.

The Lebanese, comforted by America’s global supremacy and by its military superiority over the USSR, were not seriously alarmed Toynbee’s warning.

Thus, the Lebanese-Syrian border, as defined and even enshrined in the Lebanese Constitution—unique in the world for setting out a national frontier in a constitutional text—became more than an administrative line or a legal fiction. It acquired a dual nature: it simultaneously a frontier between two states and a political, economic, and ideological dividing line between the American and Soviet spheres of influence. When President Fouad Chehab met President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a tent erected on the border, each man remaining on his own territory, the symbolism of the venue and scenery was designed to underline both the national and regional significance of this frontier.

Yet Toynbee’s premonition ultimately proved false. In fact, this line of separation between the two spheres of influence, for a time, protected Lebanon from Syria’s expansionist political, security-related, economic and ideological ambitions. This separation turned out to be a boon for Lebanon for more than a quarter of a century.

Lebanon’s great misfortune struck when the United States—true to its pragmatism and its readiness to trade alliances for “deals,” such as the one with Assad’s Syria—began first to blur this line, and then almost to erased it altogether by orchestrating the entry of the Syrian army into Lebanon in April 1976. Through maneuvers inspired by Henry Kissinger, Washington ultimately entrusted Damascus with a tutorship over Lebanon.

The removal of this line of demarcation—engineered through a US-Syrian arrangement reached with no consideration whatsoever for the Lebanese, who still believed that American alliances were grounded in principles—allowed Syria to impose its hegemony over Lebanon. The alliance between the United States and Lebanon was, in reality, nothing more than a short-lived, circumstantial pact dictated by American interests during the Cold War.

Toynbee was mistaken on another point as well: the alternative to tense borders is not necessarily peace; it may just as well be domination.