Abstract
The idea of a historical and genealogical continuity between the ancient Phoenicians and the modern Lebanese played a prominent part in Lebanon’s politics and nation-building process. The narrative revolving around the Phoenicians was used in order to claim a continuous and compact history of an autochthonous populations, which, according to this perspective, managed to maintain through the centuries its uninterrupted peculiar identity and the aspiration toward self-government. The function of the Phoenician tropes was to prove the existence of the Lebanese nation as a separate entity, with its own distinct identity that could not be absorbed into a general Arab identity, and the legitimacy of its claims to full independence, against competing projects of merger with Syria or the wider Arabic-speaking world. In the politically charged context of the French Mandate and after the independence of the country in 1943, Lebanese nationalism, predicated on themes of geographical and historical exceptionalism, became synonymous with anti-Arabism and the protection of Lebanese Christian interests against Arab nationalism, Islamism disguised as Arabism, and Third-Worldism. The article traces the evolution of the idea of Phoenicianism, its sectarian dimension, and its impact on the formulation of a Lebanese nationalist discourse. The latter has been frequently interpreted in the literature as a reformulation along nationalist lines of old sectarian (Maronite Christian) aspirations, or a self-serving discourse that was functional to the interest of the urban bourgeoisie. This article argues that, while both the preceding arguments are solid and convincing, due attention should be paid to the evolving nature of Lebanese nationalist discourse of exceptionalism, which accounts for the ever-changing nature of the political landscape and the structural problems in Lebanon’s state-building process. Of particular note is that the central tenets of the Lebanese nationalist thought were in fact borrowed by French nationalist right-wing authors through the intermediation of Jesuit schools and educational establishment, which acted as a veritable conveyor belt for an organicist idea of the nation, unified through a charismatic leadership and firmly anchored in a Christian worldview.
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Mazzucotelli, F. (2022). On the Shores of Phoenicia: Phoenicianism, Political Maronitism, and Christian Nationalism in Lebanon. In: Záhořík, J., Morone, A.M. (eds) Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe. Palgrave Studies in Political History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_4
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