Lebanon from perspective of societal security and the model of consociational democracy: 1945-2006

Lebanon, which has a unique structure in the Middle East region with its social and political aspects, has a governing system based on consociational democracy, on which Arend Lijphart laid the theoretical foundations. Although the roots of the system can be traced back to the 19th century in Lebanon, it was established with the 1926 Constitution and the 1943 National Pact and it was reaffirmed with the 1989 Taif Agreement. In this country, where sectarian collective identities play an important role, especially Maronite, Sunni, Shiite and Druze communities have come to the fore. Collective identity communities have shared power among themselves in proportion to their populations. In Lebanon, maintaining these identities and ensuring their security has an extremely critical place. Due to this feature, Lebanon faced the 1958 Crisis and 1975 Civil War in which sectarian collective identities were extremely dominant. Lebanon has set a suitable example for the Copenhagen School's societal security approach which puts identity security at the center and turns society into a unit of analysis. The study establishes an identity-based relationship between societal security and consociational democracy and tests this relationship within the framework of the Lebanese example through the theme of oscillate reconciliation and conflict. The study, which emphasizes that consociational democracy provides societal security as well as paradoxically, it causes a societal security dilemma and is a source of societal insecurity. Especially the 1958 Crisis and the 1975 Civil War, argued to have occurred as a result of the insecurity triggering factors of consociational democracy, are examined in all dimensions in the study. In the last stage, named as a traumatic reconciliation wave, the societal security situations of collective identity communities under the Syrian hegemony were evaluated.