Lebanon's power-sharing system will fail as it did in Iraq - analyst By The Daily Star
Friday, April 23, 2010
The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s model of power sharing is “doomed to fail” as it has done in Iraq, a strategic researcher on Iraqi affairs said Wednesday.
At a lecture on Iraq at the Issam Fares Center for Lebanon in Beirut, Abdel Hussein Chaaban said Iraq’s current consociationalist model would ultimately fail as it only serves for a transitional period, not permanent, and will not bode well for Iraq so long as there is no respect for all Iraqi social factions.
His comments were made during a seminar also featuring Faleh Abdel-Jabbar, president of Iraq Center for Strategic Studies.
Iraqi MP Leila al-Khafaji, a delegation from the Imam Hakim Organization, presided by Sayyed Ali al-Hakim, and several academics attended the talk.
Consociationalism is a form of government guaranteed group representation often employed for managing conflict in deeply divided societies, such as the pluralistic societies of Lebanon or Iraq. When consociationalism is organized along religious confessional lines, as it is in Lebanon, it is more commonly known as confessionalism. But the situations in Lebanon and Iraq cannot be easily compared, Chaaban told audience members, because Iraq is still under foreign occupation in spite of a recent US- Iraqi security treaty.
Abdel-Jabbar shared Chaaban’s pessimism about Iraq’s current model of governance, underlining the delicate sectarian conditions of the country’s political system.
After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq was for the first time officially defined as a federal country. Abdel-Jabbar characterized federalism as a power partition and not a country partition, stressing the fact that excessive centralization only leads to decentralization.
Regarding the provincial electoral law in a country where each province is dominated by a majority of sects, Abdel-Jabbar said that election conflict had shifted from intra-sectarian to a rally for the best political program. – The Daily Star