Citizenship ‘is the attachment of a people to a particular country...”

Nada Raad
Daily Star staff

Citizenship desperately needs to be encouraged here despite a lack of the necessary social, economic, political and cultural factors that aid its development, according to participants in a workshop held Thursday by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS).
The workshop explored three core themes of citizenship: how to overcome sectarianism in Lebanon; the role of various educational institutions in the political socialization of the Lebanese citizen; and the continued weak representation of Lebanese women in political, administrative and public life.
Citizenship was identified by LCPS general director Salim Nasr as a complex notion that expresses the relationship between a country’s geography, government and citizens.
“It is the attachment of people to a particular country as well as the fulfillment of their duties and responsibilities to assure the country’s stability and development,” Nasr said.
He added that on a legal level, citizenship could be explained as the granting of equal rights to all the people attached to a country.
“Citizenship is neither a membership nor an affiliation, it is not a choice but a heritage,” Nasr continued.
Nasr said that citizenship denotes the effective participation of people in political life, social affairs and general decision-making. It is not dictated by the law so much as by personal choice.
Based on Nasr’s definition of citizenship, the session began with a contribution from former Finance Minister Georges Corm that aimed to identify steps that could be taken to reduce confessionalism here.
Corm described the relationship between people here and religion as similar to the relationship between the slave and his master.  He said that if Lebanon does not implement new laws to narrow confessionalism, it will never get beyond its sectarian divisions.
Nassif Nassar, professor at the Lebanese University (LU), explained confessionalism by referring to late journalist and businessmen Michel Shiha, who believed that Lebanon’s system closely resembled the model of “consociational democracy.”
Nassar said that according to Shiha, consociational democracy was based on the rule of minority confessional groups in an attempt to offer balance and equality in the society, but concealing an undercurrent of conflict between and within groups.
Nassar said that the concept of consociational democracy should be criticized because it is not based on the principles of citizenship, which prioritize the individual and not the group.
According to the LU professor, citizenship is constructed by linking citizens to their state, which should be democratic, liberal and national.
He said that a second key factor in building citizenship in a country is the independence of thought from religion. “Religion still underpins our political behavior here.”
The director of the Arab Center for Psychology and Analysis, Adnan Houbal Lah, said that confessionalism in Lebanon should be dealt with as a reality in this society, which goes unmentioned most of the time by officials here. He said that the move from a confessional system to a state system creates violence and civil war, citing the example of Lebanon.
He said that citizenship here is faced with the “confessional fear,” as every confessional group fears that another religious group will be stronger. Houbal Lah said that Lebanon could only get out of such confessional thinking by strengthening the state in a way that allows people to be independent of their religions step by step.
Movement of People’s Rights director Ugarit Younan said that although officials here talk about “coexistence,” which implies the absence of confessionalism, such a term cannot be reliable when partnership is based on exclusiveness and not on a merit system as stipulated in the citizenship concept.
According to Younan, the educational system here does not promote citizenship because it does not explain to students the concept of confessionalism.
“When I presented a program to the Education Ministry in 1990 that included confessional explanations, they directly rejected it because they deal with confessionalism as a nonexistent issue,” she said.
She said the first subject taught in schools is religion and they manage to separate Muslim students from Christian ones, making little effort for them to meet one another.
Younan explained that there are 20 school history books available here, and none of them teach that Lebanon comprises 18 different confessional groups. She added that even the committees responsible for setting up the history programs in schools are chosen in a way to include all confessional groups in the country.
Regarding the extent of education’s role in forming the Lebanese citizen, Monir Bashour, a teacher at the American University of Beirut, said that the curriculum here is “torn and shattered and will never be able to form the Lebanese citizen.”
Nada Moughaizel Nasr, a teacher at Universite St. Joseph, suggested the establishment of a “school plan” which would work to promote democratic values among students and teach them to respect each other.
The workshop also discussed the weak representation of women in political life, highlighting the discrepancy between women’s active role in the social and economic spheres, and their relative absence from political life ­ especially higher office. Among the explanations given for this situation was the unwillingness of family-based political organizations to put forward female candidates. It was also noted that few women have access to the resources needed to run independent political campaigns.
Margueritte Helou, teacher of political science at LU, told The Daily Star that society’s unwillingness to see a woman in a position of power also contributed to their poor representation. “In addition, woman’s own acceptance of such a culture plays a role in determining her poor representation in political decision-making,” she said.