Macron’s misguided efforts waning France's influence in Lebanon Article by Unherd

The British news website Unherd published an article by Michael Krantz on the weakening of French influence in Lebanon. Caliber.Az reprints this article.  

A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged by ordinary people, elbowing each other out the way to shake his hand, many begged Macron to save their country from itself.

In the wake of a cross-sectarian protest movement, and deep-seated popular anger against the corrupt and intransigent Lebanese state, many Lebanese saw their former colonial master as the answer to all their prayers. The President was especially well-received in Gemmayzeh, a Christian bastion, and one of the neighbourhoods most affected by the port explosion. Macron, for his part, played his part well, echoing the grievances of a people beset by a crumbling economy and shameless elite corruption.

So popular was Macron’s visit, in fact, that 50,000 Lebanese even signed a petition urging France to recolonise their homeland. The President never addressed the petition, but beyond helping raise €250 million for the benighted country, he also established an ambitious roadmap to transform Lebanon, claiming he’d received assurances from Lebanese leaders that they’d soon form a new cabinet. The humanitarian duly arrived — but the reforms never materialised. It took another year before Lebanon’s bickering politicians finally formed a new government, and by all appearances it’s just as feckless as any other.

Now, four years later, Macron is trying to save Lebanon once more — this time motivated as much by domestic political concerns as by France’s influence in the Middle East. Today in Paris, he’s hosting an international conference to garner “support” for Lebanon’s people and sovereignty, after already endorsing a ceasefire proposal to end Israel’s war in the country. Facing challengers from both the Left and the Right at home, Macron has become all but powerless domestically, and sees high-profile crises in places like Ukraine, Africa, and especially Lebanon as opportunities to boost his credentials as a bold international player. But his chances of success this time around are little better than they were four years ago. For while France has grand pretensions in Lebanon, drawing on centuries of tangled cultural and political engagement, the truth is that the Middle East has moved on.

Relations between France and Lebanon stretch back almost 1,000 years. During the First Crusade, Count Raymond of Toulouse “discovered” the Maronites, the largest of Lebanon’s Christian sects, living in the mountains of the Levant, thereby reconnecting them to the rest of Western Christendom. Centuries later in 1649, as the area today known as Lebanon gained a degree of autonomy, France opened its first consulate in Beirut and officially took the Maronites under its protection.

In 1923, France established colonial mandates in Lebanon and Syria. Unlike in Damascus, where foreign rule was fiercely resisted, many in Beirut saw the French as cousins — perhaps unsurprising for a Christian-majority country. Soon enough, meanwhile, these varied influences would reshape Lebanese identity. Greetings like ça va and bonjour became common refrains in Beirut cafés, even as many Christians named their children Georges or Pierre.

At the institutional level, French has long appeared on Lebanon’s currency, and French transliterations of Arabic place names continue to appear on signs across the country to this day. All the same, French in Lebanon would fade. Though the Maronite elite envisaged the modern Lebanese state as a Christian island in a Muslim sea, the country today is a multicultural nation. And while French retains some prestige among the country’s elite, the idea that Lebanon is some hardy Christian outpost is unsurprisingly alien to the Shi’as of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley.

Little wonder, then, that English has supplanted French as the most popular foreign language among young Lebanese. Renowned newspapers that once published exclusively in French like L’Orient-Le Jour have launched English-language versions in the past few years. While I was in Beirut several years ago, a friend comically recounted how a Lebanese university student at a poetry reading said they had written their poem in Arabic because, they claimed absurdly, it was “a dying language” in Lebanon — and was giving way not to French, but rather to English.

Nor is this merely a story of linguistic change. For as French’s star has fallen, so too has that of the Republic itself. Though Paris deployed troops to Lebanon during the Civil War — and helped secure the release of then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Saudi custody as recently as 2017 — it’s generally been supplanted by the US. After all, it’s now Washington not Paris that funds the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the Pentagon pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Lebanon since the Nineties. The US too has emerged as the primary Western backer of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim political elite alongside its ally Saudi Arabia, and there is hardly a better symbol of its growing might in the country than its gargantuan, fortress-like embassy. It hardly helps that France’s own foreign policy has long since been subsumed by American interests.

Taken together, then, the pleas of Lebanese Francophiles back in 2020 were little more than the dying breaths of a lost age. As the President’s appearance in 2020 so vividly proved, the “Paris of the Middle East” vanished long ago. And performative proposals aside, today’s conference won’t achieve much either. Tellingly, neither Israel nor Iran are attending Macron’s shindig, making any progress towards a ceasefire a non-starter, and although the US is sending a few diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will not be present. It’s clear then that the most critical players involved in the conflict see it as a sideshow, and Macron’s ability to act decisively in the region has long disappeared, if it ever existed at all. Where Lebanon now goes, in short, is out of France’s hands.

By Khagan Isayev