In his strongly argued, thoroughly researched, and well written study, Reinoud Leenders tells a fascinating story about elite competition over resources in postwar politics. What is most intriguing in this particular book on Lebanon is not the complexity of the political order agreed to in 1989 but the unforeseen consequences of the initially praised new formula of power sharing as trust building. Counterintuitively, a fairer representation of distinct groups turns out to have harmed the public interest through a series of failures to ensure a transparent process of policymaking. Leenders offers a detailed account of the price Lebanon had to pay for the accommodation of social conflict, that is, institutional gridlocks and widespread misuse of state resources by politicians. The lessons implied in Spoils of Truce gain special importance now, when in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, constitutional engineers and practitioners engage in the building of new political institutions in many Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Why the postwar reconstruction of Lebanon “brought about an insupportable degree of corruption” (p. 6) is the question that drove the author's investigation into the complexities of Lebanese politics. There might have been corruption before 1990, but the promise of truce had generated expectations for peaceful life and a better and fairer government. Leenders prefers a political explanation for the shocking magnitude of malfeasance in Lebanon. It is not the economy, culture, or anything else to blame; the author affirms that the political game and how it shapes state structures is what matters. The more the resulting public institutions “deviate from the criteria of bureaucratic organization,” he argues, “the more likely it is that these institutions will be marked by high incidences of political corruption” (p. 12). Furthermore, all this can be better understood only against the background of the specific context and time, and of an account of the specific forms under which corruption schemes appear and endure. A successful explanation of corruption, the author argues, needs to rely on a historical approach, and this book does employ such a method.
Leenders explains the prevalence of corruption in Lebanon through the specifics of the accommodative arrangements secured by the Ta'if Accord. The resulting “political settlement,” as he dubs it, includes both the formal rules and the way they were exercised in practice, reformulated, or misused for narrow private purposes (p. 14). The process of state building after 1989 had a strong effect on the design of state institutions and the rules governing political competition. The outcome was a divergence from building a solid bureaucratic organization (i.e., based on checks and balances, attention to conflict of interest situations, and limited discretionary powers) that led to a failure to contain malfeasance.
The book is well structured and organized. Chapter 2 explores incidences of corruption in selected sectors: public fund misuse in health care, scandalous subsidizing of the airline business, mishandling of the oil exports, public procurement at the port of Beirut, failures in licensing the quarrying industry, and nontransparent tenders in public reconstruction projects. The following chapter establishes striking deficiencies in the organization and functioning of the institutions responsible for the failure to protect the public interest in these areas of activities. Chapter 4 then reveals how, by emphasizing inclusion over efficiency in decision making, the postwar settlement produced conditions for stalemate. Through the analysis in Chapter 5, Leenders shows how these power-sharing arrangements hindered the development of sound and accountable bureaucratic institutions. Chapter 6 summarizes the findings and discusses some implications.
Leenders identifies five particular traits of the 1989–90 political settlement with long-lasting effects for the future of state agencies and, ultimately, for corruption. First, institutional gridlock was produced by conflicts over competence among the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of parliament, who attempted to extend their own powers. Each one of them represented a different ethnic/religious group through a mandate firmly established by the Ta'if Accord. Second was the troika politics of allotment, where the three top government officials, assigned with almost the same powers, partitioned the “spoils of public office and resources” in the absence of clear rules and oversight. Third, politicians often bypassed the parliament, misused agenda-setting powers, and skillfully maneuvered to dodge the rigid political arrangement and to achieve their own goals. Fourth, in this context Lebanese elites felt vulnerable, and to reduce insecurity, they manipulated electoral outcomes through gerrymandering and vote rigging. Finally, the unique role of Syria in securing the Ta'if Accord, backing certain Lebanese politicians against others and intensifying the competition over resource allocation, created opportunities for manipulation through foreign pressure.
Methodologically, the author relies on the case-study approach, which offers an opportunity for a deep, detailed analysis of various manifestations of corrupt behavior. As broadly agreed upon in the literature, collecting information on corruption is a very challenging task, given the sensitivity of the matter and the exposure of informants to risks. In this regard Leenders's achievement is notable, indeed. He has managed to gather extremely rich data from various sources, including official documents, media and nongovernment organizations' reports, and unstructured interviews in the field.
Another achievement of the book is the systematic analysis of the empirical material. To assess the extent of departure of Lebanon's post-1989 political process from Weber's model of bureaucratic organization, Leenders uses three sets of criteria. These include unambiguous goals and rules set for the state structures, mechanisms for oversight, and well-defined borders between public and private interests. Rich data are then analyzed to establish the extent to which Lebanon's state agencies met these criteria. Case by case, the author reveals “the collective and structural failure of Lebanon's political class” (p. 17) and the flourishing of muhasasa (allotment) in the absence of strict oversight and attention to conflict of interest.
One big question that would be of interest to many scholars and practitioners is how generalizable Leenders's findings are. Institutional gridlocks, often resulting in large bureaucracies' failure to reach compromise, are reminders of other cases of coalitional government where attempts to satisfy demands of heterogeneous groups opened opportunities for unjustified state growth and for the misuse of power. The Lebanese case appears extreme, however. There, by institutional design, the prime minister is almost equal among peers, appointing ministers without portfolio is common, and discontent among cabinet members is frequent; crisis has become “a normal state of affairs” (p. 139). Furthermore, can one expect external factors to be important facilitators of corruption in other countries? If so, where? Syria's involvement in Lebanese domestic politics in a way that depressed transparency and enhanced misconduct is very different from the effort of the European Union, for example, to encourage clean policies in the postcommunist young democracies. Apparently, a one-country study cannot account for the diversity of foreign actors and allow for broader conclusions.
Other limitations of the case-study approach used in the book relate to possible spurious effects and case-selection bias. The author is aware of those, yet more discussion would have been helpful. The impact of the postwar political settlement, the theorized key driver of corruption, is studied almost in isolation from other factors, especially civil society and economic capacity. One may argue, for instance, that the weakness of nonstate organizations, citizens' apathy, and/or higher levels of tolerance to bribery favored the spread of corruption in Lebanon. Research on other countries suggests such possible impacts. The case-selection issue has received more attention in this book. It is understandable that data availability plays a big role in determining what will be analyzed. Still, which sectors remained unexplored in Spoils of Truce, and are there reasons to suspect that the settlement did not have the same impact there? I found the discussion of the Central Bank as the only deviation from the common pattern of gridlock and misconduct in Lebanon very interesting and thought provoking.
The main finding of the book—that the social-conflict accommodative model of political settlement in Lebanon facilitated political corruption—raises serious concerns about the role of constitutional engineering. Both politicians and practitioners should be alarmed by the message that power-sharing formulas and veto arrangements are not magical cures, and that significant side effects may include not only the further deepening of divisions but also institutionalization of corrupt methods of resource allocation. As scholars have argued elsewhere, Arend Lijphart's consociationalism might be a good solution for Belgium and Switzerland but not for others. Leenders addresses this concern at the end of the book and concludes that in postwar environments, political deadlock produced by grand, complex, power-sharing mechanisms not only weakened bureaucratic organization but also failed to achieve “genuine peace” (p. 241). Yet, in Lebanon and other places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia, secure distribution of government positions across communities became the only possible way to reach a settlement and stop the violence.
If the key to achieving democratic quality, including reducing corruption, is in the specifics of truce arrangements (as the book suggests), is it not time to think of other solutions for postconflict environments? Leenders does indeed propose that serious plans to fight corruption in the Lebanese case have to rely on a “comprehensive revision of the Ta'if Accord” (p. 238). But if representation continues to be a salient issue, what mechanisms could be installed to avoid gridlock in decision-making and to exercise effective oversight? Or, should other factors and societal forces also be engaged in tackling the issue? Future research on countries troubled by a history of division and mistrust needs to address these questions. Spoils of Truce will be a valuable source of data and ideas about what might go wrong in the complex arena of postwar politics.
