Beirut

Beirut is one of the cities in the Arab Middle East that is heavily enmeshed with other places in the world; this is especially so due to its connection with networks of the Lebanese diaspora. By number, however, the population of approximately 1.5 million people in the metropolitan area is outnumbered by many other cities in the Middle East.

Beirut, the primary city and capital of Lebanon, is an old town. Excavations have uncovered ruins of the Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, and Ottoman periods. However, in premodern times, Beirut was only a second-rate regional center. It was mainly with the rising influence of European colonial interests in the 19th century that Beirut grew in importance. Urged by European powers that saw themselves as protectors of the Christian communities in the region, in 1861, the Ottomans established a semiautonomous district, “Mount Lebanon.” While still an Ottoman provincial capital, Beirut became a focal point of commercial and political ties from the Levantine coast with European powers—especially France. Also, Beirut became a center of evangelization activities. Many renowned educational institutions, such as the American University of Beirut, have their origins in that period. Beirut grew into a cosmopolitan center of the Levantine coast. The city attracted immigration from the surrounding rural areas. At the same time, Beirut became an important harbor for the outmigration from the Mount Lebanon areas and the Syrian hinterland to the New World. Today there is a huge diaspora of several million people with Lebanese origin (either holding Lebanese passports—often beside other ones—or at least with close ties to Lebanon) in North and South America, in Europe, in Africa, and, since the 1980s, also in a growing number or countries in the Arab Gulf as well as in Australia.

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in Word War I, France and Britain could expand their influence in the region and circumvented the establishment of a pan-Arab nation. Taking the Mount Lebanon region as a core, adding mostly Sunni-populated coastal towns, some mostly Shī‘a-populated rural areas as well as the multiconfessional and cosmopolitan coastal town of Beirut as capital, the French created the Lebanese state in 1920. The Lebanese state was built on the basis of a balance of powers between the different sects. During World War II, Lebanon obtained full independence. Independent Lebanon kept the sectarian political system, which, in comparison to the authoritarian or monarchic neighboring states of the Arab Middle East, is a rather democratic political system and developed an open, liberal, service-based economy with hardly any state intervention. In the 1960s, Beirut became the major relay station for economic relations between North America/Europe and the Arab Middle East. Furthermore, Beirut turned into the first major tourist destination in the Arab Middle East, the cosmopolitan character and the summer resorts in the [Page 117]mountains attracted the economic upper classes of the Arab countries, and the image of a “Paris of the Middle East” fascinated European tourists. Last but not least, Beirut became the financial center of the Arab Middle East. Thus, the economy in Lebanon could indirectly profit enormously from the oil boom in the Arab Middle East.

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