Traboulsi 55minorities” in the Ottoman Empire. That policy would constitute the basis
for the legitimization of the post-WWI mandates of Britain and France
over the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
e justification by France of its colonial “rights” over natural Syria Th
took the form of the defense of the Christians, Shi‘a, Druzes and Alawis.
On the other hand, the famous Balfour declaration tells everything con-
cerning the manipu lation of the question of minorities to serve colonial
interests. The promise of a national home for the Jews in Palestine not
only recognized the national character of the Jews all over the world and
denied it to the Arab people of Palestine—negatively defined as “the exist-
ing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”—but the Palestinians them-
selves were viewed as “communities” and their defined rights as “civil and
religious” but not political.
e same logic presided over the partition of the Middle East after Th
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Sunni minority rule was imposed
on Iraq where ethnic Kurds were deprived of their rights to self rule, the
Bedouins constituted the basis of the new Emirate of Transjordan (later to
rule over a Palestinian majority), and Syria was partitioned into five states
along sectarian lines: two states for the Sunnis (in Aleppo and Damascus),
a Christian state in Greater Lebanon, and one Alawite and one Druze
autonomous region.
I would like to argue that the transformation of clans, ethnic groups
and religious communities into political organizations had a direct bear-
ing on the development of the public sphere. Not only did those politi-
cal entities sanction subnational forms of identification and solidarity
as communal repositories of rights and duties, but they also established
patronage networks encouraging the growth and development of notables
who entertained an ambiguous relationship between state and society, in
which the communities were neither fully autonomous nor completely
representative of their members; more importantly, individuals were con-
stantly reduced to a dominated status.
e second point concerns the relationship between nationalism Th
and democracy in the comparative experiences of Europe and the Arab
world. Nationalism and democracy were complementary in the European
case, as the dissolution of the absolutist state opened the way for the emer-
gence of the individuals whose loyalties to the nation were progressively