Lebanon

A country built as a formula for sharing power between religious communities, and repeatedly broken by the arithmetic changing. The Phoenician cities of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos traded across the Mediterranean and gave the alphabet to Greece. Mount Lebanon sheltered Maronite Christians and Druze for centuries under loose Ottoman authority, and after massacres in 1860 the mountain got a special autonomous status under European guarantee. France enlarged that territory in 1920 into Greater Lebanon, adding coastal cities and the Bekaa - which added Sunni and Shia populations and turned a Christian-majority mountain into a country with no majority at all. The unwritten National Pact of 1943 allocated the presidency to a Maronite, the premiership to a Sunni and the speakership to a Shia, on a census taken in 1932 that has never been repeated. Palestinian refugees arrived in 1948 and after, and the civil war from 1975 to 1990 killed around 150 thousand and drew in Syria and Israel. Hezbollah emerged from the Shia south. A port explosion in 2020 devastated Beirut. The currency lost most of its value after 2019. Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East. The country has about 5.8 million people in ten thousand square kilometres, plus a very large diaspora that outnumbers it. Arabic is official and French and English are widely used. It recognises eighteen religious communities, each with its own personal status law. The cedar on the flag has been a symbol of the country since antiquity. Baalbek holds some of the largest Roman temple stones ever cut.

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