New Texts Out Now: Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17427/new-texts-out-now_reinoud-leenders-spoils-of-truce
The Lebanese Central Bank, for instance, presents a positive but relative exception to the failure of Lebanon’s state institutions to meet basic bureaucratic criteria. At the same time, the Central Bank managed to curb or prevent the corruption thriving elsewhere. I argued that following a short period wherein Lebanon’s political elites also eyed the Central Bank for their corrupt schemes, it managed to insulate itself from the otherwise incapacitating effects of the post-Ta’if political settlement. This was due to some unique circumstances that failed to emerge elsewhere. With the expansion of the market in treasury bills that financed Lebanon’s bulging public debt, political elites gained a positive and personal interest in upholding the Central Bank’s independence and institutional safeguards. This, I argued, can be explained by these elites’ own purchase of treasury bills, the vast returns involved, the critical role of the Central Bank in this context, and its reputation of integrity on which Lebanon’s debt market crucially relied. Ironically, therefore, Lebanon’s political elites were in strong agreement when it came to creating and sharing in Lebanon’s debt burden, but otherwise their fierce differences undermined virtually all state institutions, their policies, and their services.