ABSTRACT
After 1975, Lebanon, a coastal Mediterranean nation smaller than the state of Connecticut and populated by some 3 million, was in a state of disarray and, in some regions, disaster. In 1982 its very existence as a nation was in jeopardy. Why bother to consider it in its own right? one might well ask. Why not treat it simply as the battlefield of larger conflict it appeared to be? After all, the Republic of Lebanon was little more than a complex of hostile and armed enclaves, each beholden directly or indirectly to a foreign body. And it had been an independent republic only since 1943, a period of less than four decades. An agglomeration of different ethnic groups, it seemed never to have developed the inner core or established the legitimacy of a nation, as had, for example, Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden after 1291 and the United Provinces after 1581, two small coalitions that fought the powerful Hapsburgs to emerge as Switzerland and the Netherlands, respectively. Why bother, indeed, with this apparent historical will-o-the-wisp?
