Why is being a citizen not enough in Lebanon?

Two expressions capture much of Lebanon’s relationship with authority. “Don’t you know someone?” is usually heard when the state fails to provide something it should: a document, a licence, a property registration, a hospital admission or medicine that has disappeared from the market. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” appears at the opposite end of the transaction, when the state is actually trying to enforce a rule and someone believes his connections should exempt him from it. The first expresses state’s failure; the second expresses power over it. Between them lies wasta, the system of personal connections through which Lebanese citizens have learned both to recover rights and services the state fails to provide and, at times, to obtain privileges the law never granted them.

That distinction matters because describing wasta simply as “corruption” is legally useful but politically incomplete. Lawyer and Beirut Bar Association Council member Labib Harfouche told The Beiruter that influence used to obtain a benefit outside normal legal procedures falls within the logic of corruption, regardless of how socially accepted the practice has become. The beneficiary, the official abusing his position and the intermediary can all participate in the same corrupt act. The law therefore offers little ambiguity. The more difficult question is why a practice that violates the formal system became so deeply integrated into the way Lebanese society actually functions. To answer that, one has to look beyond individual morality and examine the history of the state itself.

Wasta predates the Lebanese War (1975-1990). Political families, local notables and sectarian leaders had long mediated between citizens and public authority, while President Fouad Chehab’s reforms between 1958 and 1964 were partly an attempt to strengthen institutions precisely against this culture of personal access. Yet the collapse that began in 1975 fundamentally altered the scale of the phenomenon. Former minister and former Kataeb Party president Karim Pakradouni told The Beiruter that, as state authority disappeared during the war, the Phalangist political organisation began performing functions that normally belonged to government. In East Beirut, Émile Eid, Kataeb official with a judicial background, was given a de facto judicial role based on Lebanese law, while “popular committees” overseen by Georges Freiha, member of Bachir Gemayel’s Gamma team, dealt with healthcare, schools, garbage collection, fuel, electricity, transportation, food supplies and price controls. Under such circumstances, knowing the person who controlled bread, medicine, fuel or protection was no longer merely useful. It could determine whether basic needs were met.

The war therefore did not invent wasta; it turned personal mediation from an advantage into a culture that developed later into an infrastructure. More importantly, the end of the war did not reverse that transformation. After the Taif Agreement and the formal end of hostilities in 1990, many wartime leaders entered the institutions of the reconstructed state while retaining the political and social networks built during the conflict. The intermediary who had once replaced the state increasingly operated from inside it. This continuity helps explain why post-war Lebanon rebuilt ministries and administrations without necessarily rebuilding a direct relationship between citizen and institution. The state returned, but access to it  continued to pass through the same political gatekeepers.

At that point, wasta became part of Lebanon’s political economy. When a citizen requires a party official or influential intermediary to secure a service that should already be available by law, a transformation occurs: a right becomes a favour. That favour is politically valuable because it creates obligation. The politician who helps with a hospital bill, finds a public-sector opening or accelerates an administrative file is not simply solving a problem; he is demonstrating his usefulness in a system where institutions are unreliable. State weakness can therefore reinforce the political power of those positioned between citizens and the state. This creates an obvious contradiction: actors formally responsible for strengthening institutions may simultaneously benefit from remaining indispensable when those institutions fail.

The connection with sectarianism follows naturally. Lebanese sectarian parties have never survived on identity alone. Many have developed networks of schools, hospitals, social assistance, employment and administrative mediation, giving communal affiliation a material function. A citizen may remain tied to a sectarian political organisation not simply because of religious loyalty, but because that organisation can provide access to resources the state distributes poorly or inconsistently. Sectarianism therefore feeds clientelism, while clientelism gives sectarianism practical value. Pakradouni told The Beiruter that parties rooted in a single sectarian constituency have limited incentive to dismantle a system from which they draw influence unless they become genuinely cross-sectarian organisations. He also points to expanded decentralisation as one possible reform, although decentralisation without accountability could simply reproduce the same patronage networks at a smaller geographical level.

Wasta also creates a less discussed inequality: not everyone needs it in the same way. Wealthier Lebanese can often buy alternatives to public failure through private schools, hospitals, generators, lawyers and professional networks. Poorer citizens have fewer exits and may become more dependent on a party, religious institution or local notable. Connections therefore function as a form of capital. A person with the correct phone number can sometimes navigate the state more efficiently than someone with the correct documents.

The system survives partly because repeated necessity eventually becomes normality. Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Claudia Nehmé told The Beiruter that an exceptional practice, when repeated under chronic insecurity, can become an informal social norm. Someone who refuses to use connections may eventually be considered naïve rather than principled. The Lebanese who insists on following every formal procedure can therefore resemble a bureaucratic Don Quixote, not because the law is imaginary, but because expecting it to function without personal intervention sometimes appears detached from experience.

Journalist and history and civics teacher Rania Raad also argues that this contradiction is reproduced in education: students are taught merit, integrity, and equality before the law while regularly watching adults achieve through personal connections what law and institutions should provide as a matter of course. The problem is not that schools teach the wrong principles; it is that daily life repeatedly teaches a different, and often more effective, set of rules. Raad insists that the solution is not simply to teach students that corruption is wrong, but to encourage them to question how the system reached a state of chronic corruption in the first place. It is through that questioning, she argues, that possible solutions begin to emerge.

The Rahbani brothers captured something similar decades ago in their satiric play “Ya’ish Ya’ish” -  “Long Live, Long Live”. In one exchange, legal authority insists that the law remains the law no matter how many people violate it, while an ordinary man responds argues: we need to eat, work and send our children to school. We cannot simply wait for an effective government to appear. The scene captures the same Lebanese contradiction: law may remain valid, but people still need to survive when the institutions supposed to apply it fail.

The issue, then, is not whether wasta is simply corruption or simply survival. It has been both, depending on who uses it, for what purpose and at whose expense. The deeper problem is that Lebanon has allowed personal access to become a substitute for equal citizenship. “Don’t you know someone?” asks who can help when the state fails; “Do you know who you’re talking to?” asks who can help when the state works. A functioning republic should make both questions irrelevant. Rights should require no intermediary, and obligations should admit no protector. Until that becomes true, being Lebanese on paper will not always be enough to be treated equally as a citizen.