The decline of the Lebanese communist party in the postwar period (1990-2016)

Abstract

It is the argument of this thesis that the decline of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) depends on a number of factors, which prevented the LCP from playing an adequate role on few functions carried out by political parties. The thesis demonstrates that the decline in the role the LCP performed in the postwar period corresponds with its inability to confront the internal and external challenges (following the end of the civil war), and with its inability to control political power unlike other parties in Lebanon, and with its inability to achieve a counter hegemony and to reconstruct a non- capitalist political identity challenging the prevailing one. Furthermore, this thesis analyses the concept of permanent minority party and the classification of the LCP within it. It also compares the performance of the LCP against the benchmarks of political parties by means of indicators such as representation, elite formation and recruitment, goal formulation, interest articulation and aggregation, socialization and mobilization, organization of government. The thesis compares such indicators with those of the LCP by examining the literature which consists of secondary and tertiary resources. The result is that the LCP faced a decline in the role it performed in the postwar period, for many reasons such as the breakdown of the Soviet Union, globalization and the global capitalist system, the electoral system, rise of Islamic fundamentalist groups, resistance, Taif agreement and the end of the civil war, sectarianism, decline of the role of the LCP in mass organizations, in addition to the organizational problems facing the LCP and democratic centralism.