Lebanon and the EU: Clashing logics?

Lebanon has been a key site for widespread displacement from Syria since 2011, and the EU has been the main funding power that has provided refugee aid since then. The country is not a signatory to the 1951 Con-vention. Still, since 2011, in a context of divided bureaucracies and elite cartels, it has hosted more than one million Syrian refugees (Fakhoury, 2020). At the beginning of the conflict, the Lebanese government adopted a loose policy of border regulation. Soon, however, a securitized politics of refugee containment superseded the open-border approach. In 2015, the government ordered the borders to be shut down except for human-itarian cases. It also asked the UN Refugee Agency to stop registering

refugees.

In the last years, Lebanon has witnessed an acute securitization of the refugee question. Politicians have portrayed refugees as security and economic threats, and mostly as threats to Lebanon’s sectarian pow-er-sharing arrangement which rests on safeguarding the balance of power between Christians and Muslims. As soon as the Syrian regime re-estab-lished its authority on Syrian soil, various political parties began con-tinually lobbying the international community for Syrian refugee return, stressing Lebanon’s overstretched capacity. Municipalities and security forces have enforced practices that have significantly restricted Syrians’

access to legal residency, employment and housing and have reduced their livelihood opportunities (Medina, 2020).

Municipalities have enforced illegal curfews that have limited refugee mobility especially in times of Covid-19 (Chehayeb and Sewell, 2020).

Armed forces have also demolished refugee shelters in the name of envi-ronmental violations even though displaced individuals have increasingly been unable to afford decent housing (Human Rights Watch, 2019a).

Moreover, security forces have intensified their crackdowns on Syrians who have worked in the informal labour market. This has occurred although the Lebanese government has made it almost impossible for Syrians to obtain legal labour permits. In parallel, the political elite have scaled up calls for refugee repatriation (Fakhoury and Ozkul, 2019). In coordination with Syrian authorities, the government has moreover been processing applications for return.

In a nutshell, Lebanon’s asylum policy has increasingly consisted of making it unbearable for refugees to stay. Lebanese General Security has reported that about 170,000 Syrians have voluntarily returned to Syria – although the numbers are contested (Human Rights Watch 2019b). Still, researchers have cautioned against these so-called voluntary returns.

Push factors such as recurrent evictions, denial of rights and margin-alization from access to services have coerced Syrians into searching for alternative options (Mhaissen and Hodges, 2019).

Against this background, Lebanon’s realities have been at odds with the EU’s proclaimed resilience-building approach. Since the onset of refugee flight from Syria, the EU has upscaled its cooperation with Lebanon, framed in the EU’s key policy instruments as a prioritized host country. It has also embarked on a series of cooperative dialogues with

Lebanon’s successive governments in the search for mutual benefits as to how Lebanon and the EU could benefit from regional refugee coop-eration. The EU and Lebanon’s governing powers have thus discussed support to security reform, governance, development and trade in the context of the refugee challenge. In 2016, in the framework of the London Conference for Supporting Syria and the Region, the EU and Lebanon signed the so-called Lebanon Compact (European Commission, 2016b).

Vague and less ambitious than the EU-Jordan compact, the compact promises to explore avenues for facilitating the temporary inclusion of Syrian refugees and their integration into the job market (Howden et al., 2017; EU-Lebanon Association Council, 2016). Nonetheless, it affirms the primacy of Lebanon’s sovereignty and labour laws (EU-Lebanon Associ-ation Council, 2016). In the context of the four Brussels conferences that the EU has co-hosted since 2017, Lebanon and the EU have spelled out respective commitments in view of boosting refugee inclusion. Objectives such as facilitating refugee documentation procedures, allowing refugees to work in restricted sectors and facilitating their access to education and health as well as registering Syrian children born on Lebanese soil arise as key projected outcomes of this cooperation.

Cooperation has however been a bumpy ride and spelled out com-mitments on the part of the Lebanese government have turned out to be aspirational. In practice, despite the EU’s funding power and its palette of positive incentives, Lebanon has increasingly securitized its approach towards refugees, and turned a blind eye to the EU’s rhetoric of resil-ience-building. Today, according to UNHCR, more than 70% of surveyed Syrians do not hold a legal permit (UNHCR, 2019). Furthermore, the number of job permits for Syrians that have been issued have remained extremely limited (Howden et al., 2017). Soon enough it has become clear that the EU’s search for refugee solutions on Lebanese soil and its quest for building resilience for both host and refugee communities hold no achievable outcomes. Here, several factors come into play.

The EU’s refugee approach which seeks to entice Lebanon to facili-tate refugee inclusion and to foster refugee resilience, has been at odds with Lebanon’s geopolitics of asylum (Fakhoury, 2020). It is true that the EU was able to inspire a conversation on improving refugee inclusion in policy spheres. As underscored, with the adoption of the 2016 Compact which promised funding in return for the Lebanese government relaxing

measures vis-à-vis Syrians’ temporary stay, the government pledged to deliver on some reforms. In 2017, it announced its decision to waive the USD 200 refugee residency fee enabling Syrian refugees to renew their legal stay. These commitments turned out to be fleeting rhetoric.

In the last years, soft conflicts between Lebanese officials and their EU counterparts have increased. Some Lebanese politicians have started calling on the EU to divert funds from Lebanon to Syria in the hope of incentivizing refugees to go home. Still the EU has renewed its willing-ness to support Lebanon’s recovery in the context of the refugee challenge.

Also, as Lebanese officials started lobbying for rash refugee repatriation, the EU has reiterated on various occasions that conditions for return are still not favourable, and that it proposes instead as a temporary solution “resilience-building” through humanitarian and development aid (Fleyhane, 2017). In return, key governing powers have insisted that Lebanon is no country of asylum and that the massive strains that Lebanon is exposed to will most likely backfire on Lebanon and the EU (Hall, 2019). More precisely, they will trigger refugee waves to Europe and destabilize the polity reeling from the weight of so many burdens.

In this light, various Lebanese politicians have criticized the EU’s so-called politics of resilience-building where refugees are, framing it instead as a politics of deterrence (Fakhoury, 2018). They have also crit-icized unbalanced burden-sharing in the international refugee regime.

These clashes have not remained pure rhetorical divergences. They have had consequences for refugees’ lived realities and rights. As the EU and Lebanon have diverged on their search for refugee solutions, a logic of crisis governance has prevailed (Fine et al., 2020). This logic has privi-leged quick fixes that remained disconnected from local perceptions and practices.

From yet another complex perspective, the EU’s refugee diplomacy in Lebanon has remained detached from an engagement with Lebanon’s divided allegiances vis-à-vis the Syrian conflict and the domestic polar-ities that the issue of displacement has brought along (Fakhoury, 2020).

Ever since Syria’s lethal conflict erupted, Lebanese governing powers have held divergent positions vis-à-vis Syria’s war and the refugee issue.

In the context of Syria’s war, some Lebanese factions have backed the Syrian regime in the face of its rivals. Others have viewed the conflict as an opportunity to weaken Syria’s control in Lebanon. Amid domestic

tensions, most political factions have started portraying the extended stay of Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunni, as a threat to Lebanon’s system of sectarian power-sharing.

In this setting, the issue of Syrian refugee stay and return has become tightly enmeshed with Lebanese politicians’ geostrategic interests (Fakhoury, 2020). Some political executives who are staunch allies of the Syrian regime hoped that, by advocating for Syrian refugee return, they would contribute to restoring the legitimacy of Bashar-al-Assad’s rule. Within this climate, the EU’s ‘resilience-building’ approach has been moulded by the complex geopolitics of Lebanese Syrian relations, and its policy pleas for improving refugee inclusion have remained mere ink on paper (Lavenex and Fakhoury, forthcoming).