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The Levant’s Lost Cosmopolitan Legacy
Foreign Affairs
The Levant’s Lost Cosmopolitan Legacy
European-style nation-states are a failed model for the Middle East.
For centuries, the Levant—that fertile crescent stretching from the Mediterranean coast through Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan—embodied a remarkable experiment in pluralistic coexistence. Long before Western liberal theorists coined terms like “multiculturalism,” Levantine societies had perfected the art of commercial and cultural interdependence across religious and ethnic lines.
The great trading cities of Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem were not just commercial hubs but laboratories of pragmatic accommodation. Armenian merchants, Greek Orthodox bankers, Jewish traders, Sunni Muslim craftsmen, and Maronite Christian entrepreneurs operated within overlapping networks that prioritized economic utility over ideological purity. This was not the sanitized diversity of modern university campuses, but a hard-edged, profit-driven pluralism that worked because it had to work.
What made the traditional Levantine model so effective was its fundamentally conservative character—it was built on established hierarchies, respected traditions, and the recognition that prosperity required stability. The Ottoman millet system, for all its imperfections, provided a framework where different communities could maintain their distinct identities while participating in a broader economic and social order.
The Levantine merchant families—whether the Greek Orhodox Sursocks of Beirut, the Jewish Sassoons who operated across the region, or the Sunni Muslim commercial dynasties of Damascus—understood that their prosperity depended on maintaining networks that transcended narrow communal boundaries. They were, in essence, practical conservatives who understood that tradition and innovation could coexist when mediated through market mechanisms.
What destroyed this delicate ecosystem was not ancient hatreds—a lazy Western stereotype—but the toxic combination of imported European nationalism and the heavy hand of modern state intervention. The Levantine cosmopolitan order was dismantled not by organic evolution but by deliberate political engineering.
The Balfour Declaration, the French Mandate system, the creation of artificial borders, and later the rise of Arab nationalism and Zionist state-building all represented attempts to impose European models of ethnic homogeneity on a region whose genius lay in its heterogeneity. Each successive wave of ideological transformation further eroded the commercial and cultural networks that had sustained Levantine prosperity.
The rise of political Islam, Arab socialism, and militant Zionism—all modern phenomena—completed the destruction of what had taken centuries to build. Where once you had Lebanese Christians and Muslims sharing commercial ventures, Palestinian Arabs and Jews engaging in trade, and Syrian communities of all backgrounds participating in common enterprises, you now have rigid ethnic and religious boundaries policed by state security apparatus.
Today’s Middle East reflects the bitter harvest of abandoning the Levantine model. Instead of the creative tension between competing communities within a shared framework, we have zero-sum conflicts between artificially homogenized ethnic and religious blocs.
Lebanon, once the jewel of Levantine cosmopolitanism, has become a confessional state paralyzed by sectarian mathematics. Syria has collapsed into ethnic and religious warfare. Israel–Palestine represents perhaps the most tragic case—two peoples who once shared commercial and cultural spaces now trapped in an endless cycle of mutual recrimination and violence.
The current political dynamics reveal the consequences of rejecting the wisdom of gradual, market-driven integration in favor of top-down ideological projects. Whether it’s Hezbollah’s Iranian-backed sectarianism, Hamas’s Islamist resistance model, or the Israeli settlement project, all represent attempts to impose ideological solutions on problems that once found practical resolution through commercial interdependence.
The traditional Levantine economy was built on what conservatives would recognize as sound principles: family enterprises, long-term relationships based on reputation, respect for property rights, and the understanding that prosperity required stability. These merchant communities created wealth not through resource extraction or government subsidies, but through trade, finance, and services—adding value through human capital and commercial innovation.
Today’s Middle Eastern economies, by contrast, are largely dependent on oil rents, foreign aid, or military expenditure—all of which create perverse incentives that undermine the kind of productive entrepreneurship that once flourished in places like Aleppo’s textile markets or Beirut’s financial districts.
The economic interconnectedness that once made war between Levantine communities economically ruinous has been replaced by aid dependency and resource competition that makes conflict profitable for political elites. When Palestinian and Israeli entrepreneurs can no longer do business together, when Lebanese Christians and Muslims compete for foreign patronage rather than collaborate in domestic enterprise, the economic foundation for peace dissolves.
For American conservatives skeptical of Middle Eastern engagement, the Levantine model offers important lessons. It suggests that successful societies are built not on the triumph of one group over others, but on frameworks that allow different communities to pursue their interests through cooperation rather than domination.
The Levantine experience demonstrates that religious and cultural diversity need not lead to social fragmentation if properly channeled through market mechanisms and traditional institutions. Indeed, the most successful periods in Levantine history were those that combined respect for traditional identities with openness to commercial and cultural exchange.
This is not multiculturalism in the contemporary Western sense—it does not require the abandonment of particular identities or the adoption of relativistic values. Rather, it represents what we might call “conservative cosmopolitanism”: the recognition that different communities can maintain their distinctiveness while participating in broader networks of exchange and cooperation.
The tragedy of modern Middle Eastern politics is its enslavement to European models of ethnic nationalism that are fundamentally alien to the region’s historical experience. The attempt to create homogeneous nation-states in a region characterized by heterogeneous populations has produced nothing but conflict and instability.
A return to Levantine principles would not mean abandoning sovereignty or legitimate security concerns, but rather recognizing that security and prosperity are best achieved through frameworks that accommodate rather than suppress the region’s natural diversity. This might involve federal arrangements, economic cooperation zones, or other institutions that allow different communities to maintain their autonomy while participating in broader networks of cooperation.
The Spirit of the Levant offers a conservative alternative to both the failed project of imposed ethnic homogeneity and the dangerous fantasy of revolutionary transformation. It suggests that the Middle East’s path forward lies not in choosing between tradition and modernity, but in recovering traditional wisdom about how diverse communities can coexist and prosper.
For American policymakers, this suggests supporting initiatives that rebuild commercial and cultural connections across communal lines rather than reinforcing the walls that separate them. For Middle Eastern leaders, it means recognizing that their peoples’ prosperity lies not in the pursuit of ideological purity but in the patient work of rebuilding the networks of trust and cooperation that once made the Levant a beacon of civilization.
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Levant may seem like a relic of a bygone age, but in an era of failed states and endless conflict, it represents something precious: proof that the Middle East’s peoples are capable of far better than the blood and tragedy that define their region today. The question is whether they—and their international supporters—have the wisdom to choose the path of practical cooperation over the seductive simplicities of ethnic and religious warfare.
The post The Levant’s Lost Cosmopolitan Legacy appeared first on The American Conservative.
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