Living History Interview - With Ambassador

AuthorClovis Maksoud
Pages621-632

Page 621

One of the unique features of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems (TLCP) is the publication of a "Living History Interview" with a person of international accomplishment and renown. The Living History Interview complements the symposium format of TLCP by blending theory and practice, thus giving practical perspective to the questions examined in the symposium. For this feature of TLCP, we conduct an interview with an individual who has experience in the same or related area of transnational law that the symposium addresses. The purpose of the interview is to invite a prominent international scholar, jurist, or politician-not to explore his or her professional point of view- but to gain insight into his or her personal perspectives as shaped by historical events in order to better understand the complex nature of international law.

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Biography

Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, a lawyer, journalist, and diplomat, is presently a Professor of International Relations in the School for International Service at American University. Dr. Maksoud is also Director of the Center for the Global South at American University and a member of the Advisory Group of the United Nations Development Program.

A Lebanese national, Dr. Maksoud was the Chief Representative of the League of Arab States in India from 1961-1966. From 1967-1979, he served as the Senior Editor of Al-Ahram and then Chief Editor of Al-Nahar Weekly.

Dr. Maksoud is the author of many articles and books on the Middle East and the global south, among them: THE MEANING OF NON-ALIGNMENT, THE CRISIS OF THE ARAB LEFT, REFLECTIONS ON AFRO-ASIANISM, and THE ARAB IMAGE, just to list a few. He has also been the Chairperson and Convener of many conferences on the environment and development, human rights, population, and disarmament.

Dr. Maksoud graduated from The American University of Beirut, went on to receive his J.D. from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and did his post-graduate studies at Oxford University in Britain.1

Living History Interview With Clovis Maksoud

Erin Rose Peterson, Editor in Chief of Volume 15, Megan McMillan, Editor in Chief of Volume 16 of Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (TLCP), conducted this interview on April 6, 2006.

MAKSOUD: Well let me start with my various careers: diplomat, journalist, and lawyer. I was trained as a lawyer at George Washington University Law School. My father wanted me to be a dichotomist because we come from a peasant family in Lebanon. And my mother was born politically conscious and she wanted me to be a lawyer. So, my mother prevailed. I went to the American University and subsequently to George Washington University and to Oxford and then back to Lebanon. Now, I discover in retrospect that when you are trained as a lawyer you have the sort of an anchor that if you do not succeed you can present some skills that legal training has given you. It provides you the opportunity to leap from one profession to another. I was in Lebanon at the American University of Beirut during the period when the Palestinian-Israeli crises emerged and led to a heightened level of violence. The whole area of the Middle East was in a state of agitation. Intellectuals questioned where toPage 623 go. As in today, there was a great deal of dynamism but no clear sense of direction. Partly because-and this probably explains what is happening today too-there were always two trends operating in the Arab world. One, that most of it was under different kinds of colonial and imperial powers: French, British, and earlier, the Ottomans. So there was the inevitable and objective reality of fragmentation. Simultaneously there was a great feeling about the people-about the unity of culture, of language, a prevalence of the Islamic religion, and of the Arab ethnic background. A prevalence, but definitely not to the exclusion of other ethnic and religious groups. Thus, Arab nationalism was guiding people towards some level of Arab unity, wherein the historical circumstances were instrumental in the geopolitical breakdown and in the interdependence of the Arab states. This reality confronted my generation and the Arab students at the American University of Beirut (AUB), which was the hub of progressive, modern, liberal, and secular democratic Arab nationalist thought. This explains why many of the intellectual and political leaders of many Arab countries are graduates of the AUB. In a way, AUB functioned as a training ground, like the Ivy League universities here. AUB was, thus a training ground for the intellectual governing elites. During this period, there was-I am giving you this as the formative period of the intellectual political and legal dispositions, two simultaneous processes taking place-an objective historical reality of division and a broad eagerness to have unity fashioned by the notions of common purpose, feelings, language, and common destiny. Arab nationalism took the form of the prevalence of Islam. The prevalence of a single religion facilitates unity, but it is not the exclusive criterion for being an Arab. I am, for example, a Christian. My late wife was a Muslim. So we were born to a secular concept of Arabi-nationalism.

TLCP: You mentioned that AUB in Beirut was a seat for Arab nationalism. I find that to be very interesting because you identified yourself as a Christian Lebanese. Lebanon is this very interesting country where there was no single prevalent religion as in, for example, Jordan.

MAKSOUD: Yes, I am Maronite Christian because my father is. My mother is Orthodox. I lived in a Druze village and I was married to a Sunni Muslim. But it didn't matter. At that time, we, the Arabs, unlike now unfortunately, assumed we were Arabs, and enjoyed variety. It was the unity of diversity, and a formative component in our identity in the sense that Christians feel that they are, culturally at least, Muslims. It isn't that Islam is exclusively a religion, but a set of shared values. One day, upon my arrival to India to assume my position as the Arab League ambassador in 1961, my friend Rashid Kabani took me around to show me old Delhi. He showed me the Grand Mosque. At that moment I felt that my forefathers did it, it isn't a religious feeling. It is a civilizational component of my being. In that sense, what we Arabs are experiencing at this moment is a phenomenon alien to the liberal modern secularPage 625 formation of Arab nationalist thought. The reason that there has been a breakdown is that Arab nationalism has been associated in the minds of the younger generations with failure in the Palestinian situation and with Arab nationalism being a cover-up for authoritarian regimes. So, in a way, there has been a distortion of what has been considered an enabling sense of nationalism. The second characteristic which forms the intellectual orientation can be attributed to the American University, and to Professor Constantine Zureik. What we had at that time is the feeling of deep grievance as a result of the Palestinian drama. In the Palestinian situation, we realized that the Holocaust has exacerbated a sense of Jewish identity. And we understood the sense of solidarity that emerged among...

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