Possibilities of a new Ethiopian consensus

June 30, 2013

The
founding principles and aims of progressive politics in Ethiopia may not be
entirely in doubt today, but its operative ideas and practices have long been
open to question and critique. This is true, though Ethiopian literati have
generally not shown interest in subjecting our vexing legacy of progressivism
to retrospective scrutiny and in assessing its current status and function.

No longer
persuasive intellectually, morally, and politically, particularly to Ethiopia’s
younger generation, the staying power of the old progressivism within the
Woyane regime and in some oppositions circles lies in the inertia of
established, residual conventions and habits of Marxist-Leninist thought. Its
“radical” attitudes, ideology, and practice have consistently produced
tyrannical leaders and repressive regimes (those of the Derg, the TPLF and, in Eritrea, the EPLF). It has everywhere
turned the promise of national revolution into an exclusive partisan
performance and the democratic aspirations of the people into the dictatorial
agenda of narrow, insular elites.

So we know
that, far from offering simple and ready solutions to our national problems,
the existing tradition of forward-looking politics is deeply problematic.  In fact, it constitutes a major source of
Ethiopia’s present national crisis. If it is to help bring about the nation’s
democratic renewal, our troubled progressive inheritance has to undergo major
conceptual and practical renovation itself. It has to be thought anew – from
the ground up.

This is a
necessary first step toward a new progressive national agreement in Ethiopia.
Patterns of dogmatic thought, forms and mechanisms of partisan dictatorship and
styles of anti-Ethiopian rhetoric and polemic associated with the old tradition
of “radical” politics are today integral parts of oppositional as well as
ruling ethnonationalist orthodoxy.  How
could contemporary Ethiopian patriots strike a grand progressive bargain with
champions of this orthodoxy whose resentment of Ethiopia borders on a reverse
chauvinism that devalues and negates our common national culture?

So opening
up the old tradition of progressivism in Ethiopia – in all its partisan and
tribal forms – to critical, forward-looking reconstruction is essential to the
building of a new, more democratic general agreement among the nation’s diverse
political, ethnic, and cultural communities. The dismantling of the present,
moribund system should create intellectual and political space for thinking up
alternative ideas of liberty, democracy, the rule of law, federalism, and local
self-government in Ethiopia. It should allow new ideas to be more freely
articulated, debated, discussed, and agreed upon by the widest possible Ethiopian
public. In short, the dismantling of the old paradigm of revolutionary thought
and action can be expected to facilitate the elimination, finally, of dictatorially
imposed rule in Ethiopia and allow for a lasting consensually achieved democratic national and political order in
the country.

Though
possible and desirable, the building of a new Ethiopian progressive consensus
today is, however, a great challenge. The collective effort has to resolve not
only the differences and antagonisms of particular parties, groups, coalitions,
and movements, but also the conflicts of distinct modes of national concern:
ethnic nationalism, modern Ethiopian national consciousness that transcends ethnicity, and traditional patriotism that stresses
Ethiopian historical roots and identity. In some of their extreme variants,
these forms of national concern may be repellent to one another, but they are
not entirely self-contained and mutually exclusive. Still, they remain
recognizable species of nationalism to be reckoned with by consensus builders.
Separately, none of them adequately represents the breadth and depth of
Ethiopianness today. Indeed, both governing and oppositional forms of ethnonationalism
militate against the Ethiopian experience, a matter of great concern and
urgency for patriotic forces.

Traditional
patriots who accentuate Ethiopian historical sources and identity are not
necessarily averse to modern ideas, like democracy and federalism, but such
ideas may not be the major driving force of their national concern. Sensing,
correctly, the existential threat Ethiopia faces under the divisive tyranny of
the Woyanes and the wholesale tribalization of her national interests and
affairs, some may be in no mood currently to quibble about ideas. Perhaps
disenchanted with the global values of progressivism some Ethiopian patriots
may be turning inward in resistance, pushed by prevailing conditions in the
country to a protective affirmation of tradition and identity.

Reclaiming
and defending the national base is essential, but we can’t go back to our roots
simply and straightaway, in abstraction from present progressive concerns. There
is a danger here of patriotic groups inflicting political marginalization on
themselves in their disinclination to address major issues confronting the
country today. The biggest challenge we face is reconciling the claims of
national tradition and integrity with those of contemporary pluralism and
diversity through a new Ethiopian national-democratic consensus and solidarity.

The
initial task of developing a general forward-looking agreement among various
groups and forces in the resistance against TPLF dictatorship, with a keen eye
toward post-Woyane Ethiopian political order, is one of establishing a broadly
inclusive yet definite framework of ideas, principles, and practices. We need a
widely shared set of terms, concepts, and perspectives through which Ethiopian
national and political issues may be commonly as well as distinctively defined,
grasped, and approached. The framework of thought and discourse should be
capable of integrally handling pluralism, difference, and dissent in our common
national life.

Departing
from this basic understanding, I offer the following theses on progressive
change in Ethiopia. The theses are summary notes intended for discussion and
further analysis among concerned Ethiopian intellectuals, activists,
journalists, opposition entities, civil society groups, and other
stake-holders. They are organized around three major overlapping spheres which
I consider to be crucial battlegrounds where Ethiopian progressive consensus
has to be fought for and won, where we leave the old progressivism behind and
embrace the new. These battlegrounds are politics, ideas, and identity.

Theses on
Progressive Change in Ethiopia

Politics

1. The underlying defect of the old and still operative
paradigm of progressivism in Ethiopia (and Eritrea) is its aggressive,
expansionist take-over and domination of the relatively autonomous spheres of
ideas, culture, religion, nationality, economy, polity and civil society, more
or less incorporating all these domains in calculations and strategies of imperious
partisan power. Operating solely or primarily on the basis of priorities and
agenda set unilaterally by a narrow political elite with unlimited appetite for
power, the paradigm reduces all of these spheres of social and national life to
objects and extensions of dictatorial rule.

This is a
systemic flaw characteristic of an entire tradition of revolutionary thought
and practice, not merely that of particular parties and fronts. The claim here
is that the paradigm itself – rather than its “failure” or distortion – led not
only to the tyrannical regimes of the
Derg and the TPLF but, more broadly, to the self-defeating political
overreach and domination of progressivism as such. This fundamental defect of
our revolutionary legacy should be a critical, transformational concern to
Ethiopian democrats and patriots today.

2. Old school “radical” progressive entities in Ethiopia,
including the TPLF, the OLF, the EPRP (which has today sadly reduced itself to
political irrelevance), and other groups have not really attempted to learn
from social strata and distinct communities they wanted to lead in
revolutionary struggle and “liberate.” Instead, they developed their political
agenda and programs through polemicizing and fighting against one another.
While the victors, like the TPLF and its ethnic and
political cousin, the EPLF, gained dictatorial state power over the “nations,
nationalities, and peoples” they supposedly liberated, the vanquished, like the
EPRP and the OLF, were reduced to the political margins, ending up with the
dubious status of the permanent opposition.

The
Orwellian reversal of values that has come to characterize the existing
paradigm of progressivism in Ethiopia (where professed democracy is actually
dictatorship and “national liberation” really means partisan domination) should
not be understood as a “betrayal” or an unexpected outcome of the Revolution.
From the outset, Ethiopian revolutionaries have been ideologically conditioned
and organizationally trained to suppress free civic and political activity in
the country and to substitute their own imperious, partisan activism for the
autonomous agency of citizens and communities.

Against
this tradition of “radical” closure of social and political space, the new progressive
project in Ethiopia would allow various self-organized civil society groups,
parties and movements to provide bases for national consensus and solidarity
within a more open and democratic political framework. In so far as the
national environment is relatively open, which is not to say fragmented or
politically unregulated, it will invite and facilitate the autonomous
democratic participation of various groups and parties opposed to Woyane tribal
tyranny. The more transparent and differentiated the environment, the greater
participants’ experience of agency within it; and the greater and freer
participants’ experience of agency, the stronger, more democratic and
sustainable the Ethiopian national consensus and solidarity they are likely to
affirm and establish.

3. The projected Ethiopian progressive consensus can be expected
to generate active, mutually supportive relationship between political forces, on
the one hand, and social constituencies and the nation as a whole, on the
other, in a way and to an extent not possible in the old structural model of
revolutionary politics. The existing structure has taken shape exclusively from
within its own ideology and partisan agenda. In contrast, the new progressive
politics would assume a more dynamic form which would allow it greater openness
to the Ethiopian social and national landscape, to align itself with varying
socio-economic and cultural contexts in the country and with the nation’s vital
interests. The nation as a whole and distinct communities and social strata
within it will no longer be passive objects of authoritarian “revolutionary”
domination and manipulation. Instead, they would become active participants in
the conception and enactment of progressive thought. 

4. Relative openness or transparency as a principle for
organizing a new progressive political order and public sphere in Ethiopia is neither
a mechanism for dictatorial rule as usual nor a license for one kind of tribal
hegemony or another. It is a way of accommodating pluralism and difference
within an integral national whole. The shift from partisan-authoritarian
closure of the social and political space to a more open and democratic order
does not dispense with national cohesion and leadership. In the absence of
overall direction, coordination and regulation, the principles of openness and
democracy are as impracticable as they are inconsequential.

So the
issue is not whether the new Ethiopian progressive consensus needs leadership
or direction, but what kind of direction. In as much as its leadership gains
acceptance and support from diverse social, political, and regional bases while
maintaining its cohesion, it also gains more democratic validity and legitimacy
than the Woyane regime or its predecessor ever did.

5. Political coalitions and alliances that paper over
significant differences among opposition groups, say, between factions or
elements that prioritize identity politics over common Ethiopian nationality,
and those who would reverse this order of priority, may have some political
value. For they may lessen disagreements and conflicts by strengthening
cooperation on the basis of shared immediate interests and by achieving limited
objectives in the short- or medium-term.

But such
alliances are ineffective, or may even be counter-productive, in reckoning with
fundamental issues and principles about which the groups may quietly differ and
in resolving underlying differences for the long-term. Limited political
successes gained from the alliances can be easily undone if they are attained
through merely tactical calculations and measures that do not relate to or
address broader relevant issues and problems of progressive change in Ethiopia.
More generally, there is a need to clarify the relationship that should obtain
between what any coalition or alliance by itself can
achieve and what outcome or impact its actions can have as part of larger
movements of Ethiopian social-historical and political forces.

Ideas

6. Old fashioned Ethiopian revolutionaries, including
Woyane ethnonationalists, who cut their progressive teeth on the Student
Movement and on Marxist-Leninist ideology, have generally seen themselves
engaged in serious, high-minded political work driven by critical reason. They
apparently believed their activism and struggle were guided by high concept.
But behind this self-image lies a paradoxical orientation toward ideas. On the
one hand, invoking revolutionary ideas and goals had so much force and
influence that theory assumed a dominant, commanding position over everything
else, even as it abstractly expressed egalitarian values and ideals. Fiercely
held ideological dogma and agenda were privileged over vital Ethiopian national
interests and affairs.

On the
other hand, old school progressivism in Ethiopia was impatient with any attempt
at a serious discussion and development of political ideas in the Ethiopian
context. Its priority has been quickly and tightly controlling the articulation
of political concepts, including those of democracy and nationality, within
narrow, exclusively partisan confines. Preoccupation with tactical activism which
predisposes traditional radicals to immediately instrumentalize ideas for
contestation, polemic, agitation, and propaganda has obstructed any openness
that may sustain broadly enlightening, reflective, and politically productive
thought.

Post-revolutionary
Ethiopia has thus for decades endured two extremes at once – too much “theory,”
yet too little thought; a whole lot of conceptualizing and idealizing going
hand in hand with an abundance of brutal tyranny; high-minded dogma of national
liberation wedded to crass tribalism.

7. The way the new progressive political project would
handle ideas can be expected to be fundamentally different from the approach of
the old revolutionary paradigm, whose ethnonationalist spinoff dominates Ethiopian
national affairs today. In the traditional approach, political ideas cannot be
publicly and freely discussed, debated, and agreed upon within or outside the
authoritarian state, beyond the intentions, terms, formulas, and agenda of an
exclusive, dominant party or front. Ideas like democracy, national
self-determination, and federalism don’t have to persuade or inspire citizens
and communities. They don’t need our minds to freely and actively engage them.
Instead they act directly and externally on us, as if we were their objects.
They dictate to us, tyrannize over us.

By
contrast, the projected model of forward-looking politics departs from the
premise that progressive ideas cannot enlighten and move us if we don’t allow
them to work in relative autonomy as
ideas, to convey logos or meaning in their own terms. It would be based on
the understanding that, in so far as ideas function merely as accessories to
power interests, or are little more than apologies for tyranny, they cannot
bring light to our politics and guide it. They become instead forces of
darkness and domination themselves, means of rationalization of dictatorship
and repression. Departing from this forethought, progressive innovation would
produce alternative meanings of freedom, democracy and federalism in the
Ethiopian context. Sorely needed political change and progress would be
achieved in Ethiopia through either greater or better awareness of the meanings
of familiar concepts and principles or the articulation of alternative forms
and contents.

Identity

8. A major source of the polarization of forces of
division and unity in post-revolutionary Ethiopia is the way the contending
sides often deal with diversity and complexity that make up the historical
being of distinct ethnic and cultural communities in the country and of
Ethiopia itself. Both sides generally avoid grappling with these involved constitutive
features of Ethiopian social and national life, seeking instead the reassurance
and comfort of simple identity and unity. In this avoidance, the separatist
attitude, seeking exclusive identity, is the other side of the coin of
insisting on plain, immediate national oneness. Both sides evince impatience
with, and intolerance of difference and pluralism in Ethiopian national and
political life.

The new
Ethiopian progressive consensus would come into its own in part by overcoming
the limitations and problems of these polarized forms of national identity and
difference. It would critically engage these forms through collaborative
intellectual and political efforts that cut across ethnic and partisan lines.
In the process, it would debunk the old progressive construal of “national
self-determination” as the simple reverse or negation of Ethiopian nationality
and identity. The new progressive project can be expected to show that integral
self or identity is not something a particular community brings ready-made to
the Ethiopian whole. Instead, it is something built, at least in part, from
that community’s relations with other social groups within the Ethiopian whole.

9. References to “nations, nationalities, and peoples”
made in old school Ethiopian progressive circles, including the Woyane regime
and some in the opposition, cannot be taken literally or at face value. They
don’t actually represent or signify real communities in Ethiopia in their
particularity and diversity. Instead, the references must be understood as generic
ideological constructs whose social referents do not exist outside the uses of
these Leninist-Stalinist categories. Following the Student Movement, the
Woyanes imagined “nations, nationalities, and peoples” into being and then
waged “liberation” struggle on the presumed existence of the social referents
of these categories of global revolutionary ideology.

The initial
challenge contemporary Ethiopian progressives of various ethnic backgrounds
face here as they struggle for national consensus and solidarity is to come to
the recognition that all claims of identity and national self-determination
made in terms of the old Leninist-Stalinist paradigm are bogus, in concept as
well as practice, and that there are different and better ways of realizing
universal ideas like self-determination and federalism in the Ethiopian
context.

10. The actual identities of diverse Ethiopian communities
are given in the historical sense of ascribed distinctness of ethnicity,
culture, language, way of life, and so on. But, politically, identities are willfully created rather than given,
or, more specifically, they are what political elites, parties, or fronts have
sought “radically” to create. A graphic example of political construction of
national identity is the use of the Latin alphabet rather than Ge-ez to write Oromgna, an Ethiopian language.

Oromos are
inseparably connected to the rest of the Ethiopian people by broader,
trans-ethnic national and cultural ties that cannot be severed. Yet, bent on
breaking those ties, Oromo nationalists made the political choice of writing
their native Ethiopian, or, more broadly, African language in European script.
Political priorities impelled them to embrace the contradiction of resorting to
a Western writing system in affirming their “self-determination” or identity as
a people. Ethnonationalist politics made the Ge-ez alphabet more “foreign” to
them than Latin script. The political choice may be understandable as a nationalist
preference of Oromo intellectual and political elites, but it can hardly be
said to represent the national self-determination of the Oromo masses in
Ethiopia in any meaningful sense of the term.

To
recognize identity as a political issue rather than taking it simply as given
in advance naturally or historically is to realize that it is open to
contestation, negotiation, and compromise. It is to note that identity politics
is contingently produced and practiced in contemporary ideology and so should
not be passed off as absolute necessity or entitlement. This realization is a
decisive first step toward a new Ethiopian progressive consensus in which the
principle of regional and local self-government, including the use and
development particular languages, may be worked out and enacted through
alternative approaches in different contexts. The core value of
self-determination or autonomy may be fostered more progressively and
democratically by being stripped of its authoritarian, exclusively partisan and
tribal forms.

11. A fundamental flaw of old school radicalism in Ethiopia
that must be overcome today within a new progressive agreement and movement
concerns its arrogant, dismissive attitude toward Ethiopian national being.
This madly abstract, historically artless attitude is broadly symptomatic of a
troubled revolutionary vision, going back to the Student Movement, but it is
most clearly evident today in the divisive tribal dictatorship of the Woyanes
and in certain opposition circles.

In its
more extreme ethnonationalist forms, the existing model of progressivism
embodies a separatist political project predicated on the outright denial or
rejection of Ethiopian nationality. The country is seen entirely negatively as
a “prison of nations.” Where it is not explicitly denied (by the Woyanes, in
order to pursue political and material interests nation-wide, and by ethnic
opposition groups, largely for tactical reasons of coalition struggle against
the Woyane regime), Ethiopian unity is recognized merely as a “choice” or
“agreement” of tribal communities and parties. If these groups withdraw their
agreement (they may do so according to the constitution), Ethiopia presumably
ceases to exist. The Ethiopian whole is thus seen as nothing beyond or outside
a collection of disparate ethnic communities, which neither give national
meaning to the whole nor receive common nationality from it. This, sadly, is
essentially how the old progressivism has ended up “settling” the so-called
national question in Ethiopia.

Against
this anti-Ethiopian paradigm of radical politics, particularly its Woyane
variant of “revolutionary democracy,” we can envision a new progressive
arrangement in which differences and disagreements among the nation’s ethnic
and cultural communities are resolved within the Ethiopian whole, not only
without loss to the communities, but with national meaning and value added. The
Ethiopian whole need not be based exclusively on either articulated political ideas or historical sources and values. For neither modern political
ideology nor historic tradition alone captures the essence and reality of
Ethiopian national being today. Together, complementing each other, the two
modes of national concern make up a stronger, better, more inclusive and
democratic Ethiopia than either of them separately.

So, in the
projected progressive model, Ethiopia is neither reducible to a simple unity
nor to a collection of entirely self-contained ethnic groups. It is an integral
whole of diverse, intersecting communities, cultures, and regions that have
both robust unity and real autonomy. And Ethiopia herself has integrity not
merely as a political community but, more broadly, in that she makes up a
vital, evolving common national culture that endures.

12. Practitioners of identity politics in Ethiopia have in
various ways attacked the nation and threatened to dissociate themselves from
it while champions of unity, alarmed by the ethnonationalist domination of
Ethiopian affairs, have tended to play a game of patriotic defense in which
forward-looking ideas of change are not vigorously pursued or given priority.
The point, however, is to bring about the integral transformation of the
Ethiopian nation-state along new, progressive and democratic lines.

Summing up

The
national crisis of post-revolutionary Ethiopia has been largely the crisis of
progressivism itself – in all its residual Marxist-Leninist partisan, authoritarian,
and ethnic forms. The entrenchment of one-party monopolization of government power,
state domination of civil society, the absence of the rule of law, the
substitution of narrow partisan self-assertion for broad-based national
self-determination, and the rise of ethnonationalist tyranny in the country
were all outcomes of the Revolution and its aftermath. Under these
circumstances, progressivism has come to constitute an oppressive form power in
its own right, a veritable paradigm of dictatorship that militates not only
against democratic rule in Ethiopia but the Ethiopian nation as such.

Consequently,
to take the first step toward a new forward-looking Ethiopian national
consensus is, ironically, to make the existing tradition of progressive
politics an issue, to get a good grasp of its excesses, flaws, and limitations.
Reckoning with our revolutionary legacy in this way, we can begin to slog away
at lasting democratic change by disentangling the vital threads of Ethiopian
national and political life from the weave of the old exclusively partisan,
ethnocentric, authoritarian progressivism.