A millennium democratic goal

By Maimire Mennasemay (Ph.D.)¹

August 18, 2007

The current responses to these conditions put the emphasis on poverty reduction, international aid, and electoral democracy. These responses – rooted in the present hegemonic neo-liberal ideology of development, civil society and democracy – create a state that serves the interests of global capital rather than bring about the socio-economic and political emancipation Ethiopians yearn for. I will argue in this paper that, if we Ethiopians are to construct a prosperous, just and democratic society in the new Millennium, we need to go beyond the current politics of Millennium Development Goals (MDG, henceforth), international aid and electoral democracy, and strive for a Millennium Democratic Goal.²

Human beings do not experience their life as an aggregate of a disparate collection of disconnected facts, events and individuals, but, rather, as a meaningful whole (Taylor 1988). For the great majority of Ethiopians, life is lived as a totality characterized by grinding poverty, hunger, premature mortality and powerlessness. One cannot comprehend the experience of Ethiopians in a way that responds adequately to the totality of their life conditions, which technocrats disaggregate into political, economic and social components, unless the common ground of these disaggregated conditions is apprehended comprehensively. This common ground is “poor living” – a manner of being in society so distorted by the “unfreedoms” that structure and articulate society that individuals do not have the capabilities to undertake the important activities that they have reasons to choose and value in order to lead a life of dignity (Sen 2000; Nussbaum 2000). Neither poverty reduction, nor international aid, nor electoral democracy are adequate responses to poor living, for they are inherently limited in their capacities to eliminate the social, economic, cultural and political unfreedoms constitutive of poor living. Ethiopians need an alternative to these inadequate responses in order to achieve a prosperous, just and democratic society. The “capabilities approach” suggests such one alternative.

The “capabilities approach” considers freedom as both the means and the end of development, and development as “the removal of the various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency” (Sen 2000). The internal connections between development and freedoms are articulated in terms of “functionings” and “capabilities”. Functionings reflect “the various things a person may value doing or being” and refer to what a person actually does and is – keeping oneself healthy, educated, active in the community, and so forth. Capabilities refer to the “various combinations of functionings” that persons actually can choose from “to be and to do” in terms of what they have “reasons to value most”. The current functionings and the ensemble of alternative functionings from which a person could choose from make up the person’s “capability set” – the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for him/her to achieve, i.e., “the person’s freedom to choose from possible livings” (Sen 1992, 2000). Unlike the means-end rationality of liberalism that locks countries such as Ethiopia into development without prosperity, elections without democracy, and social change without social justice, the capabilities approach makes substantive freedoms the means and end of policies and actions. It shifts “attention away from the means” to “ends that people have reason to pursue”, and correspondingly, “to the freedoms to be able to satisfy these needs,” and thus makes it possible to overcome poor living. (Sen 2000; Nussbaum, 2000, 2006).

From the capabilities perspective, it is misleading to consider poverty primarily in terms of lack of income, resources, or goods, as the poverty reduction program of the MDG assumes. Jeffery Sachs (2005), an influential economist, an advocate of the MDG project and a champion of the poverty reduction approach, states that the goal of the MDG “is not about ending poverty in our time”; rather, its aim is “to end extreme poverty, not to end all poverty, and still less to equalize world incomes or to close the gap between the rich and the poor” (Sach’s emphasis). Nowhere in his discussion does one find poverty reduction conceived as an integral part of the construction of a free, just, prosperous society through the agency freedom of the poor themselves. Rather, poverty reduction is conceived as a technical matter, formulated by experts, and implemented by those in power. In the MDG, the poor are treated as creatures of needs, not as agents who could transform society and their manner of being in society. Indeed, the MDG could be successfully implemented by authoritarian regimes, since it does not make freedom the means and the end of development. The point is that since poverty reduction is not premised on the elimination of unfreedoms, it is possible to reduce poverty and still be trapped in poor living.

Since poor living is the expression of the functioning of a certain kind of society and its institutions, overcoming poor living cannot be dissociated from the qualitative transformation of society and its institutions. This is a political question. And since democracy is theoretically a political arrangement that provides individuals the freedoms “to choose from possible livings” in terms of what they have reasons to believe is a life expressive of their human dignity, democracy is the way that makes possible the overcoming of poor living. But we have to avoid the danger of making a fetish of democracy, for, as the failures of electoral democracy to provide freedom, social justice and prosperity testify, “democracy does not serve as an automatic remedy of ailments as quinine works to remedy malaria” (Sen 2000). Electoral democracy offers, like its parent liberal democracy, only a democracy of means; it concentrates on the justice of procedures and is oblivious to the social, economic and political injustices that result from such procedures. The result is a fetshization of democracy that inhibits the tackling of unfreedoms that we now witness in Ethiopia and in those countries whose democratic credentials hang only on holding elections. We thus need to raise the question of what kind of democracy will be adequate to overcome poor living in Ethiopia. The kind of democracy Ethiopia needs is a democracy of ends, i.e., a democracy that articulates socio-economic justice, freedom, equality and prosperity as its internal defining processes. The way to a democracy of ends is the full participation of the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized and the oppressed, who constitute the great majority of Ethiopians, in the formulation of and decision-making on political, economic and social issues. The key term here is participation, and its fruitfulness will depend on whether or not we conceptualise it in a way that is consistent with the goal of overcoming unfreedoms.

From the perspective of democracy of ends, the formulation of and decision-making on political, economic and social issues cannot be left to the “pronouncements of those in authority”. Indeed, the “intensity of economic needs”, such as the one we find in Ethiopia, adds to the “urgency” of participation. To be consistent with the democracy of ends, participation must be a bottom-up, deep and wide process that involves peasants, pastoralists, and the urban poor, both women and men, and that institutionalizes public reasoning and contestation for formulating policies and making decisions about political, economic, and social issues. It establishes a bottom-up flow in (a) identifying problems, (b) setting the agenda for discussion, (c) determining the rules of decision-making, (d) formulating policies, (e) making decisions, and (f) distributing tasks and responsibilities. This bottom-up approach is the only one that is consistent with the idea that democracy is actualized only when the underprivileged, who, in Ethiopia, stand in for the universality that democracy embodies, choose freely the policies and actions that contribute to the elimination of unfreedoms. Participation thus becomes the quilting point of new social, political, economic and cultural coordinates of meanings and actions. It thus establishes a new “cognitive mapping” of life conditions that makes freedom the means and the end of political, economic and social practices. It creates “a space of intelligibility” wherein a new public realm is articulated through mutual recognition, mutual accountability, self-assertion and solidarity. Its goal is finding ways for overcoming the unfreedoms that affect individuals and the community through a process of public reasoning and contestation that critically considers all options and evaluates how far the decisions the participants take contribute to the reduction of unfreedoms and the enhancement of capabilities. The question then is how to institutionalize this kind of participation.

A democracy of ends requires the self-organization of those who suffer from unfreedoms. Without self-organization, a democracy that makes social justice, freedom and prosperity internal to its practice will be unattainable. To achieve the goal of eliminating unfreedoms and make participation the incubator of a democratic Ethiopia, the creation of local associations around specific issues of unfreedoms and of the capabilties to be enhanced is indispensable. This means the progressive creation of networks of local, sub-regional, regional, and national associations of peasants, pastoralists, women, the urban poor, the unemployed, youth, and the underpiveleged in general, around shared issues such as agriculture, husbandry, manufacturing, industry, nutrition, health, education, employment, housing, communication and transportation, environmental degradition, technology, research and development, and so forth.

Such associations should not be confused with civil society. Civil society in Ethiopia is one of the sites of the elite, the other being the state, and the primary concern of the great majority of its constituents is providing palliative social care rather than eliminating poor living. The associations proposed here are neither part of the state nor of civil society. They constitute a political society — multiple networks of associations active in reducing unfreedoms and enhancing capabilties, resisting the depoliticization of poverty, economic development and social justice, and bypassing the instruments of exclusion deployed by the state and civil society. We could consider the actions of these associations in terms of what Max Weber (1978) calls “politically oriented action” as opposed to “political action” that he identifies with the action of the state. A politically oriented action “aims at exerting influence on the government” in order to bring about change in the “appropriation, expropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government”.

Such associations form a political rather than a civil society for a number of reasons. First, whereas civil society depoliticizes the economy and socializes inequalities, political society (the ensemble of the associations) creates a space of actions that enables participatants to formulate policies and take decisions on social, economic and political issues. It thus goes beyond poverty reduction, the fetishization of elections, and the current fixation on international aid. It aims at overcoming poor living through the agency of self-organization of the poor themselves. Second, the policies and decisions that these associations adopt constitute the participants as political subjects and generate a local democracy incompatible with a regime that uncouples democracy from socio-economic justice, local self-governance and development. Third, it has an intrinsic value, for its bottom-up, deep and wide participation expresses the self-determination of the participants, making possible the overcoming of the voicelessness of the underprivileged in the definition of socio-economic needs by providing a public space wherein the people determine their goals rather than have these imposed on them externally by market forces and technocrats. Finally, it has a constructive role, for bottom-up, deep and wide participation plays a crucial role in the formation of new social practices and values, new identities and social understanding. The importance of this constructive role is impossible to overestimate. Therefore, I will unpack some of its crucial contributions.

First, the birth of a participation-driven political society will enable the flowering of Ethiopia’s intersubjective and common meanings related to democracy, socio-economic justice and development. The dispossessed identify, from within their own life-world, their unfreedoms, needs, aspirations, and the valued functionings they want to pursue, which engages them to develop the discourses and modes of communication necessary to express new possibilities, opportunities, and the kind of futures open to them. One cannot overestimate the importance of such a development for a democracy of ends, for the existence of democratic ideals and institutions does not in itself guarantee democratic practice (Drèze and Sen, 2002). Participation-driven political society makes possible the emergence of democratic practices as routine activities encompassing political relations, social justice and socio-economic issues, thus making local democracy a way of life. Where there is local democracy, there develops a culture of self-assertion, mutual recognition and mutual accountability, providing a solid ground for sub-regional, regional, and Ethiopia-wide democratic practices and institutions. Political society thus offers the possibility of the development of an internally generated practice of democracy that Ethiopians could recognize as a qualitatively new form of society that emerges from their own actions as the solution to the triple riddles – poverty, injustice, and oppression – of their history. Ethiopia could thus engage in its own historically specific democratic journey in a way that reflects its values and aspirations as authentically as American, Indian, or Japanese democracies reflect their own values and aspirations. Democracy is not something one imitates and follows, as “electoral democracy” and its globe-trotting “observers” assume, but a way of life that one identifies with.

Second, participation-driven political society leads to the emergence of conditions for the secularization of ethnic relations. Secularization is commonly understood in terms of the separation of religion and state. However, the primordial dimensions of ethnic relations that are now dominant in Ethiopia express a quasi-religious kind of attachment to one’s ethnie. This is not because ethnicism is an archaic remnant of the past. Rather, it is the pathological effect of the loss of the sense of history brought about by decades of homeless modernization and oppressive regimes, transforming ethnicity into a meta-narrative that desperately tries to give sense to people’s senseless daily sufferings by identifying an outsider – the Other Ethnie – as “the cause” of their miseries. At the same time, this meta-narrative retroactively posits a harmonious ethnic community that would have existed in the past and that could be recovered by removing the Other Ethnie, the assumed cause of their ills, demanding in the process one’s quasi-religious attachment to one’s ethnie as an indispensable requirement for exorcizing the assumed malevolent Other Ethnie. This kind of fundamentalist attachment to one’s ethnie is the root of the current calamitous transgressions of human solidarity: the new phenomenon of ethnic killings in Ethiopia – in Arba Gugu, Assosa, Bodeno, Gambella, to name a few.

Such a quasi-religious attachment to one’s ethnie cannot be legislated away, nor could it be maintained without defeating the quest for a just, prosperous and democratic Ethiopia. However, the focus on unfreedoms, and the political society through which these are tackled, offers a way out of this predicament. The functionings of participation-driven political society cannot fail to expose that there are, within each ethnie, inequalities that breed oppression and exploitation, and that, therefore, an ethnic perspective on unfreedoms cannot offer effective solutions, and that one’s conditions are better understood and resolved in terms of one’s status as a peasant, a pastoralist, a worker, or an unemployed, rather than as a member of an ethnie. Such an awareness cannot but lead to the recognition that ethnicism is an adaptive preference to oppression and exploitation, triggering the eventual withering away of the primordial dimensions of ethnic relations. This secularization of ethnic relations creates the moral and cultural grounds for accepting the right of individuals to enjoy their ethnic identities without transforming the latter into psychological, social and political straightjackets that undermine the solidarity that is indispensable to eliminate the unfreedoms that afflict all Ethiopians, irrespective of their ethnic identities. This outcome of participation-driven political society lays the foundation for the democratic unity of Ethiopia from the bottom up.

In addition, there is the question of how non-ethnic identities, democracy, prosperity, and unity could arise from within the wombs of ethnic identities, oppression, endemic poverty, and the fragmentation that characterise Ethiopia. No direct passage is possible from the present oppressive, impoverished and fragmented Ethiopia to a democratic, prosperous and united Ethiopia without a mediating institution. This is the issue of what Frederic Jameson (1988), calls, “the vanishing mediator”, referring to the role the “protestant ethics” played, according to Weber, in the birth of capitalism from within the wombs of a non-capitalist world. Civil society cannot play a similar mediating role, for the majority of its elements are primarily engaged in palliative social care. Only political society could assume this mediating role. As a new space of intelligibility – constituted through participation and the culture of self-assertion, mutual recognition and mutual accountability it fosters – political society is the mediator that brings about the emergence of non-ethnic identities, democracy, prosperity, and unity from within the wombs of ethnic fragmentation, oppression, and endemic poverty that now characterise Ethiopia. Moreover, as a new space of intelligibility, political society fulfills an emancipatory role that goes well beyond changing the existing Ethiopian realities in terms of the current aspirations of the people. It brings about the indispensable qualitative transformations of these aspirations themselves, expanding the democratic horizon.

One may ask how self-organization, i.e., the institutionalization of participation, could come about. The starting point for an answer to this question is the recognition of the existence of skills of self-organization in Ethiopia expressed in local traditional practices that cover issues ranging from conflict resolution to sharing work and other activities (Mequanent, 1996; Legesse 2006). These traditional skills constitute a fund of cultural knowledge whose critical and emancipatory elements could be rethought and reworked in terms of the exigencies of the present to tackle the issues of self-organization. A legitimate question arises at this juncture regarding the role of intellectuals in participation-driven political society. Though the agents of participation-driven political society are those who suffer from capabilities deprivations, the participation of intellectuals is indispensable. However, intellectuals cannot enjoy “place-holder” functions for the underprivileged under the claim that intellectuals know better and therefore represent better the interests of the underprivileged. The authority of intellectuals is not rooted in their knowledge-claim but rather in the fact that they have reasons that speak to the interests and aspirations of the participants in a way that persuades them that the intellectuals’ proposals contribute to overcoming unfreedoms and enhancing capabilities.

There is no natural necessity that dictates that Ethiopian life conditions in the new Millennium will necessarily be an extension of or will be better than what they are now. What circumstances will prevail in the new Millennium depends on the will and actions of Ethiopians. If our goal is the creation of a free, prosperous, just, culturally vibrant and democratic Ethiopia, then this goal should be the starting point for reflecting on how it could be achieved. A better future is possible only if the goal that is pursued, the means that are used to implement it, and the subjects capable of implementing it are identified, at least in their general outlines. Only we Ethiopians can accomplish this task of reflection, for our activity of knowing reality is embedded, as a major tradition of philosophy would have it, in reality itself, as indeed Ethiopia’s catastrophic experiences of moderniztion, socialism, electoral democracy, all of them based on unreflectively borrowed knowledge, amply demonstrate. If we abandon to others the task of interpreting our culture, of reflecting on our history, of analysing our needs and of planning our development, we abdicate our soul and body and hand over to them the intellectual, moral and affective resources with which we imagine, interrogate, understand, judge and transform ourselves. Such an abdication displaces the center of gravity of our future from our history to the history of those on whom we depend to solve our problems. This means the perpetuation of our present destitution into the indefinite future. A telling omen of such a desolate future is the “Millennium Development Goals”. This project, which depoliticizes poverty and the economic forces that generate it, expresses the non-historical and non-political conception others have of our life conditions. Inevitably, it reduces Ethiopia’s problems to the issues of poverty reduction and international aid. Yet, from the perspective of the life conditions of Ethiopians, the issue is poor living, an entirely different matter, as we have already seen.

If the new Millennium is to be the epoch of our emancipation, then we ourselves must reflect on our conditions and create our own path to our emancipation from within the wombs of our history and conditions. This is a compelling proposition. However, a century of oppression has inflicted on Ethiopians traumas so crippling and has made reflecting on life in Ethiopia so daunting that the temptations to resort to instinctive but inevitably destructive solutions such as ethnic politics, or to borrow from others pre-packaged solutions, or to follow the destructive path of disavowal of one’s roots (as does Tekeste Tamrat, the young man in Haddis Alemayhu’s novel, YeElm Ezat), seem irresistible to many. Succumbing to these temptations has contributed to making Ethiopia “a sick society, all set against itself and deprived of renovating, salvational forces” (Messay 1999).

In this new Millennium, we should resist these temptations and rise up to the fundamental challenges of our history – oppression, poverty, social injustice – and overcome them through our own intellectual labour, imagination, and social practices, so that Ethiopia becomes a land of freedom, social justice and prosperity. This is unattainable through “The Millennium Development Goals” project, for it inherently condemns Ethiopians to poor living indefinitely under the banners of electoral democracy, international aid and poverty reduction. Our project should be to make the democracy of ends our “Millennium Democratic Goal.”

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1. For complete references to quoted items, please refer to Maimire Mennasemay, “A Millennium Democratic Goal: Some Conceptual Issues” in the forthcoming International Journal of Ethiopian Studies. The text presented here is a shortened version of a section from this article.
2. The writer can be reached at: [email protected]