Whatever
its contemporary forms, the sources of identity politics in Ethiopia today can
be traced to the nation’s pre-revolutionary and revolutionary past. It is
bound up with the development of the modern Ethiopian polity and its radical
transformation.
But
here is the broader historical point that is often overlooked in radical
ethnocentric criticism and devaluation of the Ethiopian national tradition: the
formation of nation-states everywhere has generally involved more or less
violent conquest, incorporation, and assimilation of some peoples or regions by
others. This has been generally the way in which states have been created all
over the world – in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
In
many cases, political, economic, and cultural expansion has resulted in
protracted conflict between dominant forces and dominated groups. However, this
broad historical pattern of state formation has also tended to result in more
or less significant progressive accommodation, within evolving nation-states, of
the demands of incorporated communities for freedom and equality.
The
development of the modern Ethiopian polity is no exception to this overall
historical pattern, even if it has had particular characteristics of its own. It
cannot be denied that this development has produced some resentment and
antipathy toward Ethiopian nationhood among certain westernized elite circles
and educated strata in particular ethnic and cultural minorities in the country.
It has produced within these circles a sense of wounded cultural pride and a
politics of victimization. But we need get over the realities of Ethiopian
nation-state formation even as we struggle to right past wrongs. This can be
done in part by putting in historical perspective the politics of victimization
itself. Doing so is important because this style of politics has dominated and
shaped the separatist ethnonationlisms of groups like the TPLF and the OLF.
Distinct
Ethiopian ethnic communities cannot be spoken of entirely in terms of their
treatment by conquering Amhara rulers, to the exclusion of their own historical
dynamic, their own cultural influence, and their own experience of expansion,
in short, their active entry into the
Ethiopian national scene. It is a historical fact, for example, that, beginning
in the sixteenth century, if not earlier, the Oromos launched their own
expansion, moving from their base in the Bale and Borena region and advancing
to the North and Northeast into the Ethiopian highlands, into areas which came
to be known as Arsi, Shewa, Welega, Harar, and Wello.
The
problem with continuing to depict major cultural or ethnic communities which
have been centrally involved in Ethiopia’s historic and contemporary affairs
merely as victims of Amhara domination is not only that the depiction is not
entirely consistent with the complexities of actual Ethiopian history. The
portrayal is problematic also because it results in a politically paralyzing
fixation on the past which constitutes a drag on much needed forward movement
and progress in trans-ethnic
Ethiopian national-democratic thought and action today.
Revolution
and the Domination of Identity Politics
While
the inequality and injustice experienced by distinct ethnic and cultural
communities in the country may have provided its primary sources or conditions,
identity politics took shape and came into play in the course of the Ethiopian
Revolution, beginning with the Student Movement. It did so as a corrective
response to the flaws and limitations of traditional Ethiopianness, intended to
bring about the freedom and equality of all “nationalities,”
“nations,” and “peoples” in the country. Not simply a limited
local phenomenon, then, identity politics has from the beginning been connected
in thought and practice to the broader Ethiopian revolutionary project.
What
is remarkable, though, is the extent to which the Ethiopian revolutionary experience
as a whole came to be overtaken and dominated by its ethnocentric political
offshoots, culminating in the triumphant “radical” tribalism of the
TPLF. As I have noted elsewhere, the Woyanes have given identity politics
primacy in a way and to an extent not theorized by pioneers of the Revolution. The
pioneers saw “national self-determination” movements within the
framework of class struggle, as limited tactical movements toward the
trans-ethnic solidarity of oppressed classes in Ethiopia.
The
problem the country’s progressives and patriots today face is not simply
one of resolving conflicts between the claims of Ethiopian unity on one side
and those of the self-determination of “nationalities” on the
other. This is largely an old and tired formulation of our national crisis
which represents a false choice, an unreal polarization bereft of conceptual
and practical significance. It draws on a dubious, now discredited,
Leninist-Stalinist doctrine. Oneness-in-diversity has been more or less a mark
of our national development, notwithstanding the historical realities of
incorporation and assimilation of diverse peoples in the growth of the modern
Ethiopian state.
Instead,
the major challenge Ethiopian progressives confront today has to do with a
dominant “radical” representation
of ethnicity (as “nationality” and “national
self-determination”) that works against not only robust, vibrant
Ethiopian solidarity, but also against the real autonomy and democratic freedom
of all distinct Ethiopian ethnic and cultural communities. Simply stated,
exclusively partisan ideological representation is privileged and dominant over
the actual self-determination or local autonomy of the nation’s diverse
communities as well as over their common Ethiopian nationality. Categories like
“liberation,” “self-determination,” and “revolutionary
democracy” have more to do with the ruling ideology itself – its
internal abstractions, codes, and practices – than with its social
referents and historical context. It seems to me a good conceptual and
practical grasp of this major challenge is a critical first step in overcoming
it.
In
other words, the struggle for Ethiopia’s democratic renewal involves
grappling with an entrenched revolutionary narrative that has, in effect if not
in original intent, given pride of place in the nation’s affairs to
ethnic protagonists. Or, more accurately, the narrative, which the Woyanes have
played upon on their way to power, has accorded a central, dominant position to
self-appointed narrow partisan groups that have merely substituted themselves
and claim to speak for entire communities.
What
is particularly problematic here is that, under TPLF hegemony, broad-based
progressive political actors that intersect ethnic and regional lines have so
far been unable to come into their own. Their trans-ethnic national agency and
proposed remedies for Ethiopia’s social, economic, political, and
cultural ills are excluded or displaced by the priority of maximizing the
“self-determination” of disparate tribal groups and parties and their definition of
“national” problems and their
“solutions.” It bears stressing that, for the tribal elites in
power in Ethiopia today, what ideas and solutions are formulated is less
important than the fact that it is they
who formulate them. The priority here is not the soundness or substance of the
ideas and solutions as such, but their association with affirmations of
identity, with political self-definition and self-assertion.
The
significant role identity politics played in the Ethiopian Revolution and its
ultimate triumph in post-revolutionary Ethiopia through the reign of the
Woyanes have consequently meant that the definition of problems of Ethiopian
nationhood, the solutions proposed for them, and the movements and measures aimed
at reaching the solutions have all taken a decidedly ethnocentric character.
The very rationale of identity politics has been to exclude broader
socio-economic, political, and cultural ties that interweave diverse
communities and cultures in the country and to make ethnicism the form and substance
of all “nationality.”
Thus,
in the hands of the Woyanes and their Amhara and Oromo collaborators, the tribe-centered
ideology of “revolutionary democracy” is essentially split off from
the affirmed values and sentiments of our trans-ethnic national experience. The
ideology presents itself as something alien or indifferent to the Ethiopian
tradition, even an existential threat to that historic tradition. The Meles
regime is simply incapable of relating to our national spirit from within
itself, and Ethiopian patriots and democrats will not find that spirit in the
regime.
The
“Radical” Form of Dominant Ethnicism
If
democratic opposition forces in Ethiopia and in the diasporic Ethiopian
community are to formulate and implement an effective long-term strategy for
undoing the ethno-nationalist hegemony of the Woyanes, then, they must have a
clear understanding as to what exactly is to be undone. They must achieve a
good conceptual and practical grasp of what they want to transform, namely, not
ethnicity as such or merely a particular regime, but an entire system or form of
identity-based “radical” politics in the framework of which the
regime has taken authoritarian shape and claimed legitimacy. Their opposition
needs to establish some order of priority of ideas, goals, projects, and
activities in which particular accomplishments of objectives build on one
another, cumulatively constituting growth, maturation, and completion of
resistance. The dynamic order of priorities may be characterized as tactical,
strategic and, more broadly, systemic.
For
example, instead of taking ethnic identity and conflict in Ethiopia simply as
historically or naturally given, opposition groups and coalitions might ask the
broader systemic and strategic question: What is it about the model or system of revolutionary politics which the Woyanes have played upon
that produces fixed antagonistic ethnic identities and differences within and through itself for diverse,
intersecting and overlapping Ethiopian communities? In posing such a question,
we direct our attention at the politically self-serving manipulation of the
system by the ruling party. We highlight the fact that the Woyanes use the progressive
vocabulary which has formed the basic stock of Ethiopian revolutionary
discourse to encode authoritarian-tribal contents or meanings of their own. In
doing so, they have often evaded systematic, critical scrutiny by insinuating
their exclusively partisan constructs into supposedly
“self-determining” ethnic and cultural communities.
How
do we recognize the underlying form of radicalism at play here, in the abstract
and in reality? It can be seen as a framework or model of political thought and
practice involving pattern-making and order-creating through an arrangement of
ideal and actual elements. As played upon by the Woyanes, the model interweaves
fragments and pieces of reality – particular places, historical events, specific
issues and concerns, and local identities, grievances and conflicts – with
global, ideological dogma and political formulas, generic revolutionary
narrative, and abstract social labels or categories.
We
are talking here about the rise of a vanguard party or front which makes “clearings”
in society, culture, and politics, creating political order unilaterally by occupying
and “developing” these clearings through its exclusive ideas,
institutions, and agenda. As the experiences of the TPLF and the EPLF show, once
in power, the revolutionary party or “liberation front” suffers
from the delusion that an entire nation is held together by its ideological and
political constructs alone, fearing that if it does not maintain its
dictatorship through its exclusively partisan constructs, there will be no
political or national order.
Under
these circumstances, virtually all social groups, political organizations, and cultural
and institutional practices in Ethiopia are incorporated or neutralized as extensions
or objects of the Woyane tribal party-state itself. Elements which resist such
incorporation are either marginalized or excluded, and often, suppressed. No
public sphere exists or functions openly and effectively in the country outside
the restricted political space the state itself has created through various dependent
ethnic organizations, public agencies, cultural institutions, and auxiliary intelligentsia
and mass media.
Leaders
and partisans of the TPLF-EPRDF of course claim that their politics reflects
progressive ideas and principles and the interests of the Ethiopian people. But
universal ideas as such and the autonomous interests of Ethiopian civil society
are the least of the ruling party’s actual concerns. Rhetorical claims
aside, its fundamental political impulse is rather to adopt an external controlling
attitude toward ideas and social interests. The power of Woyane ethnocentric political
system is not that of intellectual and moral persuasion, but of direct authoritarian
regulation of collective behavior through manipulation of ideological codes and
bureaucratic instruments and, often, by brute political force.
While
the model of radical political thought and action which has guided the Meles
regime and that of the Derg before it
emerged in the revolutionary era formally as an order of grand ideas (
“national self-determination,” “equality,” and so on), these ideas have substantivelyremained outside the model and deeply
contradicted by it. So, departing from a form of radical identity politics
which contravenes the real freedom and autonomy of distinct ethnic and cultural
communities in Ethiopia, the TPLF regime has been moving toward a goal of
“national self-determination” which cannot be reached.
Contradictions
of Dictatorial Identity Politics
As
an overall model and in its Woyane variant in particular, identity politics is
entangled in a web of paradoxes which manifest themselves on various levels. Generally,
there is the opposition between, on the one hand, the ostensibly
“progressive” political ethnicism of the ruling Tigrean party and,
on the other, its imperious, repressive circulation in and through a whole host
of dependent local social and cultural groups, institutional entities, and
organizations. This represents a contradictory assertion of egalitarian values
and dictatorial power, a massive empowerment of a particular party-hierarchy based
in a minority “nationality” over the affairs and relations of large
ethnic majorities and other numerous smaller distinct communities in the
country.
Put
differently, national self-determination as an ideal or ultimate value and goal
is neutralized by its treatment as a ground for tactical maneuvers and
engagements aimed at advancing or maintaining narrow partisan-tribal interests.
Ethnic differences and conflicts in Ethiopian society have not been so
irreconcilable as to justify misconceived and unworkable separatist movements
like those of the TPLF and unreconstructed factions of the OLF, yet partisans
of radical ethnocentrism have systematically exploited such differences,
converting them into exclusive ideological constructs and political projects
and into bureaucratic and material interests.
The
fundamental incoherence of ethnocentric politics in Ethiopia, then, is that, while
its whole rationale is the identity and autonomy of communities, regions, and
localities in the country, it systematically negates this rationale through
massive and highly intrusive state intervention. At work here is a paradoxical
localization that converts the local, apparently self-determining, collective
self into an extension and object of a centralized power hierarchy or system of
domination.
Through
this system, the ruling party-state hierarchy recodes, streamlines, and
standardizes the values and meanings of local communities, social institutions,
and cultural practices within its own political structure, stamping them with its
exclusive authoritarian form. It refashions actually diverse local social
strata within a more easily controllable abstract ethnicism. In this sense, the
Woyane authoritarian one-party state may be seen as a deeply contradictory
political system, at once divisive and aggregating, simultaneously separating
and binding, formally liberating and actually oppressing.
Opposition
forces can persuasively claim, then, that this structure, as well as the model
of revolutionary politics which underwrites it, is of dubious value as a
mechanism for securing the local autonomy or the common Ethiopian nationality of
distinct ethnic and cultural communities in the country. They can also make the
case that the so-called national question as traditionally formulated and
debated in the context of the abstract radicalism of the Ethiopian
revolutionary experience has not been particularly helpful in theorizing the
concrete issues and problems of ethnic and cultural minorities on the margins
of mainstream Ethiopian society, let alone in bringing minorities into the
center on an equal, democratic basis.
As
I have argued elsewhere, these problems amount to more than the shortcomings or
failures of particular parties or regimes, such as the Derg, the TPLF and the OLF. More fundamentally, they reflect an
underlying limitation in radical political thought and practice in Ethiopia,
going back to the Student Movement. Simply put, the limitation consists in a
naïve realism which conflates forms and categories of Leninist-Stalinist
abstraction, which are constructs or contents of global revolutionary ideology,
with their Ethiopian social referents, the actual communities and groups in
Ethiopia to which the categories refer or which they supposedly represent.
However,
being so weighted by artless realism has, ironically, caused the ruling
ideology to have a disempowering, hollowing out effect on actual social groups and
communities in the country. Thus there is the paradox of
“nationalities” or “peoples,” including the Amhara and
Oromo communities, being subjected to partisan Tigrean hegemony in the very
act, or supposed act, of their “national self-determination.” We
see here rhetorical and formal promotion of local autonomy, of ethnic identity
and difference, going hand in hand with the erasure of actual locality and diversity brought about by the homogenizing
effects of TPLF authoritarian state ethnicism.
This
is so largely because, in championing the self-determination of nationalities
or distinct communities in the country, the ruling party has worked exclusively
with manipulable representations and dependent
factions of such social entities forged within, and attachedto its own power hierarchy. The
TPLF’s social referents, be they Oromos, Amharas, Tigres or other groups,
never achieve real local self-government or actually free collective agency
because they remain ensnared in its web of partisan priorities and agenda, its
dictatorial forms, structures, and operations. They function mainly as ciphers
or focal points for the party’s own authoritarian priorities, ideas, goals,
and maneuvers.
It
is as if, in the “revolutionary” political consciousness of the
Woyanes, the Ethiopian national whole and the diverse communities which make it
up were utterly hollowed out and so completely filled with the TPLF’s own
partisan images that neither the national whole nor its parts can be recognized
apart from these images. In the process, progressive thought itself has been
impoverished in the hands of the Woyanes and their intellectual backers, unable
to break out of the narrow confines of inert partisan ideology and ethnonationalist
orthodoxy, to come into its own and acquire analytical and critical distance
from Ethiopian sociopolitical reality.
In
sum, the model of radical politics within which the Woyane regime has taken
shape and come into play has subjected the common Ethiopian nationality of
diverse communities in the country to a two-fold reduction. First, the
Ethiopian whole is diminished to a mere aggregation of disparate,
self-contained parts, to nothing more than a collection of ethnic enclaves
which maintain largely external relations with one another. Second, to the
extent the Meles regime acknowledges Ethiopian nationhood, it does so by
reducing it to contemporary ideological slogans centered on the dubious formula
of “national self-determination up to and including secession.” The
regime thereby perpetuates the rationalist illusion of the revolutionary era
that the Ethiopian people can maintain solidarity through dry abstractions
alone, without relying on a common national culture, on shared Ethiopian values
and sentiments.
Undoing
Authoritarian Ethnicism:A
Note on Democratic Resistance
How
should dissident groups and coalitions in Ethiopia resist the ethnocentric
hegemony of the Woyane party-state machine, whose wheels churn our national
affairs up? What are the fields and forms of their counter-hegemonic struggle
for democracy? These are hard questions which don’t lend themselves to
simple or ready answers and this is not the place to tackle them. It is enough here
to make a few general observations by way of closing this piece.
In
posing these critical questions, I envision a growth of oppositional struggle
beyond the activity of simply polemicizing against or rejecting the Meles regime
while adopting a defensive patriotic position in which “unity” pure
and simple is sought as an antidote to ethnic “division.” An underlying limitation of our
opposition to the dictatorial rule of the Woyanes is that we often limit
ourselves to a moralizing position; we tend to move too immediately to a condemnation
and rejection of it that actually leaves its ideas, myths, institutions, and
practices largely unexamined, unchallenged, and unraveled.
The
dictatorship cannot be simply condemned or rejected out of existence. If what
we want is to takeback effectively domains of Ethiopian intellectual,
cultural, and sociopolitical life occupied by the TPLF-EPRDF party-state
machine, we must engage the machine in various ways and on many fronts. We can
resist its hegemony by responding to gaps, tensions, and contradictions in the
structural model of revolutionary politics within which it has taken form and
established itself.
Counter-hegemonic
intellectual, moral, and political movement in this sense marks a further stage
of development of opposition that must be reached if the TPLF party-state
apparatus is to be effectively dismantled. The movement involves getting a hold
on the apparatus, engaging critically its ideological premises and operative
assumptions as well as its specific policies and actions, intervening in its
workings as well as in its rhetoric. High-performance oppositional struggle
entails taking apart conceptually, strategically, and in practice Woyane
“revolutionary democracy” and offering an inspiring alternative
vision of progressive politics and government that might better achieve the
goals of freedom, equality, democracy, and development for all Ethiopians.
