Volume 36 2009 Issue

Review of African Political Economy No. 120:181-192 # ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2009 Post-war Ethiopia: The Trajectories of Crisis Christopher Clapham This article addresses current crises of governance in Ethiopia. Internal conflicts within the ruling coalition arise from its origins in a localised insurgency and its flawed capacity to create a broader political base. In the national context, particularly in the major towns, it rules only by effective force and not through dialogue or negotiation. A policy of ethnic federalism promised devolution of powers to local areas, but founders on the difficulty of reconciling autonomous systems of power and authority within a common political structure. Internationally, Ethiopia has had considerable success, presenting itself as a model of ‘good governance’ with donor approval. Having accepted the basic tenets of neoliberalism, it also backed the ‘global war on terror’, giving it scope to promote its own agenda, with US backing, in Somalia. Its cardinal problem remains the management of diversity and opposition. Introduction Crises of governance in Ethiopia are embedded in the long uneven history of the Ethiopian state itself, and its place within a highly conflictual regional political arena, in which Ethiopia holds a central position. The crises that beset the ruling political coalition (the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, EPRDF) of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, after the apparently triumphant conclusion to its border war against Eritrea in May 2000, were only partially of its own making. This is not the place to delve into deeply contested histories, but it is at least necessary to place the developments that led to the impasse so apparent by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century in their broader context. This impasse was not merely the outcome of failed democratisation, or human rights abuse, or even indeed poverty, but was, rather, the latest expression of much deeper problems that derive from the inherent contradictions of state creation and maintenance in a perennially violent corner of Africa. Most basically, the conflicts that have long structured Ethiopian politics result from the incompatibility between a particular conception of the state – which itself springs from the peculiarly hierarchical and authoritarian notions of governance associated with the cultures and societies of the northern Ethiopian plateau – and the numerous ethnic, cultural, class and economic elements that could scarcely be accommodated within this concept of governance, and the interests that upheld it. Throughout the history of modern Ethiopia, the resulting tensions have had to be managed, through some combination of force (which has always been essential to hold the state together) and political dexterity, in devising formulae through which the underlying divisions ISSN 0305-6244 Print, 1740-1720 Online/09/020181-12 DOI: 10.1080/03056240903064953 182 Review of African Political Economy of an extremely varied society could be held in some kind of check. Ruling Ethiopia has never been easy. The EPRDF itself came to power in 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the previous formula developed by the Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Maryam, a formula which at the outset in the mid-1970s appeared to offer a solution to the contradictions that had led inexorably to the failure of its own imperial predecessor. In an analysis widely shared by the Ethiopian student intellectuals of the 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of which the future EPRDF leadership itself formed part, the Derg and its supporters believed that Ethiopia’s problems centrally derived from a history of economic exploitation that was most clearly expressed in the alienation of land in large areas of Ethiopia by the members of a ‘feudal’ class, which had profited from its role in the conquest of much of the country’s current territory during the second half of the nineteenth century. Once this process was reversed, by nationalising land and vesting its control in peasants’ associations drawn from the local population, the central contradictions of Ethiopian statehood would be removed, and it would be possible for peoples freed from exploitation to build a united Ethiopia under a socialist and also nationalist government. This essentially Jacobin project, in which social equality would lead to national unity, was destroyed most basically by its incapacity to make any concessions to those who, notably in Eritrea, were already contesting the territorial structure of the state itself. Add to that its ruthless centralism, the rapid undermining of the local autonomy that the initial land reform had promised, the inevitable failure of its Soviet-inspired commitment to centrally planned economic development, and the ever-increasing burden, human and economic, imposed by never-ending wars, and its eventual collapse was assured. The alternative project embraced by the Tigrayan People’s Liber- ation Front (TPLF), always the predominant element in the EPRDF which it formed as victory approached, nonetheless drew on significant elements common to all of the Marxist revolutionaries of the 1970s, adapted in the light of their own situation, and of a global constellation of forces dramatically different from that which had prevailed when the Derg was formed. Central to the TPLF vision of Ethiopia was Stalin’s theory of ‘nationality’, which accorded far greater prominence to the ‘national question’ than the Derg had ever done – appropriately enough for a movement heavily based in Tigray, which sought to create an alliance with other regional forces that were likewise opposed to the ruthless centralism of the Derg. Apart from recognising Eritrea’s right to indepen- dence – the essential requirement for ending the most debilitating of all Ethiopia’s wars – this also encompassed the right of every ‘nation, nationality, and people’ within Ethiopia to ‘self-determination’, explicitly extending not just to internal self- government, but to a right of secession from Ethiopia itself. But in making the national question, rather than the land question, the key to the resolution of Ethiopia’s internal difficulties, the TPLF/EPRDF regime still shared with its predecessor the conviction that the problems of nationality in Ethiopia were essentially superstructural, and that the removal of the basis for discrimination by one group against others would in turn remove any valid source of separatism, and make possible the maintenance of a single Ethiopian state, not as rigidly centralised and nationalist as the Derg envi- saged, but whose peoples were nonetheless capable of living harmoniously together. Added to this was the recognition of both a capitalist economy and the elements of global liberalism that were imposed by the need to reposition Ethiopia within a Post-war Ethiopia 183 transformed global order, difficult though these were to combine with an internal political structure that was still conceived by Meles Zenawi and his colleagues in essentially Leninist terms. The intense and peculiar legacy of long guerrilla struggle, guided by a Maoist conception of liberation war, has in practice proved virtually impossible to reconcile with liberal ideologies. That the pretence could be sustained for so long, before the regime’s fundamental illiberalism became all too apparent in the aftermath of the 2005 elections, was due in very large measure to the leadership of Meles Zenawi—a man of extraordinary intellectual ability, great personal charm, tactical astuteness, and a capacity to appeal especially to international constituencies which were themselves looking for African ‘success stories’ to justify their own vision of liberal ‘good governance’. This collection of abilities was rendered all the more striking by the contrast with his opposite number, Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea. The fact that, unlike the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the EPRDF took over a sophisticated and well-established state apparatus was also a considerable benefit. Even though opposition was never absent, the EPRDF regime could plausibly claim, in its early years, to have brought all the disparate elements in Ethiopia’s composition together into some broadly sustainable harmony. For the first time in decades, the country was at peace. The previously alienated peoples of the peripheries were given a level of autonomy that they had never previously possessed, and despite the disgruntlement both of central Ethiopian nationalists on the one hand, and many of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, on the other, a reasonably man- ageable balance between the country’s tradition of centralised statehood and the rep- resentation of its disparate peoples was achieved. The abandonment of the Derg’s counterproductive attempt to run a centrally planned economy, and the adoption (to the extent that a movement still deeply imbued with Marxist thinking could do so) of a capitalist economic model, helped to create evident though still modest economic progress. Political space was opened to a dramatically greater extent than ever before in Ethiopia’s history, with the establishment for the first time of an independent press, and other trappings of an expanded civil society. Most strikingly of all, Ethiopia’s international standing was transformed from near pariah status into a favoured position in the new global order, notably among aid donors for whom the new government’s apparent honesty, efficiency and dedication especially to trans- forming the lives of the rural masses

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