Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge Studies 14 John Young: Bolshevism and National Federalism in Ethiopia DOI: 10.34663/9783945561577-05 In: John Markakis, Günther Schlee, and John Young: The Nation State : A Wrong Model for the Horn of Africa Online version at https://www.mprl-series.mpg.de/studies/14/ ISBN 978-3-945561-57-7, DOI 10.34663/9783945561577-00 First published 2021 by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, Max Planck Re- search Library for the History and Development of Knowledge under Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Printed and distributed by: epubli / neopubli GmbH, Berlin https://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/111400 The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Chapter 3 Bolshevism and National Federalism in Ethiopia John Young 3.1 Introduction Civil war broke out in Ethiopia on November 4, 2020 when the national army at the be­ hest of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attacked the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) administered state of Tigray. There were many differences between Abiy and the TPLF, but foremost was the Front’s support of national federalism and the prime minister’s back­ ing of a return to the centralized administration of past Ethiopian governments. The issue of national federalism has been controversial since it was first introduced by the Ethiopian Peo­ ple’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 1991, but the war encourages the debate to be revisited. This chapter considers national federalism as an alternative arrangement to the Western nation­state and examines its theoretical origins in the writings of the Bolshe­ viks and the early experience of the Soviet Union, compares Soviet experience with that of Ethiopia under the EPRDF, and attempts to draw some insights. Alone in Africa, Ethiopia was not a colony, but an independent state that took the form of an empire and competed with the European powers in the scramble for territorial gain in the continent. While other African empires collapsed before or with the advent of European colonialism, successive Ethiopian imperial governments defeated—as in the case of Italy in 1896—or came to arrangements with the colonial powers—as in the case of Britain and France—and thus maintained its empire well into the modern era. Moreover, its collapse late in the twentieth century was not due to foreign intervention, but because of internal contradictions. Ethiopian experience thus set it apart from the rest of Africa; its wars of liberation were not against a foreign power but against the imperial regime of Haile­Selassie and the Derg. With the possible exceptions of South Africa and South Sudan, all the major African armed struggles were anti­colonial, but the EPRDF fought the state socialism of the Derg to realize its own version of socialism and ways to address the national question. Again, in contrast to the rest of Africa, the EPRDF explicitly rejected the European modelled nation­state. Instead, the system of national federalism formulated by the EPRDF has its inspiration in Bolshevik ideas and the experience of the Soviet Union, spurned Western practice. And the ideas it drew upon were the product of a long debate among the Western political left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the brutality of forced assimilation, marginalization, and crushing of rival nationalities during the national democratic revolutions of the British, French, German, Italian, and American states. In opposition to the European model of political development, the international politi­ cal left was of one mind in viewing the nation­state and nationalism as obstacles to achieving a society of free people (Bookchin 1994). For the left, nationalism united people in a hier­ archical arrangement that obscured the ultimately class­based contradictions that served to 56 3. Bolshevism and National Federalism in Ethiopia oppress the workers and other marginalized groups to advance the interests of capitalists who needed captive national markets. Anarchism represented the most extreme manifesta­ tion of this leftist conviction and held all states to be barriers to human freedom. Marx and Engels sometimes endorsed nationalist struggles, such as that for Polish self­determination because it had the objective of undermining the reactionary Russian Tsarist regime. How­ ever, they held the nation­state to be a transitional phenomenon to be overcome in realizing a nation­less and class­less communism. In response to the threat posed by the rise of reactionary nationalism and Islamism, the Bolsheviks oversaw the construction of a federation that deliberately undermined the domi­ nant Russian nation and endeavored to politically, culturally, and economically advance the marginalized communities, not as an end in itself, but as a means to give birth to a social­ ist state. That the commitment to this ideal declined, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors perverted the goal of socialism, and it collapsed in 1991 does not negate consider­ ation of that experience since it continues to cast light on the national issue in contemporary Ethiopia and elsewhere. The collapse of the Soviet Union cannot be attributed solely to the rising nationalism of its component parts and instead to growing anger at the unaccountable elites ruling the federation and a misconstrued reform process under Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mikhail Gorbachev. But it is notewor­ thy that the Soviet Union broke up along national lines and should Ethiopia not overcome its long­running crisis, given added weight by the outbreak of war in November 2020, the country could follow the trajectory of the Soviet Union and disintegrate. Although the writings of the leading Bolsheviks on the national issue and the early ex­ perience of the Soviet Union had widespread support in the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) from which all components of the EPRDF and much of the opposition had their origins, its practical application to federalism was widely greeted with skepticism and op­ position. On the one hand, it was opposed by Amhara and other Ethiopian nationalists who held it would bring about the disintegration of Ethiopia. On the other hand, it was opposed by secessionists, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), and those who assumed that it was subterfuge to keep the minority Tigrayans in power, that no serious power would be de­ volved, and that none of the country’s nations would be permitted to secede. Although the EPRDF maintained that its approach was a realistic response to the country’s endemic na­ tional conflicts and that the Western modelled nation­state was unsuitable for Ethiopia and Africa, it was at best ignored on the continent and at worst viewed as a recipe for disunity and weakening the central state. Most scholars have opposed the EPRDF’s approach to the national issue and thus began a dialogue of the deaf. Academic critiques have typically been informed by Western social science, a belief in the superiority of the Western nation­state, support for models of fed­ eralism designed to suppress the kind of national consciousness that the EPRDF’s policies gave rise to, and a religious like faith in Western liberal democracy. Hence the popularity of Abiy’s rejection of EPRDF ‘authoritarianism’ and support for a Western version of democ­ racy. Abiy’s vision for Ethiopia harkens back to a golden age of pan­Ethiopian unity and the absence of ethnic conflict under unitary governments. Unfortunately, there was no such golden age and instead there is a long history of Ethiopian emperors and the Derg trying to overcome national revolts at great human cost. 3. Bolshevism and National Federalism in Ethiopia 57 Understanding this better than Abiy and the Amhara centrists who form his ideological core, the EPRDF tried to construct a system that passed considerable powers to national com­ munities, not as its critics would have it to bring about the demise of the Ethiopian state or to ensure the self­aggrandizement of Tigrayans, but instead to overcome national oppression and ensure the state’s survival. That the TPLF and EPRDF model of decentralized national based administrations was not always successful and in need of reform cannot be contested, but it represented an important attempt to contain national strife that has long threatened to dismember Ethiopia, while the centrism pressed by Abiy is a tried and failed approach. In an environment of Western triumphalism in the post­Cold War era, critics often con­ sidered it enough to link the EPRDF’s model of federalism to Bolshevism to discredit it. Meanwhile, EPRDF supporters were reluctant to acknowledge their theoretical dept to Bol­ shevik ideas and Soviet experience and instead were reduced to contending that only a radi­ cal devolution of power to national communities could save the country from disintegration. There was much truth in this, but it provided little basis for understanding the EPRDF’s model of federalism and could not be defended on either theoretical or comparative grounds. The EPRDF had the power, but the academics and other critics have overwhelmingly dom­ inated the debate, and with each crisis faced by the regime there were new attacks national federalism. The November 2020 war provides a context to reconsider whether centralized unitary government or a version of national federalism best meets the needs of Ethiopia, assuming that the country survives its present crisis. After reviewing the writings and approaches of the leading Bolsheviks on nations and nationalism and the experience surrounding the establishment of the Soviet Union, this study will outline the development and implementation of the TPLF and EPRDF system of national based federalism.