The paradox of Ethiopia’s politics of nationalism

The last two years were extremely turbulent for Ethiopia as the country witnessed a seesaw battle between the national army and a coalition of rebel groups led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the rebel organization from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Finally, towards the end of 2022, the Ethiopian federal government and Tigray rebels signed a peace deal to end this two-year-long metastasizing war. However, despite the peace deal, as both parties are still reluctant to engage in meaningful dialogues, it is difficult to get over from the ghost of past two years.

Indeed, several awkward questions remain unanswered. What will be the future of the TPLF rebels and TPLF as a political entity? Will there be any punishments for the war crimes committed by both sides? What will be the future of the Prime Minister’s ambitious reform agenda? But most important of all, will the peace deal hold? And if the violence breaks out again, this would not be the first time that a treaty is relapsing into a conflict.

Although the current situation in Ethiopia is taking an enormous human toll, causing political instability throughout the Horn of Africa, these events are not entirely unfamiliar in Ethiopia. In its 60-year political discourse, Ethiopia has experienced alternating periods of peace and conflict. In 1974, a military group known as the Derg overthrew the monarch, Haile Selassie. The head of the Derg, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, launched a deadly purge to transform the country into a Communist stronghold, infamously known as the Red Terror. Mengistu began a collectivisation program while the nation was experiencing one of its regular droughts, and hundreds of thousands perished from famine.

In 1991, a coalition of rebel militias overthrew Mengistu’s Marxist military regime, thus putting an end to a violent seventeen-year civil war. The TPLF, the most ferocious and well-organized of the rebel organizations, came to command the ruling alliance, which ruled the nation. The TPLF-led government not only named the country the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, but they also introduced a new constitution in 1995 and explicitly endorsed the ethnic groups’ rights to self-determination and secession without restriction.

Although this radical approach was anticipated to lessen violent conflict in Ethiopia, issues related to ethnic conflict persisted and the country remained divided on important national narratives. Nevertheless, during the three decades of TPLF reign, Ethiopia experienced respectable economic growth, averaging approximately 10%. The TPLF initiated a program of economic modernisation, which over time, yielded tremendous benefits. In fact, some people have begun referring to Ethiopia as the China of Africa, and the nation has emerged as a stable nation in the disturbed, violent Horn of Africa.

In 2018, a popular protest erupted against the TPLF-led coalition government. Following the protest, Abiy Ahmed emerged as the prime minister. Abiy was born to parents from one of Ethiopia’s two main religious communities and served as both a soldier and an intelligence officer. His father was a member of the sizable Muslim minority, while his mother came from the Orthodox Christian majority. As he campaigned on a promise of mending the nation’s differences, he adopted a working strategy known as “Medemer”, an Amharic word that means “synergy” or “coming together.”

After taking office, Abiy started to change the status quo. Thousands of political prisoners were first freed by him, and he condemned the use of torture in Ethiopian jails. He also started a reform of the nation’s security agencies and lifted the State of Emergency imposed by the TPLF. Additionally, Abiy concluded and signed a peace agreement with Eritrea that ended a 20-years-old conflict and won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his zeal to reform the divisive political spectrum, Abiy disbanded the EPRDF in November 2019 and founded the Prosperity Party, a new political entity with eight regional states. The TPLF declined to join the alliance and remained outside, claiming that Abiy was acting to consolidate his power. Abiy’s supporters contend that his policies are pan-Ethiopian and geared toward creating a more Unitary State. And according to the rebels’ backers, the move from Abiy was aimed at the centralization of power, which would result in a reduction of the autonomy of ethnonationalist forces, as mandated by the constitution.

In June 2021, Ethiopia decided to postpone the scheduled general election due to the pandemic. However, the TPLF proceeded with the election in the Tigray region in September 2020. Later, the TPLF assaulted the Ethiopian National Defense Force in November 2020 under the guise of a pre-emptive strike. On November 2, Abiy Ahmed declared a six-month nationwide state of emergency out of fear of a riot in the capital. Later, he joined the security forces and took command of the national unit in the fight against the TPLF. By Christmas, with the assistance of drones that were allegedly provided by Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, the Ethiopian army took control of the situation and managed to push all the Tigrayan rebels to the north.

The emergency was lifted by the government in January 2021, and all the TPLF’s top officials were freed from custody. The government declared its readiness for a humanitarian truce in June 2022 as well as its unwavering intention to participate in productive negotiations with the African Union serving as the mediator. As per the African Union, the latest peace talk is postponed due to logistical reasons.

Clearly, Ethiopia’s assimilationist nationalism has yet to yield any notable outcomes, and its aspiration for a nation-state remains elusive. A State can be defined based on its political sovereignty, geographic scope, and institutional framework. However, the idea of ​​a nation is broader since it takes into account a variety of additional features, such as a shared cultural, historical, and often linguistic background.

Article 39 of Ethiopia’s constitution stipulates that “every Nation, Nationality, and People in Ethiopia has an absolute right to self-determination, including the right to secession,” reflecting the nation’s adoption of outdated Soviet Communist theories of governance. Surprisingly, the constitution does not refer to “ethnic groups” at all. Therefore, “ethnic politics” in Ethiopia has no constitutional foundation.

Even though the rebel commanders in Tigray have begun planning their independence, this is not going to be easy from a realpolitik perspective. Tigray is a landlocked region, situated between the rest of Ethiopia, with which it is still at war, in addition to the central government, and an antagonistic Eritrea on the other side, which just assisted Abiy’s government in putting down its insurrection. Furthermore, if their independence were acknowledged, it would spark a chain reaction of nationalist movements, causing the continent to become unstable. What would prevent other regions from Ethiopia or other countries from trying the same thing?

Ethiopia has had multiple civil wars, a socialist revolution, and two coups, as well as countless droughts, famines, and pandemics. However, it also managed to attain Africa’s highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate along the way, averaging between 8 and 11% annually in the last decade until 2016. Probably Ethiopian nationalism was strengthened by these successive civil wars. History has demonstrated that nothing can bring a nation closer than difficult times.

Early in the 1990s, when the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet Union disintegrated more quickly and Yugoslavia expanded, that was the last significant wave of nation-building. Only a few new nations have joined the club since then, and many of them are still having difficulties. The African nations Eritrea, which is dictatorial and impoverished, and South Sudan, which is anarchic and dangerous, were both recently formed.

Indeed, in many parts of Africa, there is a strong emergence of the pre-1991 politics of nationalism. This particular genre of politics undermines the right to national self-government by ideologising a centralized unitarist State in the guise of unity. This type of nation-building effort was made in Somalia under President Siad Barre, which eventually led to the breakdown of the state and the unilateral declaration of independence by Somaliland in 1991. Sudan’s attempt at the Arabisation of South Sudan in 2011 also resulted in the State partition and the longest civil conflict in Africa. Ironically, a once hegemonic TPLF itself re-joined national movements for self-determination, often known as federalist forces, which it sidelined and oppressed for over a quarter-century.

Going forward, Ethiopia may need to change its steadfast top-down strategy for creating an indivisible nation-state, which prevents the society’s federal structure from flourishing. Ethiopia may instead initiate a bottom-up international federalization process that matches society with the State. Until then, Ethiopia’s quest to become a nation-state will continue to be elusive.

The article is authored by Samir Bhattacharya, senior research associate, Vivekananda International Foundation.