Nascent Pains of the Absolute Entitlement to Self-Determination
and Outright Secession
Plaintiffs in Civil Society and Ethiopia’s Neophyte Exploration into
Social Re-engineering
Public
Lecture - RL Vol XII No 371
MMXVIII
Costantinos
Berhutesfa Costantinos,
President,
Lem Ethiopia – the Environment & Development Society
Abstract
Article 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia states
the Rights of Nations,
Nationalities, and Peoples. It establishes that “every Nation, Nationality
and People in Ethiopia has an unconditional right to self-determination, including
the right to secession. Nevertheless, current discussions and analyses of transition to democracy in Ethiopia
is generally are marked by several limitations. These include: a tendency to narrow democratic thought and
practice to the terms and categories of immediate, not very well considered,
political and social action, a naive realism, as it were; inattention to
problems of articulation or production of democratic systems and process within
Ethiopian politics rather than simply as formal or abstract possibilities;
ambiguity as to whether civil society is the agent or object of democratic
change and concerning the role of the state; a nearly exclusive concern in
certain institutional perspectives on self-determination in Ethiopia with
generic attributes and characteristics of political organisations and
consequent neglect of analysis in terms of specific strategies and performances
of organisations in processes of transition; and inadequate treatment of the
role of international agencies and of relations between global and indigenous
aspects or dimensions of self-determination in Ethiopia.
It is a telling comment on the abstract
nature of the whole exercise that the major nationalities of Ethiopia have been
cultural categories rather than territorially defined political entities. Yet
such was the power of the theory that even the Dergue was forced to make some
half-hearted concessions to it by establishing autonomous units in its People's
Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. After 1991, the student theory of the 1960s
and 1970s has become official doctrine. The absence of any critical
re-examination of the principle has meant that Ethiopia is now virtually a
laboratory for its testing ‘self-determination and secession’ out, irrespective
of the disastrous lessons of the South Sudan, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc.
Whether democracy means individual freedom
or collective rights, government policy or citizen action, private value or
public norm, the upshot of the relative inattention to problems of articulation
of open democratic systems and processes in itself makes democracy at once the
most concrete of idea systems. Within current projects of political reform,
democracy is either conventionalised or sterilised on terrain of theory and
often vacuously formalised on the ground of practice. It enters Ethiopian
politics and society in relatively abstract and plain form, yet is expected to
land itself to immediate and vital Ethiopian polity's socio-political
experience. It suggests itself, seems
within reach only to elude, and appears readily practicable only to resist
realisation.
Key words: Constitution, Article 39, ethnicity, nation,
nationality, people, self-determination, secession, Ethiopia
See paper here or https://www.academia.edu/37889067/Nascent_Pains_of_the_Unconditional_Right_to_Self-Determination_and_Secession_RL_Vol_XII_No_371_MMXVIII
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