Zenebe BASHAW - codesria

CODESRIA
12th General Assembly
Governing the African Public Sphere
12e Assemblée générale
Administrer l’espace public africain
12a Assembleia Geral
Governar o Espaço Público Africano
عشر الثانية العمومية الجمعية
ﻰﻘﻳﺮﻓﻹا مﺎﻌﻟا ءﺎﻀﻔﻟا ﻢﻜﺣ ﻢ
ﻜﺣ
Governing the Public Sphere and State Formation in
Ethiopia
Zenebe Bashaw
Nagoya University
07-11/12/2008
Yaoundé, Cameroun

1. The Problem
The discourse and practice of the public sphere has for long been conceived as arena and
space which private citizens create as a public in order for them to debate the general rules
dictating relations in society (Habermas, 1989; Calhoun, 1992). It is only when such arena
and space is depersonalized and able to create relatively functioning and independent civil
society that it serves the purpose of strengthening transparent and durable institutions.
Situating this to Ethiopia connotes the main players of the public sphere to be a wide range of
actors in urban and rural communities, such as students, peasants, ethno-linguistic groups,
workers and religious and local leaders. These are agents that represent and manifest the
composition, characteristics and trend of the public sphere. Indeed, its comprehensiveness and
broader understanding perhaps leads to delineating the public sphere as synonymous with
society or its main germane fabric as a whole. The successive states in Ethiopia have been at
the center of organizing and countering the forces of the public sphere, for politics in the
country has essentially been how best to incorporate the different forces of the public sphere
that make up the different states: the empire state, the Marxist state and the ethno-political
state (see Berhanu, 1998).
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the successive states since the creation of
modern Ethiopia have been unable to successfully govern the public sphere with durable and
well-functioning institutions. The paper contends that one main source of protracted conflicts
in the country lies in the incapacity and unwillingness of successive states in allowing the
forces of the public sphere to be part of the process of state formation. Rather the process of
state formation is marked by strong elites who control weak institutions and negotiate among
themselves. Political power has not been vested in the public sector, and the forces of the
public sphere have not been in a position to articulate and discuss the notion and “subjective
aspect” of the successive states in Ethiopia, i.e., how the states exist in their minds and hearts
that they rule and control.
This occupies an important place in the governance of the public sphere for the reason that the
concept of the state that a number of people theorize is “invisible; it must be personified
before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived”
(Walzer, 1967: 194). As identities give meaning to the continuity of the state, the state as an
institution strengthens or weakens the importance of national identities, and is their
representation. The further alienation of the forces of the public sphere from decisions in the
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(re)distribution of resources, political participation and the freedom to organize erodes the
capacity of the successive states from “broadcasting” and “radiating their power” from the
center to “cover a … territorially, demarcated area over which it exercises” (Mann, 1986: 112;
Herbst, 2000).
To be sure, the challenges of effectively governing the public sphere in the process of state
formation in Ethiopia have been bedeviled by the interplay between “territorial deficit” and a
“deficit of integration” (see Darbon, 1991: 41). Not only do the different states lack
substantial control over areas beyond the seats of governments, they have also been
constrained in their capacity to maintain law and order, to extract revenues and to place
effective administrative systems. What Christopher Clapham (1999: 57) identifies as the
“shrinking of the state away from the peripheries of its formal national territory, and its
concentration in the capital and the major cities, and in the most important areas of export
production” constitutes the underlying historical nature of the successive states. And states
that fail to govern the public sphere successfully lack coercive, integrative or incorporative
and (re)distributive capacities and legitimacy to effectively penetrate society.
2. Significance
A state as an organization claims the monopoly of violence in a defined territory and for its
recognition by other states and/or acceptance by agents of the public sphere as the ultimate
provider of public and political goods for its people. State formation is a continuous process
in territorial expansion and consolidation, regulation of social relationships coupled with
“standardization” or constitution of identities. It also constitutes extraction and
(re)distribution of resources and provision of public goods (Weber, 1978: 905; Rokkan, 1975:
570-575; Skocpol, 1985: 21). State formation is a continuous process of developing the
center’s territorial claim and effective control over the periphery. It is also a process in the
monopoly of legitimate force. It implies “the assertion of a territory, a center, over others, in a
kind of internal conquest, which only gradually and to a varying extent became a process of
integration” (Rao and Suphellen, 1996: 81). With the risk of oversimplifications, the history
of state formation is a history of defining political power territorially. By state formation, this
paper underlines the formation, change, reformation, and deformation/exist of a state as a
territorial organization.
The significance of looking into the relationship between governing the public sphere and
state formation is evidenced, first, by the need to institutionalize functioning and durable
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states’ institutions which are inseparable from expanding the political and economic space for
forces of the public sphere. The capacity to effectively governing the public sphere also serves
as a source of rule-based function of government structures for the effective provision of
public goods, and transparent accountability rules that govern the actions of both state and
private sectors.
Second, studying the public sphere as the foundation for political and social communities, and
the state as an institution is concerned with examining the importance of history, power, and
symbolic action to the understanding of the political economy of a country (March and Olsen,
1984). The state was described as the leviathan and the public enemy, and its role in society
has been fiercely debated. Whilst some rush to write obituaries for the decline and eventual
demise of the state, its existence and capacity in developing countries constitutes issues of
survival, peace and development.
Third, more than any time in the modern history of most developing countries, the question of
how the state (re)constitutes itself is inseparable from how to build relatively durable peace.
In societies that have been undergoing through turbulent and difficult periods, how best to
incorporate actors of the public sphere into the state is an issue that deserves due attention.
The nature of the relationship between the state and actors of the public sphere is the source
of state capacity and its continuity as a viable institutional entity. This is mainly due to what
John Guidry and Mark Sawyer called “contentious pluralism”, a space created with the
participation of agents of the public sphere in contributing and strengthening the
democratization of the state (2003: 273).
3. Conceptualizing the Public Sphere and State Formation
The past century was described as a “great age of state formation” and poses one of the most
challenging questions in political economy (Erthman, 1997: 1). It is difficult to explain “why
have many Third World states remained weak or achieved only middle-level capabilities, and
why have a few others been able to avoid such weakness?” (Migdal, 1988: 261).
Historically scholars from Bodin to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Marx and Weber explored
the origin of the state, its nature and trajectories. Recent interest in the study of the state and
state formation has two sources. First, there is a presumption that the state is in decline. The
position of the nation-state as unit of social organization is “weakened” due to external
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political and economic pressures by transforming the location of power from the national to
the supra and global level. External constraints are often accompanied by domestic demands
for devolution of power and increased local autonomy (see Habermas, 1996; Spruyt, 2002).
Second, there is a growing interest in state weakness and failure with its serious consequences
for human security and its threat to regional and international security. The challenge of
building durable political institutions in developing countries adds to the growing interest.
State penetration of the public sphere, or what Barbara Haskel alternatively calls “access to
society”, is a function of a particular state’s capacity (1980: 90). The relationship between the
state and agents of the public sphere is mainly concerned with how best to maintain the
autonomy of the state without isolating itself from agents of the public sphere, or being
“captured” by them. The debate in the relationship revolves around understanding whether the
state has autonomy, its origin is located in the public sphere (public sphere embeddedness), or
the state and the public sphere have mutual embeddedness (state autonomy and public
sphere).
Isolated autonomy, mainly advanced by neo-Weberian and state-centric theorists, gives
ontological primacy of the state over the public sphere. The strength of the state is measured
how successfully the state “insulates” itself from the public sphere, and vice versa. In the
1960s the interest was to examine how the new post-colonial states could build successful
state institutions for effective “governability” with stable political order (Huntington, 1968).
Theda Skocpol, one of the most ardent proponent of state autonomy, argues that the autonomy
of the state is ascertained when it is able to pursue and implement goals that do not
necessarily reflect the interest of any other entity(ties) (1985: 9). Fred Block, an equally
strong advocate of state autonomy, views states as inherently autonomous organizations and
contends that “[s]tate power is sui generic”, i.e., it is not reducible to society or class power
(1980:229).
The isolated autonomy argument was developed in reaction to Marxist and liberal conception
of the state. This public sphere-centered approach contends any plausible inquiry about the
state departs from the formation of space by the public sphere. The nature, trajectory and
structure of the state emerge from class or individual relations. Marxist or neo-Marxist
approach views the state in its instrumentality for the interest of the dominant class with the
exception of its “relative autonomy.” When the state is unable to function in balancing the
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competing interest of the dominant class, it weakens and “withers away”. Using the
embeddedness of the state in class relationships, John Hobson shows how late-Victorian
British state was able to increase its extractive capacity, while Tsarist Russian state, that was
isolated, had weaker fiscal capacity (1997: 236 and 240). The state is not only viewed in its
functional aspect, but also as an arena in which different groups of the public sphere contest.
The strength or weakness of the state therefore is whether it is able to serve as a “neutral
arbiter” from which its legitimacy derives (Levi, 1988). State-in-public sphere approach, on
the other hand, posits that the state’s autonomy is enhanced and its capacity strengthened
through its “connectedness” to the public sphere (Evans, 1995: 50). Such a state is able to
coordinate its connectedness with forces of the public sphere by mobilizing resources and
harnessing “a sufficiently, coherent, cohesive state apparatus” (Weiss, 1998; Evans, 1995).
The boundary between state and public sphere is “elusive, porous, and mobile” and state
strength or weakness and legitimacy are variables, not constants (Mitchell, 1991; Holsti,
1996: 90). The strength or weakness of a state is based on the depth and breadth of
penetration of the public sphere by states’ institutions. This also depends on understanding
states as “coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship
groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within
substantial territories” (Tilly, 1990:1).
Two central issues are outstanding when discussing the concepts of the public sphere and
state formation. First, both concepts have been marked by contours that show transformations.
They are far from products uniformly developed in short periods of time, and more often than
not they undergo continuous changes. The infusion of social norms, rules and values produce
public sphere that gives rise to distinctive political and social communities which seek and
espouse increased participation and expression of ideas. The public sphere as space and
constellation of perceptions/imaginations constitute one crucial element of state formation (cf.
Anderson, 1991). Benedict Anderson’s (1996) treatment of nation-states as “imagined
communities” supposes the conceptualization of the state as far from universal and inherent,
rather as an artificial but resilient construction and amalgamation of identities that give
meaning to states. This is at the same time similar to what Charles Taylor views the public
sphere as being an important constituent part of the “social imaginary” created as a space
outside the power of the state, alternatively described as an “extra-political” status of the
public sphere (2004: 83-99).
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The process of state formation also indicates different historical contexts, and a wide range of
states’ disparate “collectivities” (Vincent, 1987). It is a process in the formation, change,
reformation, and deformation/exist of a state as (territorial) organization (see Desch, 1996;
Burke, 1997; Porter, 1999). As a case in point, contemporary processes of state formation,
which could be generally classified in four waves, followed the collapse of empires and their
“de-territorialization”: The collapse of the Spanish Empire in early nineteenth century led to
state formation in South America; the Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkish Empire gave
rise to new European states after First World War; the weakening of the European colonial
powers brought about decolonization in Africa and Asia; and the disintegration of the Soviet
Union created the commonwealth of independent states (Chazan, et al., 1991).
Second, the understanding and practice of the public sphere and state formation in developed
Western countries is quite divergent from its conceptualization, historical trajectories and
mechanisms of its manifestation in developing, especially African countries. Besides, what
actors/agents constitute/dominate the public sphere and how one makes a distinction between
the “public” and the “private” appears to be unique. Since its articulation and in-depth
analysis by J. Habermas in his study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(1989), the public sphere was debated and examined from the 17th and 18th century European
context and the development of the bourgeois society. The main players of the public sphere
remained restricted that omit the inclusion of other societal forces. This perhaps is what
compelled Karl Marx to characterize the state, mainly the capitalist state, as the instrument of
the ruling class, which, with the exception of “abnormal times”, might have “relative
autonomy” to balance the competing interests of the ruling class. It does not have autonomy
and is dependent on the bourgeoisie class (Carnoy, 1984: 53; Hall and Ikenberry, 1989: 7).
Employing books, salons, clubs, newspapers and other media as instruments, agents of the
public sphere were able to create communicative forum or space with the potential of creating
the “ideal speech situation” and thereby challenging the traditional spheres of claiming and
legitimizing authority by the church and the state (mainly personified by a monarch or king)
(see Hartley, 1992). Habermas conceptualizes the public sphere as:
a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be
formed….and in which citizens can confer in an unrestrictive manner – that
is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the
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freedom to express and publish their opinions-about matters of general
interest (1974: 49)
.
Non-European process of state formation, specifically in Africa, is quite different both in its
nature and the states that came into existence. Whilst there were extensive changes in
territorial configuration during state formation in Europe, which occurred analogues to the
process of “natural selection”, most African countries showed little, if not any, external
territorial changes. A closer look at the maps of Europe and Africa, for example, during the
respective process of state formation is indicative of more extensive territorial changes in the
former than the almost territorial continuity in the latter. The major changes in Africa were
internal in the course of the successive states’ attempt to claim control over agents of the
public sphere mainly ethno-linguistic groups and regional/local leaders, while the externality
of the territories were arbitrary determined by the colonial powers. It was an attempt to
configure and reconstitute the internal dynamics of the “container” rather than to challenge
the space that bounded the states. State formation did not place the “guns” (war), the “money”
(formation of bureaucratic structures and capacities to mobilize people and resources) and the
“lawyers” (nation-building and relationships with agents of the public sphere) for the
emergence of territorial states as durable organization (see Schwartz, 2000: 20; also Ertman,
1997: 6). The first two, when complemented by the last, become, to use John Brewer’s (1988)
words, “the sinews of power”.
The manners that forces of the public sphere posed their resistance to the dominant and often
dictatorial elites in Africa were also different from the open engagement and dialogue for
changes and increased participation in Europe. Seen from broader theoretical-cum-empirical
studies, there have been various lines of research on alienation, political trust, modes of
participation, political efficacy and the like that are employed to measure political legitimacy
of the state vis-à-vis agents of the public sphere (Weatherford, 1992: 149). Similar to the
challenge of how one understands the hidden aspects of power as posited by the second
dimension of power (Lukes, 1974; Gaventa, 1980), an examination of the acceptability of a
state’s institutions by forces of the public sphere in weak Third World states, or what Michael
Schatzberg calls its “thinkability” (2001: 1), is faced with the problem of assessing the
attitudes of actors of the public sphere towards political authority. Its better understanding
therefore requires looking at the socio-cultural frames of opposition of agents of the public
sphere (Geertz, 1973; Schetzberg, 2001). Social-cultural frames of opposition mainly
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constitute what James Scott calls “infrapolitics” or “disguised resistance” (1990: 199). Agents
of the public sphere who are discontented and oppressed employ innocuous, but powerful
ways of resistance. This “everyday resistance” includes rumors, gossip, folktales, songs,
gestures, jokes, and theatre (Scott and Kerkvliet, 1986: 1; Scott, 1990: xiii). Under situations
of “hopeful hopelessness”, they serve as initiators of resistance and agencies of change that
eventually have the possibility of connecting to protracted conflicts (Wendt, 1996: 264; Stern,
1987: 9).
It should be mentioned here that Habermas’ depiction of the public sphere was intended to
characterize a modern and rationalized policy built on the basis of consensus (Habermas,
1984a, 318-319; 1989, 2-4; 1990, 56). As such, the main purpose of the public sphere was to
legitimize state’s authority, at times with the role of challenging it (Rutherford, 2000). The
temporal feature of the public sphere, however, began to show changes predominately
involving its “refeudalization”. This process is accompanied, first by the diversification and
increased roles of different actors, mainly the private sector, thereby challenging the “billiard
ball” status of the state. This is done through enunciating such key elements as expanding the
share of the private sector in the provision of services through contracting out, the
decentralization of public sector management such as the devolution of budgets and financial
control by institutionalizing new autonomous agencies (“agencification”), and the inclusion of
customer-oriented services and performance (See OECD, 1995; Hood, 1995; Peters and
Pierre, 1998).
On the other hand, as a counter to these changes, the state assumes important position as a
bastion of protecting its authority from erosion by supplying public goods which other actors,
including the private sector/market, inherently lacks (such as the Pareto efficiency/optimality
and the corresponding features of non-rivalness and non-excludability of public goods as well
as asymmetric information in economic goods and service provision). 1 This continues to
make the state to be reified through the everyday “language of legal practice, the architecture
of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking out and policing of
frontiers” (Mitchell, 1991: 81). Despite its “uninvited appearances in our lives” there is
1 1 Ironically, by the time of writing this paper, the mortgage crisis in the United States and its domino effect in
the banking and financial sectors in other regions once again remind us the complexity and inherent weakness of
the market/private sector. It also sends a message in terms of arguably signifying the role of the state as the last
cushion in bailing out not only crumbling private institutions, but also the larger public.
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“scarcely any aspect of our daily rituals and routine experiences” that the state is not involved
(Hay, 1996: xiii).
Fundamentally, the debate in state-public sphere relations has been developed with the
modern capitalist state and societies in mind. Successive states, for example in Ethiopia, lack
strong and successful mechanisms for governing the public sphere because they could not
develop relatively durable institutions beyond transient elite power relationships that can
penetrate society to monopolize organized violence, extract and appropriate resources,
provide basic services and acquire minimum acceptance by agents of the public sphere.
Agents of the public sphere in weak states are relatively strong in resisting already weak state
institutions and they can go “their own way, circumventing [weak] states” (Creveld, 1999:
332), and may also gradually “sap the state’s strength and eventually topple it” (Migdal, 2001:
50). However, they cannot themselves develop institutions that at least serve to continuously
cater political and public goods. This is in direct contrast to what Habermas perceived the
public sphere as distinctively separate from state authority and self-sustaining. John Deweyl
in his work The Public and Its Problems (1927) showed how the public sphere needs the
nurturing and support (and not control) of state authority for it to be a viable contribution to
state formation.
The following section briefly discusses how the successive states from the Empire state of
Haile Selassie I to the Marxist state of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the present ethno-political
state have been attempting to govern the public sphere. It touches the consequences of the
failure in successfully governing the public sphere and the resultant protracted conflicts that
have gripped the country for long.
4. Ethiopian States and Governing the Public Sphere
There is one primary common denominator that can be observed from the three successive
states and the respective agents of the public sphere. The successive states’ attempt to govern
the public sphere was directed towards controlling, suppressing and dividing/appeasing agents
of the public sphere, which, to a higher extent, derive their base in the urban centers and
expand their resistance to the rural areas. Higher institutions have been serving as the
breeding ground for initiating and molding ideas on understanding, supporting and
challenging the Ethiopia polity.
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Agents of the public sphere across-the-board were under the leadership of urban-bred young
student bodies. The transformation of urban resistance to the successive states into open
armed conflicts was mainly possible with the mobilization of the Ethiopian peasantry. There
is a need to briefly emphasize here that in many studies peasants as a distinctive community
of agrarian societies received much attention within the scholarship of peasants’ organization,
decision-making and role in rebellion and revolution. Particularly the history of peasant
movements in Europe increased the interest to examine the role of peasants in contemporary
agrarian societies. Among others, the works of Barrington Moor (1967), Wolf Eric (1973) and
James Scott (1985) enhanced the nature of peasant revolts in history from different countries.
An “urban biased” understanding of peasants views them as helpless and docile communities
in need of elite mobilization and organization. Distinctively recognizing the class status of
peasantry as poor, middle and rich, Marxist theory assigns the role of revolutionary leader to
the proletariat, where middle peasants, provided that they support the cause of the revolution,
are allies of the proletariat. Anthropological approaches emphasizing indigenous skill and
knowledge support the rationality of peasants. Peasants are also viewed as more complacent
with a minimum package and reform than a revolution. This egoistic-peasant position
believes in the importance of political manipulation for mobilizing peasants for support. This
is what Samuel Huntington (1968) calls peasants as a substitute to reform, which, in turn, is
compared to urbanist and intellectual as ways to radical revolution.
4.1. The Empire State and Controlling an Embryonic Agent of the Public Sphere
Haile Selassie I was the “state” and source of power, making executive authority his own
preserve. The Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, Elect of God, Emperor
of Ethiopia was “the absolute dean of power” (Vivo, 1978: 16). Bahru Zewde succinctly
described him as the one who “came to be regarded as a permanent factor, as immutable as
the mountains and the rivers of the country” (1991: 201).
The 1931 constitution bestowed an “indisputable power” on the Emperor to lay down the
“organization and the regulations of all administrative departments”. The territory of Ethiopia
in “its entirety” was subject to the Emperor. He attempted to weaken the power of provincial
governors and feudal elites who ephemerally contested for power. However, the elites both in
the center and the provinces had divided interest. The mesafint (hereditary nobility) pushed
for regional prerogatives. This was countered by the new elites of mekuwanents (appointed
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nobles) and ministers, who supported centralization of the state and appointments to posts by
merit rather than by birth (Zewde, 1991: 140).
The centralization of power by the center aimed at penetrating and dominating the provinces
and much of the rural areas. The expansion and strengthening of the middle class, urban
intellectual and the petty bourgeois in major cities was the result of the introduction of
modern bureaucracy, a national army and education. Young and Western-educated elites who
staffed the bureaucracy and the army were critical of the inadequacy of the empire state to
tackle the growing inequality in the rural areas and the rising cost of living in urban centers.
Albeit the source of open and vocal opposition to the state was in the universities and schools,
the discontentment was also supported by the army and other state apparatus. The landed
aristocracy, the church and the hereditary chiefs were unwilling and incapable of introducing
changes. If there were any reforms, they were introduced belatedly to keep the interests of the
ruling class.
The history of the empire state formation showed “the unity between military power and
political authority” (Lefever, 1970: 139). There were twelve provinces and each province
(teklay gizat) was divided into sixty weredas (districts) and three-hundred thirty-six mekitil
weredas (sub-sub-districts). The governor-generals (enderassies), who were directly appointed
by the Emperor, reported to the Ministry of Interior. In the 1940s and before, the governorgenerals
had the power to levy tax and raise armies. But in the new royal decree, they were
subjected to the control of the center. The revised constitution of 1955 gave the power to the
Emperor to centrally control the bureaucratic structure. His centralization was assisted by his
hand-picked appointees and nineteen ministries. The bureaucratic expansion from the 1930s
to the 1970s increased the number of government employees to twenty-thousand from the
mere seventy-five (Harbeson, 1988: 44-45). In post-1941 empire state, the Emperor recruited
people “of low and humble background” to counterweight the power of the hereditary nobility
(Zewde, 1991: 203). He was also able to blend the Western-educated elites with the
traditional nobility (Markakis, 1974). But in reality the directive given to the provincial elites
was so broad that the nobility manipulated most of the rules and retained power through bypassing
the ministers and subordinating the technocrats (Harbeson, 1988). Moreover, the
preoccupation of the Emperor with external issues was an opportunity for his rivals to subtly
harness their power base.
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Central control over the provincial nobility and the penetration of more than eighty-five
percent of the rural population of Ethiopia required better communication. Communication
and transportation infrastructure was elementary. In the early 1940s, the impact of the empire
state was not felt far from the capital Addis Ababa (Greenfield, 1965: 282). It was “a land of
few roads” (Mosley, 1964: 143). By 1962, there were 23,370 kilometers of road, including
4,580 kilometers of all-weather gravel (Greenfield, 1965: 331). Besides the Ethiopian Airline
that was established with United States assistance in 1946, the only means for facilitating the
center’s presence at the various administrative levels were the four main routes and the Addis
Ababa-Djibouti railway. During the occupation, Italian army and engineers contributed a lot
by opening and constructing new routes in the most difficult mountainous areas of north
Ethiopia, thereby providing a “skeleton for future expansion and betterment” after the
restoration (Zewde, 1991: 164).
Cognizant of the importance of establishing a professional army for effective control, Haile
Selassie organized the first professional army in the 1930s. Young Ethiopians were sent to
Saint Cyr Military Academy in France. Swedish officers helped establish the Haile Selassie I
Military Training Center in 1934. The Emperor strengthened his 6,000 men Imperial
Bodyguard trained by Belgian officers. The maintenance of order in the capital was also
entrusted to a municipal guard comprising 2,000 men. By 1935 the empire state had 35,000
troops (Lefever, 1970: 140, 141, 166). The invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy in 1936 and
the defeat of the Ethiopian Imperial Army, however, was testimony to the military weakness
and vulnerability of the empire state. This reinforced the decision of the feudal chiefs
particularly in the north to cooperate with the invading Italian force.
One important instrument to buy political loyalty and to placate opposition of the growing and
vocal agents of the public sphere was land. And nothing is more important than land in an
agrarian society. Land was not only the source of livelihood, but also the political economic
base of power. The Emperor distributed land to members of the royal family, his retainers,
patriots and loyalists from the large state owned land. This was done at the expense of the
majority of the rural poor who languished under both state and landlord tenancy. Out of the
almost five million hectares of state owned land granted by the state, few poor peasants were
beneficiaries (Zewde, 1991: 191). Most peasants owned between one and five hectares, which
in turn accounted thirty-nine percent of total area and fifty-two percent of cultivated land. The
distribution of land was not only a factor for production, but also a significant socio-political
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indicator. This, according to John Markakis, indicated “[p]roperty relations were expressed
basically in categories of rights superimposed on the
land…” (1987: 13-14).
The Ministry of Commerce was responsible for collecting taxes which was “the only ministry
that had spread its wings over the whole of the provinces, not excepting those of the great
rases who, though angry at the loss of their own income, yet accepted the new order”
(emphasis added, Sanford, 1946: 87). However, the church, nobility and their family members
were exempted from land tax (Harbeson, 1988: 46). Besides the widening inequality and
corruption that was an “additional and often excessive extraction”, the execution of the land
tax in the north engendered stiff peasant resistance (Greenfield, 1969: 334).
The attempt of Haile Selassie to extract revenues and tax the peasant population was met with
three peasant revolts: Tigray (1943-1944), Gojjam (1968) and Bale (1963-1970). These
revolts were attributed to “innovations taking place at the national level”. But it was not “the
roads, railways and market pressures that breached peasant tranquility, but state centralism”
(Tareke, 1991: 11). These resistances were against the attempt of the center to dominate the
periphery and broadcast its power; they were against state’s measures to appropriate
resources. A force led by Ras Abebe Aregay and supported by British Blenheim bombers
based in Aden, suppressed the Tigray revolt. This revolt was the inception for later stages of
armed struggle – Woyane II – which together with the Eritrean armed struggle, toppled the
Marxist state of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991 (see Erich, 1986; Tareke, 1991).
The legitimacy of the empire state that was built on lineage from King Solomon and the
Christian Church was seriously undermined. Contrary to the positive image that Haile
Selassie enjoyed internationally and regionally as a “sound statesman working for the good of
Africa and Black people all over the world”, the empire state was gradually losing ground to
control social unrest, address rising inequalities and tackle hiking prices. The presence of a
young educated political force with leftist orientation augmented the pace of change in the
country. This revolutionary segment of the society, supported by the military, rocked the
foundation of the empire state. The failure of the regime to respond to the famine in Wollo
and Tigray contributed to the loss of public confidence in the institutions of the state. On the
contrary, government officials unwisely tried to conceal the tragedy that consumed the lives
of hundreds of thousands of poor peasants. The empire state unabashedly portrayed the crisis
13

as the “figment of the imagination of Ethiopia’s ill-wishers, and that all was well in Wollo
and Tigray” (Rahmato, 1984: 32). As Christopher Clapham described it well, the empire state
“simply lacked the resources either of political organization, or of political legitimacy…
which rapidly gained in intensity as the bankruptcy of the regime became ever more obvious”
(1988: 41). Under the dictum “Land to the Tiller,” resistance and defiance brought down the
empire state. Led by junior army officers, the Dergue (military council) took the helm of
power in 1974.
For the first time, people vilified Haile Selassie I and his associates in public. The empire
state with the Emperor at its center and the regional feudal chiefs, Ryszard Kapuscinski points
out, had “pitiable cupidity” and by the time the institutions of the state collapsed, they “left
cemeteries full of people who had died of hunger, cemeteries visible from the windows of the
royal palace” (1984: 160). The incapacity of the state to address the provincial and rural
issues helped galvanize the causes of the urban intelligential and members of the army that
openly demanded changes. Before the early 1970s, the empire state was isolated from the
provinces and the rural areas, and when the revolution broke out in 1974, “[t]here was no
traditional countryside waiting to be mobilized…” (Clapham, 1988: 35). As the empire state
was collapsing, the Emperor muttered “our era is over. There is no use trying to fight the
Almighty” (cited in Ottaway, 1978: 30).
4.2. The Marxist State and Suppressing Agents of the Public Sphere
Power in weak states is visible. They are strong despotically and weak in terms of
infrastructure, which is the capacity to penetrate their society and implement policy (Mann,
1987: 114; Easter, 2000: 14). In such states, to cite Robert Rotberg, “the expression of official
power is limited to a capital city and one or more ethnically specific zones” (2002: 86). The
military was the only viable institution to “contend a mobilized country” (Ottaway, 1988: 28).
It was the backbone of the Dergue to monopolize organized violence. The Dergue centralized
power and attempted to penetrate agents of the public sphere by suppressing opposition in the
urban centers and extending state apparatus to the rural areas through building local
institutions. The process was strenuous and elaborate and it took almost a decade of vicious
power struggles and mobilizations (see Ottaway, 1988: 25, 37).
The Marxist state under Mengistu, “the line and body politic,” had to wrestle simultaneous
and growing armed provincial resistance from 1977 onwards (Lefort, 1983). The resistance
14

was a test to the capability of the Marxist state to extend its influence deep into the rural areas
and hinterlands. Effective territorial control was important not only to assert the power of the
center, but also to counter external threats. The resistance was also a test to the acceptability
of state’s institutions as providers of public and political goods, and the belongingness of the
various ethno-linguistic groups.
Silencing the forces of the public sphere was mainly executed through the creation of public
organizations/units both in urban and rural centers. An important aspect of the land reform in
the rural areas was the establishment of peasant associations (PAs) on eight-hundred hectare
area. Within few months, between 16,000 and 18,000 PAs with a membership of more than
four million peasants were formed. Ottaway described the extent of the mobilization as “an
unheard-of success, particularly when [one considers] the difficulty most African countries
have encountered in organizing the rural population” (1987: 29; see also Tadesse, 1993: 42).
In major urban areas, three-tier urban dwellers associations of the kebelles (Neighborhood
Urban Dwellers Association), the kefitegna (Higher Urban Dwellers Association) and
maekelawi (Central Urban Dwellers Association) were formed under Proclamation No. 47
(Articles 22-26). These were the most powerful structures to regiment people both in urban
centers and rural towns. They were neither autonomous nor powerful enough to make
important economic decisions. Through their armed militias, they played key roles in
maintaining rule and law, recruiting the youth for the army, mobilizing the population (for
public works or just show of support for the Dergue), and ensuring the collection of rents and
local taxes. However, the kebelles were also infiltrated by the radical opposition parties that
inhibited the Dergue’s penetration and control of the agents of the public sphere. In the
infamous urban armed rivalry between the Dergue and leftist parties commonly dubbed as the
“Red Terror”, the role of kebelles was vital in identifying members and organizing killing
squads that consumed 10,000 lives of educated youth (Human Right Watch, 1991: 7).
The suppression of the urban population forced many of the young leftists in late 1970s to
seek refugee and resist the center in the rural areas. The expropriation of the production of the
peasantry, rural conscription and harsh treatment for dissent eroded the acceptance of the
Dergue in the rural areas. The Marxist state attempted to purge the rural areas from infiltration
and it killed and arrested peasants. This lent peasant support for the opposition. As a case in
point, the core of the major rebel group, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), was
15

made of urban petty bourgeoisie and young university students, but over fifty percent of the
fighters that numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 in the 1980s were peasants, ninety-five
percent of them were below the age of twenty-eight and thirty percent of the front and fifteen
percent of the army were women (With, 1987: 99; Firebrace and Holland, 1984: 41).
The formation of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975 had similar pattern.
The founders of the front were university students and urban youth who were part of the
student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, the armed resistance had strong political and
social base in the rural communities (Cliff, 1999: 91-92). When the devastating famine of
1984/85 hit northern Ethiopia, killing more than one million people and affecting nearly a
quarter of the population of the country, officials of the Marxist state were celebrating the
foundation of the Worker’s Party of Ethiopia (WPE) with fanfare and fireworks (Webb and
von Braun 1994; Rahmato, 1987: 173). The discontentment of the peasantry was described in
the following poem:
While dozens of committees
Kept blaring slogans,
The sky lost its cloud cover;
And the earth, its water (Omar, 2002: 87)
Instead the Dergue launched in 1985 the villagization program of resettling northern rural
population in the southern parts of the country. The major political aim was suspected to have
been the denial of potential military recruits for the northern rebels (Clay and Holcomb, 1986:
29). The people who were chosen for the resettlement were “the most capable, productive and
experienced farmers” (Clay, 1990: 57-58). The TPLF also encouraged peasants to move away
from government-controlled parts of the country to areas under its control and to the Sudan.
Through the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) established in 1978, the front was accused of
using peasant-refugees as a humanitarian shield for securing relief provision and mass base
support (Niggli, 1986; cf. Bariagaber, 1995).
Meles Zenawi, the leader of the TPLF and the current Prime Minister, believed that the policy
of the government to control the movements of peasants contributed to their support of the
armed struggle (Henze, 1991). Many peasants were not supportive of the TPLF before fleeing
(Young, 1997: 124). With the support of the peasantry, the TPLF transformed the insurrection
16

to a large-scale peasant rebellion against one of the strongest armies of Africa. The TPLF had
only 2,000 fighters during its formation in 1975. By the 1980s, it was able to mobilize more
than 20,000 fighters and one-third of them were women (Farer, 1979: 62; Abbay, 1998: 121).
Above all, it changed the underlying objective of TPLF -from a provincialist to national
liberation. The creation of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF),
composed of Amhara, Oromo and other Southern ethnic groups in 1989 demonstrated the
wider scope of peasant struggle at the national level. The rural towns and areas including
those closer to Addis Ababa were isolated from the effective control of the Dergue.
The administrative structures in rebel-controlled areas were more successful than the garrison
cities under the clutch of the Dergue. The rebels effectively utilized the support of the rural
population. Peasants hid, fed, informed and joined the rebels. The rebels “had their own land
reforms and peasant associations, their own surplus expropriation and conscription
mechanisms, and their own (largely covert) party systems and structures of political control”
(Clapham, 2002: 23). The Marxist state employed raw force to subdue the forces of the public
sphere so extensively that one of its oft-mentioned slogans read “Not only will the
reactionaries, but also nature be under our control!” For many Ethiopians, the fourteen years
until 1991 were a “nightmare of mounting brutality and personal and material restrictions.
These were years they instinctively want to forget” (Pausewang, 1994: 209).
On May 21, 1991, Mangistu Haile Mariam, who once likened himself with Tewodros II, a
local warlord who committed suicide rather than surrendering in the face of an advancing
British army in the 19th century, fled the country to Zimbabwe. The structures of the state and
its apparatus crumbled with unprecedented speed. This ended what Dawit Welde Giorgis
states “the leaders of the new revolution in 1974 who evolved into new masters and then like
the characters of George Orwell’s Animal Farm learnt how to walk upright and enslaved
those they pledged to liberate.” (1989: 3).
4.3. The Ethno-Political State: Dividing and Appeasing Agents of the Public Sphere
Historians studying the process of the empire state formation in Ethiopia concur that the dawn
of the nineteenth century was characterized by fragmentation (Clapham, 1969; Zewde, 1991:
228). A similar, closer assessment of the process of state formation during the ethno-political
state in the country has been underpinned by fragmentation and increased polarization. The
period after the disintegration of the Marxist state was marked by the demobilization of more
17

than half a million soldiers, the repatriation of millions of returnees, rampant unemployment,
rapid rural-urban migration, the outbreak ethno-linguistic conflict, famine, and a First World
War style, modern trench warfare with Eritrea.
The structuring of the state on ethno-linguistic identities is an attempt by the center to
effectively penetrate the different regions through incorporating the various ethno-linguistic
groups and building durable state institutions. Although the process of state formation seems
to recognize the rights of the different agents of the public sphere, and specifically ethnolinguistic
groups, and seek the best way of incorporating them into the ethno-political state,
the attempt by the minority Tigrayans to establish a hegemonic control of economic, political
and military power continues to bedevil the process of effective territorial control and
monopoly of organized violence, on the one hand, and on the other, increasing fragmentation
and armed ethnic clashes (see McGarry and O`Learly, 1993: 4).
It should be stated here that it is difficult to apply the delicate maintenance of balance
between coercion and legitimacy, such as “‘political crafting”, in strong and democratic
countries to weak states like Ethiopia (see Linz and Stepan, 1989). The state is challenged by
societal forces ranging from ethno-linguistic groups to religious-based movements and
peasants. Ethno-linguistic identities are the strongest voice and pose the most serious threat
through organized violence. As elites are behind the engineering of state formation, it is
opposing elites and rulers-in-waiting who play important roles in mobilizing and harnessing
insecure ethno-linguistic groups into organized resistance against the state. If not to the extent
of a primordial thinking, as Thomas Eriksen puts it, ethno-linguistic groups’ “sentiment
cannot be done way with by scholars and politicians fuelled with [the] Enlightenment” (1999:
45).
The post-1991 state in Ethiopia is best characterized as an “`ethnocratic state` under the
command of a Tigrayan minority” (Gudina, 2002: 3). Unlike the empire and Marxist states,
the ethno-political state has been undergoing not only inter-ethnic, but also intra-ethnic
conflict. The Silti-Wolayt (in the Region of Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples,
SNNPR) the Berta-Gumuz (in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region), the Neur-Anuack (in the
Gambella Region), the Afar-Amhara-Oromo armed clashes (in the Amhara Region) pose
serious difficulties for the center.
18

The ethno-political state is relatively able to contain large-scale organized armed conflict.
However, through further fragmentation of the society, it has prepared the ground for more
robust protracted conflict based on sharp ethno-linguistic identities. A study by J. Abbink
indicates that the new ethno-linguistic experiment in the country leads to increased ethnic
tensions, arising from insecurities over boundaries and over local authority, which in turn
determine access to resources (1993). Kassahun Berhanu also believes that “claims and
counter-claims to a given territory, or enclaves thereof, are on the rise,” and he lists cases to
demonstrate the trend (1998: 91). David Lake and Donald Rotchild (1966) further contend
that when ethnicity is linked with fear of what the future might be, “it emerges as one of the
major fault lines along which societies fracture.”
Like the mid-1970s Marxist state, the ethno-political state was very successful in garnering
support from agents of the public sphere and mainly the majority of peasants. It was seen as a
bright beginning that ended the authoritarianism of the Dergue and the protracted conflict.
Ordinary people felt that they would no longer have to send their sons and daughters to the
war front and that they would be able to improve their standard of living. The leaders and
fighters who constituted the core of the ethno-political states were seen as “just, law-abiding
and disciplined.” They were trusted to tackle the insecurity and killings that gripped the
country throughout the 1980s.
In contract to the empire and the Marxist states, the current ethno-political state is astute
enough to allow the forces of the public sphere to be part of the political process (the right to
organize, publish, speak, participate in election) while at the same time dividing and using
force to silence agents that appear to challenge the status quo (suppression of oppositional
parties; controlling private media outlets, blocking access to the Internet, and so on).
Agents of the public sphere can organize and form their own association/parties; yet, they are
faced with arduous bureaucratic barriers, intimidation and arbitrary arrests. They can set-up
media outlets such as private newspapers and magazines while at the same time deal with
prosecution and physical suppression (closure of offices, arrest of editors). The ethno-political
state aptly learnt the art of giving the image that it is a juncture that fundamentally separates it
from the previous states. The maintenance of the prevailing order is possible “not only
through institutional barriers” of state laws meant to control behavior such as in taxation, law
enforcement and election “but also through the shaping of beliefs about the order’s legitimacy
19

or immutability” (Gaventa, 1980: 42 and 59). Agents of the public sphere are made to
“accept” the legitimacy of the ethno-political state. Indeed, such legitimacy is quite divergent
from the conventional understanding of legitimacy which entails the extent to which citizens
“believe that the authorities and structures are adequate to meet the members’ own
expectations of as to how the political system ought to behave” (emphasis in the original,
John Fraser, 1974: 188). In other words, the legitimacy of a state is associated with some level
of “historical continuity to its institutions” (Englebert, 2000: 4).
Most federal and regional as well as local structures are filled with cadres of the ethnopolitical
state who hold the decision-making power, and many of the educated/trained staffs
remain executors of directives. This closely resembles what the Dergue experimented;
however, the ethno-political state has been able to do this with careful planning and
systematic execution. Ethno-linguistic criterion of staffing the civil service favored few and a
large number of high positions are occupied by members of the TPLF (see Abbink, 1993:
156).
The economy seems to be privatized and has indeed evolved away from the vestige of the
Dergue, and as such it also opened the way for individual and independent investors to
participate in economic development. But the sectors controlled by the state receive
preferential treatment and are usually administrated by a Board of Directors drawn from
members of the front and few individual investors (see Vestal, 1999). The ethno-political state
continues the land policy of the Marxist state. Land is the property of the public and it has
been used to buy loyalty and weaken those who are vocal against the state. The use of raw
force to suppress dissent in the rural areas is as widespread as the urban centers.
The continuous famine that is stalking the country since the assumption of power by the
EPRDF and the inability/delay (even denial that there is a problem) by the center to mobilize
resource to help the victims further alienates the state from its core support base of the rural
areas. The state’s coffers are hardly reliable, its institutions are less organized and its relation
with international and local NGOs is conflictual, leading to the termination of a number of
important projects and the deferral of aid from international donors. It is estimated in Ethiopia
alone that the percentage of people seriously affected by famine and are in need of assistance
has shown a consistent weighted average of 10 percent (close to 5 million population) since
1980s to 2004 (FDRE, 2003; CIDA, 2004). Perhaps it will not entirely be an exaggeration to
20

equate the vulnerability and poverty of the agrarian rural communities at large and the urban
population in the country to what R. H. Tawney wrote four decades ago: “… the conditions of
the rural population is that of a man [woman] standing permanently up to the neck in water,
so that even a ripple is sufficient to drawn him[her]” (1966: 77).
The overall impacts are evident in the incapacity of the center to penetrate agents of the public
sphere both in the regions and the rural areas, the incitement of one ethno-linguistic group
against the other, and its increasing reliance on use of raw force to suppress the reassertion of
regional power. This reaffirms what Francis Deng succinctly puts it as “the state, therefore,
ceased to be the embodiment of the collective national will” (2002: 61).
5. Conclusion
This paper has attempted to scan governance of the public sphere and the process of state
formation in Ethiopia. It has sought to show how the failure of successfully governing the
public sphere by the successive states in the country was linked to as one of the factors
serving as the basis for and intractability of conflicts. However, the link is mediated by a
number of other variables such as third party intervention, ethno-linguistic security dilemma,
the ability to organize and resource (re)distribution (both scarcity and the curse of abundance)
although these factors are peripheral to the core purpose of this paper and were not discussed
well. The alienation of the forces of the public sphere from decisions in the (re)distribution of
resources, political participation and the freedom to organize erodes the capacity of the
successive states from “broadcasting” and “radiating their power”.
The discussion has elaborated how the process of state formation was marked by strong elites
who control weak institutions and negotiate among themselves. The forces of the public
sphere have not been in a position to articulate and discuss the notion and “subjective aspect”
of the successive states in Ethiopia, i.e., how the states exist in their minds and hearts that
they rule and control.
The successive states in Ethiopia have been at the center of organizing and countering the
forces of the public sphere, for politics in the country has essentially been how best to
incorporate the different forces of the public sphere that make up the different states: the
empire state, the Marxist state and the ethno-political state. By going into the historical facts,
this study has underlined that present-day Ethiopia was created by Menelik II in 1889.
Menelik was neguse negest (King of Kings), who managed to prevail over the regional feudal
chiefs. After his death, the center was weak until the period of Haile Selassie I (1930-1974).
21

Haile Selassie attempted to build the empire state by facilitating the modernization process.
However, the empire state was limited in its capacity to break the political economic power of
regional feudal chiefs and to penetrate the more than eighty-five percent of the rural
population. The absolutist state personified by the Emperor gradually lost its legitimacy in the
face of growing inequality and devastating famine, armed peasant rebellion, Eritrean
secessionism, widespread defiance from the young educated section of the public sphere, and
dissent from the army. Its collapse ushered in large-scale protracted conflict.
The Marxist state used raw force in a drive to crush armed rebellion both from the center and
the hinterlands. Until its downfall in 1991, the Marxist state was one of the most ruinous and
atrocious chapters in the history of state formation in Ethiopia. The current ethno-political
state is the continuation of an attempt by the center to claim effective territorial control and
the monopoly of organized violence. It appears that the center is comparatively able to contain
large-scale organized armed rebellion. But it is beleaguered by weak institutions incapable of
penetrating agents of the public sphere, mobilizing and appropriating resources and building
legitimacy among the various ethno-linguistic groups.
The paper has emphasized the significance of looking into the relationship between governing
the public sphere and state formation by indicating that institutionalizing functioning and
durable states’ institutions is inseparable from expanding the political and economic space for
forces of the public sphere. The capacity to effectively governing the public sphere also serves
as a source of rule-based function of government structures for the effective provision of
public goods, and transparent accountability rules that govern the actions of both state and
private sectors.
In addition, the paper has explained that studying the public sphere as the foundation for
political and social communities (or civil society), and the state as an institution is concerned
with examining the importance of history, power, and symbolic action to the understanding of
the political economy of a country. This is because more than any time in the modern history
of most developing countries, the question of how the state (re)constitutes itself is inseparable
from how to build relatively durable peace. Above all, in societies that have been undergoing
through turbulent and difficult periods, how best to incorporate actors of the public sphere
into the state is an issue that deserves due attention. The nature of the relationship between the
state and actors of the public sphere is the source of state capacity and its continuity as a
viable institutional entity.
22

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