Yosyas Kifleyesus yosyas.kifleyesus@gmail.com
May 16, 2010
I have been following the recent debates in the run up to
the 2010 elections in Ethiopia. It is sad to observe that most, if not all,
opposition politicians seem to be unable to defend “liberalism” from the
ideological attacks of EPRDF politicians. Their inability was most visible when
Lidetu Ayalew, the usually
witty and gifted orator, could not respond well to Bereket
Simon’s characterization of the EDP’s (and other opposition parties’) views on
liberalism as an invitation to western domination. What is even more saddening
is that the EPRDF and its acolytes including one Adal
Isaw attack liberalism as a recipe for disaster in
the Ethiopian context.(http://aigaforum.com/articles/revolutionary_demo_view.htm#_ftnref2)
The attack on
liberalism is based on confusing two terms: liberalism and neo-liberalism. I do
not think that the EPRDF or its supporters unaware of the distinction between
these two terms. Adal Isaw’s
piece on Aigaforum.com clearly shows that he is aware of the historical and philosophical
roots of liberalism as his references to Hobbes and Locke testify. The simple explanation
of the confusion is thus that there is a deliberate attempt to befuddle the
debate and push an agenda that the EPRDF is not comfortable to pursue publicly.
So what is the difference between liberalism and
neo-liberalism? Liberalism is a political ideology based
on the belief that the power of the state should be limited by some inviolable
rights of individuals. Its roots, as Adal Isaw noted, go back to the Enlightenment in Europe. Its
immediate precursors were the religious conflicts and persecutions of
minorities in European countries. True, one of the fundamental rights that many
liberal thinkers including J.S. Mill thought as fundamental in curbing the
powers of the state is the right to property. What exactly constitutes this
right, however, is a matter of political discourse, and legal definition. The
more fundamental rights that are at the core of liberalism are the rights to
life, to liberty, to freedom of belief and expression, and to have an effective
participation in the political process. These rights have formed the basis for internationally
recognized rights under several international treaties that EPRDF-led Ethiopia
has signed. They are also rights that take more than one third of the FDRE
Constitution.
Through time, and the progression of democratic political
thought, liberalism has come to characterize the political organization of
states not only in Europe and North America, but also in Africa (South Africa,
and Botswana to just cite two), Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile etc), and
Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India and others).
Liberalism is closely related to capitalism. There is, however, no single
capitalism in the world. Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia are strongly socialist
oriented. Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, as well as most West European
states are welfare statists with deep roots in social democratic thought. So
also is Canada. In South Korea, and Taiwan,(countries
that the EPRDF holds up as its models) the economy is characterized by the
strong presence of and direction by the state.
Neo-liberalism, on the other hand, is a designation that
has come to characterize the set of micro-economic prescriptions that political
regimes in the United States and the United Kingdom (the Reagan and Thatcher
administrations) as well as the World Bank and other powerful agents of international
development adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. It is composed of a relatively
simple set of prescriptions: privatization of the economy, deregulation of the
market, and downsizing of the public sector. In other words, governments have
to sell state owned enterprises. They have to let the market determine the
price of goods and services including essential utilities. They have also to reduce
government spending on social services and shrink the size of government
agencies by, among others, reducing the number of people employed by government
agencies.
The most explicit formulations of neo-liberal
prescriptions were the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s and 1990s.
Following the realization that these programs had largely failed, the World
Bank and other international development agencies have adopted the Poverty
Reduction Strategy Paper process. Ethiopia under the EPRDF had not only carried
out these neoliberal reform programs, but in fact had benefitted from them. It
may appear a long time ago, but it was after the EPRDF came to power that many
state owned public enterprises were sold (often at suboptimal prices).
The EPRDF had also shrunk the size of the public sector
through dismantling several public agencies known at the time as Corporations.
The most notable of these, of course, was the Agricultural Marketing
Corporation (in its Amharic abbreviation E-Se-Ge-D).
Many also remember the time of 20/45 when many public employees had to leave
their employment if they had twenty years of service or were above 45 years of
age. Since 1997, Ethiopia has also been in the process of carrying out the
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers through its adoption of the Interim Poverty Reduction
Strategy Paper and the Program for Accelerated and Sustained Poverty
Eradication and Development Program (PASDEP). Because of these programs that
are designed in consultation with and carried out with the blessing and support
of the World Bank and the IMF, the archdeacons of global neo-liberalism,
Ethiopia has benefitted from a huge infusion of foreign aid.
It is also interesting to note the claimed resistance of
the EPRDF to neo-liberalism. The cases cited as exhibiting the EPRDF’s
resistance in this respect are its refusal to privatize land, the banking sector,
and the telecommunications sector. While the most preferred position of the
World Bank and other proponents of neo-liberalism is
that of total privatization and deregulation of the economy, the specific ways
in which they propose these measures differ from country to country. In the
case of land, their prescription is not that land should necessarily be
privatized. Even in the United States, where the Federal Government owns thirty
per cent of all land (and that does not include land owned by states and
cities), land is not fully privately owned. The demand made on the EPRDF and
resisted by it was for security of holding by land users, and transparency and
regularity in the administration of land (such as in its leasing). It is these
demands that the EPRDF has generally managed to resist. I am not quite sure if
the result of its resistance is something that it can be proud of.
With regard to banking and insurance, the EPRDF has
managed to resist the demand to open the market for foreign banks. Truth be
told, however, whether the EPRDF has succeeded because of its inherent strength
or because of the traditional lack of interest by foreign banks to work in a country
where the market is extremely limited, the investment environment is fragile,
and there are no colonial historical ties, is open to examination.
The resistance of the EPRDF to allow foreign capital to
be involved in utilities and telecommunications may be a case of success. Yet,
what leads to this success needs closer examination.Furthermore, whether the country’s economy has benefitted from the exclusion of
foreign investment in the sectors (especially in the telecommunications sector)
is something open to question.
Even in these
cases, however, the neo-liberal demand has been more on separating the regulatory
power of the state from its role as a market competitor. In other words, what
the advocates of neo-liberalism demand is that the state should have agencies
to make rules about how utilities and telecommunication as well as banking
businesses should be carried out, and other agencies operating on market
principles to actually carry out these businesses. Through the establishment of
the Ethiopian Telecommunication Agency, and strengthening the supervisory powers
of the Ethiopian National Bank, the EPRDF has complied with this requirement.
Whether the allegedly market led pubic companies such as
the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Telecommunications
Corporation, are really working on purely market considerations is doubtful. I
am saying “doubtful” not only because of the apparent inefficiency of these
firms, but more significantly, because of the almost rampant corruption within
these agencies that the EPRDF led government itself acknowledged on a number of
occasions. Another requirement of the neoliberals is that the state should not
subsidize the price of utilities like water and electricity. Through successive rate hikes, the EPRDF has
been very compliant with these demands too, as anyone who pays for electricity,
water or phone services in Ethiopia knows.
If the EPRDF’s practice is not fully antagonistic to the
economic prescriptions of neo-liberalism, its recent rhetorical attacks on
liberalism-cum-neo-liberalism cannot be anything but attacks on the political
ideology of liberalism. What is being attacked is the view that the state
should be constrained in its powers and should not be allowed to unduly violate
the rights of individuals.
One line of
argument that the EPRDF suggests is that there is a necessary contradiction
between the rights of individuals that liberalism holds dear and the rights of
groups, such as nations or other collectivities, to exercise their group
rights. Unfortunately, this is also an attack line that opposition politicians
seem to be unable to counter successfully at least in the context of the
election debates. For the most part, the distinction between individual and
collective rights is more worthy of academic discussion on political and legal
philosophy. The simple truth is that no state that is not constrained by, and
does not respect, the rights of individuals can truly claim to respect the rights
of groups. Group rights (to language, to the collective expressions of
traditions, cultures, and beliefs, as well as to exercise group
self-determination) do not exist in the abstract. They find their expressions
through concrete actions by individuals who exercise them.
The liberal
protection of individual rights allows individuals to engage in activities that
give effect to group rights. Note that liberal though arose because of the
denial of groups to exercise their rights to freedom of religion. The right to
hold and practice religion is a collective right of a religious group. It is
given effect through the exercise of individual followers to practice their
religion. In like manner, the right of an ethnic group to use its language and
to develop its culture is a group right that can only have meaning and effect
when individual members of the ethnic group have the full right to use their language
and to engage in cultural activities. No group right can be respected by
denying the rights of individuals. What constrain a state from denying the
rights of groups including the rights of ethnic groups,
is limits on its abilities from denying the rights of individuals – in other
words the limits demanded by liberalism.
There may be cases where individual rights and collective
or group rights come into conflict. A person’s exercise of his religion’s
demand to behead those who do not agree with his beliefs or denying the rights
of religious minorities to practice their religion within societies with
different dominant religions can be cited as example.
The recent controversy about wearing the Burqa in France is
an example. But these are exceptional cases, and liberal societies, from Canada
to South Africa, from the United Kingdom to India, have found ways of
accommodating them. The more common case is illiberal regimes that violate both
individual and through them group rights. The prohibition of the use of
languages other than Amharic in schools in pre-1991 Ethiopia is an example that
is closer to home. As further illustrations of the equivalence of denials of
group and individual rights, one can cite Eritrea’s persecution of minority
religious groups, China’s repression of Tibet, Sadam Hussien’s persecution of the Kurds, Iran’s repression of
the Baha’i, and hundreds of other denials of group rights by regimes
antithetical to liberalism and at the forefront of violations of individual
rights.
History teaches us that attacks on liberalism and
individual rights are usually harbingers of human suffering on a massive scale
deliberately inflicted by repressive regimes. From Stalinist Russia to Nazi
Germany, from Maoist China to Pinochet’s Chile, from
Apartheid South Africa to Mengistu’s Ethiopia, from
Eritrea to Rwanda, millions of individuals have been sacrificed for the sake of
an abstract collective. You can give that abstract collective any name: in
Russia and China it was “communism”. In Chile, it was the “communist threat.”
In Nazi Germany, it was the “Superiority of the Aryan Race.” In South Africa,
it was the “protecting white culture.” In Rwanda, it was the “Hutu Fatherland”.
In Mengistu’s Ethiopia, it was “the Revolutionary Motherland.”
In an Orwellian turn of phrases, in Eritrea, it is called “NETSANET.” There is
one thing that is common to all of these and similar other costly follies by
dictators. It is the desire, in Adal Isaw’s words, “to empower people more than … to empower the
individual [and the belief that] the rights of an individual should not at all
tramp the collective rights of a people.” Is this what EPRDF’s attack on
liberalism is