| The Spatial Imagination of Oromia: The Ethiopian State and Oromo Transnational Politics. (Bas van Heur) |
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I.1 Theme and Thesis
Ethiopia has always produced more imaginations than its territory could incorporate. To some, Ethiopia is the result of a thousand-year old history that has its roots in the Bible and can be directly connected to the Western civilizations of antiquity. For many Afro-American intellectuals since the 19th century, it represents the source of their Africanicity and constitutes a powerful image of belonging and return. Seen from this perspective, many of the writings on the state of Ethiopia after the change of government in 1991 and the flight of Mengistu Haile Mariam to Zimbabwe can be seen to reflect above all the wishes, dreams and nightmares of its producers and less the factual changes inside Ethiopia. The removal of the Derg dictatorship and the arrival of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as the main force behind a coalition called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) seemed to usher in a new era of prosperity and democracy. After a thirty-year war, Eritrea became a separate nation-state under the leadership of Isaias Afewerki, previously the head of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). Ethiopia, headed by Meles Zenawi, officially denounced its political tradition of centralization and started advocating and implementing a federal framework to solve the “nationalities problem” within its territory. Within a matter of months, the discourse of Marxism-Leninism was abandoned and democracy and human rights were embraced, causing the United States government to hail Isaias Afewerki and Meles Zenawi as prime examples of Africa’s New Leaders. This praise has remained remarkably constant over the last decade, although there has been a rhetorical shift away from democracy towards an emphasis on peace, stability and the fight against terrorism. During a recent visit, German chancellor Schröder reiterated this argument, emphasizing both Ethiopia’s firm commitment to fight terrorism as the fact that the new leaders had “become exemplary regarding good governance.”[1]
Meanwhile, on the other side of the global fence, a completely different set of imaginations is being produced. The implementation of the federal framework in Ethiopia accorded primacy to ethnicity as the only route to democratization and officially devolved central powers to regions below the scale of the state. Each ethnic group was accorded a separate region. In principle, this was a logical consequence of the idea of “national liberation” as used by the TPLF and other liberation movements such as the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) during their struggle against the Derg regime from 1974 until 1991. With a background in the Marxist-Leninist study circles and organizations that emerged before the revolution, after their exclusion from the center by the Derg, they turned to the peripheries with the aim to liberate their ethnic nation from the oppressive state. In the case of the OLF, this struggle was actively accompanied by the spatial imagination of Oromia. It functioned as a sort of rallying cry around which elements such as the Oromo language (afaan oromoo) and the age-grade system called gada could be politicized and which enabled the construction of a collective identity radically opposed to the Derg regime. The change of government in 1991 suddenly created the possibility to put this imagination into practice. The OLF participated in the Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE) and could establish the region of Oromia within the federal framework of the Ethiopian state. After a century of oppression and rejection, afaan oromoo became the official language in this new region. Only one year later, however, the OLF had left the TGE and its role was taken over by the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO) that was part of the EPRDF-coalition and dependent on the powerful TPLF. Since this time, one is in effect dealing with two opposing versions of Oromia, despite the largely similar contents. The OPDO, as the regional representative of the state and the Oromo people within its region, governs Oromia and is carrying out a project of cultural nationalism as originally imagined by the OLF. The OLF, however, is now involved in a discursive and military struggle against the OPDO, claiming it does not legitimately represent the Oromo people, but is merely a continuation of the earlier repressive regimes of Haile Selassie and the Derg.
How to explain this paradoxical situation? Why did the OLF leave the TGE when their spatial imagination of Oromia was being realized in socio-spatial practices? And why has every attempt at reconciliation between the parties since 1992 failed? One part of the answer has already been provided by a number of commentators. It is argued that this division is the result of a political tradition in Ethiopia that sees competition as treason and that is therefore primarily preoccupied with the monopolization of power.[2] Through a theoretically informed historical analysis of the spatial imagination of Oromia, this thesis tries to illuminate another aspect of this political impasse. The premise is that every political analysis needs to include those spatial practices and imaginations that transcend the framework of the state. My thesis is that the lack of “common ground” between the OLF and the OPDO/EPRDF is intimately related to the fact that the OLF-version of Oromia was from the very beginning the result of transnational practices: partly produced by actors not directly dependent on the resources of the Ethiopian state, the spatial imagination of Oromia could be conceptualized as radically different from this state. It is this posited difference that provides the other part of the answer to the question why the OLF left the TGE in 1992.
I.2 Previous Research
The academic and non-academic literature on Ethiopia that has appeared since the 1970s can only be understood by relating it to the earlier corpus it reacted against. To a large extent, this earlier literature was a state-centered discourse: Ethiopia as an ancient Christian civilization amidst a sea of barbarism. The focus of this “’Church and State’ tradition”[3] was overwhelmingly on the important role of Ethiopian monarchs, the intricacy of the Amharic culture and language and the independence and autonomy of the Ethiopian state.[4] Those periods that did not offer the possibility of a postulation of unity – such as the Era of the Princes from 1796-1855 and the short reign of Lij Iyasu from 1909 until 1916 – were interpreted as periods of fragmentation and deterioration as a result of Oromo rule or a “dalliance” (Marcus 2002, 114) with Islam. One of the results of this narrative style has surely been a somewhat conservative outlook that emphasizes and prefers continuities and vehemently rejects even the thought of historical breaks. It also informs the interpretation of contemporary history. Erlich’s exaggerated fear in 1977, for example, that “the almost inevitable result of the rising power of local Islam and the weakness of Ethiopia is the political and ideological annexation of the Horn to the Middle East” (408) might have little to do with the factual situation inside Ethiopia, but is clearly the result of this well established historiographical tradition.[5]
The deposal of Haile Selassie, the radicalization of the 1974 revolution and the central role that was accorded to the discourse of ethno-nationalism by actors inside Ethiopia changed all this. Itself the result of specific developments within the Ethiopian student communities in Addis Ababa and abroad, the discourse of ethno-nationalism provided a challenge not only to the Haile Selassie regime, but also to the mainstream interpretations of Ethiopian history. With its emphasis on the liberation of the ethnic nation from its oppressors, it radically questioned the continued existence of the Ethiopian state as it was cherished in the minds of many writers around the world. Partly as a reaction to these changes and as a way of dealing with the dramatic developments after 1974, one can distinguish – in a simplified way - three conceptualizations that have been offered to overcome the state-centeredness of the hegemonic historiographical and political tradition.
The first and most important contribution has been the conceptualization of the Ethiopian state as a center-periphery structure. It provided a way of acknowledging the diversity of the different Ethiopian societies, while at the same time embedding these societies within an overall framework that connected them to the center. Clapham (1975) provides an early example of such an approach, but the classic statement has probably been offered by Donham (1986) in his introduction to The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia (Donham and James 1986). This volume contains a range of articles, which analyze the making of the Ethiopian state “from below” and these both complement and criticize the hegemonic state-centered analyses. In his article, Donham also connects the center-periphery concept to the notion of frontier as one way of connecting the two poles; a connection that has been described in more detail by Triulzi (1994). The use of the frontier paradigm, however, has its roots in older articles describing the interaction between ethnic groups.[6] Fukui and Markakis (1994) have offered an adaptation of this center-periphery approach by adding an intermediary range in-between the periphery and the center. In their view, this allows for distinguishing between conflicts at the margin that are unrelated to the state, conflicts in the center where the state is the common point of reference, and conflicts in-between that involve groups not directly interested in the state, but that seek to exploit it “for their own parochial purposes” (3). McGinnis (1999) offers a similar materialist view, but interprets it in the vocabulary of local, national and international conflicts.
Partly overlapping with this center-periphery approach is the second conceptualization that makes use of theories of space and place for a variety of purposes.[7] Donham (1993) has described some of the changes in spatial practices in the area of Maale that were the direct result of the 1974 revolution. Arnesen (1996) has used geographical theories on place to analyze the historical formation and transformation of Derra, an Oromo-inhabited area in the highlands of Shewa. The article by Cohen and Isaksson (1987) on the villagization in the Arsi-region does not explicitly refer to these theories, but its thematic is similar. Scott (1998, 247-252), in his important analysis of the imaginations and practices of the state, has made extensive use of this article and translated some of its implications into a spatial vocabulary. From a political-economic perspective, it is Clapham (2002a) who has delivered the definitive version so far, in his analysis of the different ways Haile Selassie, the Derg regime, and the EPRDF have tried to control their territory through the use of specific spatial relationships.[8]
A third conceptualization can be abstracted from those spatial practices that literally traverse the center-periphery structure of Ethiopia, namely those of the thousands of migrant workers and students that went abroad to find work or pursue their studies and the hundreds of thousands of refugees that were the result of war, famine and violence. Both these processes have caused a partial deconstruction of the center-periphery structure of Ethiopia and have led “to a more open series of interactions drawing upon partially shared and intersecting ‘ethnoscapes’ of the imagination” (Donham 2002, 2). That said, although a number of articles and monographs have been published on refugees in the Horn of Africa, the research on their imaginations is still in its infancy.[9]
This brings us to the state of literature on the Oromo and Oromo ethno-nationalism. One is tempted to say that the movement of refugees and students has also led to a fragmentation of research. If one attends both to the location of research and to the discourse that is the result of this research, one can discern a number of different approaches. The first approach takes the traditional anthropological route: it involves fieldwork among Oromo societies inside Ethiopia and results in a number of articles or monographs that try to describe these societies. Some more or less classic examples of this approach would include the work of Lewis on the Oromo in Jimma, the work of Baxter on the Arsi and Boran Oromo, Bassi’s research on the Boran Oromo and the writings of Blackhurst on the Oromo in Shewa.[10] Although I will refer to some of this literature in the following chapters, most of these writings are concerned with practices and imaginations of local societies – including their perceptions of and dealings with the Ethiopian state[11] – and only to a limited extent with analyses of Oromo nationalism.
A second approach involves research among refugees in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia that were the result of the 1974 revolution and the subsequent violence. Where Luling (1986) mainly offers a summary of a handful of conducted interviews in Sudan, more critical research on Sudan and Somalia has been offered by Braukämper (1982/83) and Zitelmann (1994a). In particular Zitelmann offers a valuable analysis of the role of the OLF in Sudan. Some of the more recent examples would include Scherrer, Namarra and Dibaba (2002) on Sudan and Kenya and Fossati, Namarra and Niggli (1996) on Djibouti. A third group of literature has also been produced in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia, but is not so much interested in a description of the situation in these areas as it is in the spatial imagination of Oromia. This is the domain of Oromo nationalists. Bulcha (1988) takes a position in between: as an Oromo nationalist, his interest is directed towards the spatial imagination of Oromia (although he tends to use the term Oromoland), while at the same time he has been conducting empirical research among the refugees in Sudan. More obvious examples are those pamphlets, articles and books produced by OLF-supporters, such as the book Oromia under the pseudonym of Gadaa Melbaa[12] and magazines such as Oromia Speaks, Bakkalcca Oromo, Sagalee Bosona (Bulletin of the OLF military activities) and Warraqqa (organ of the OLF youth league).
This brings us to the fourth and probably largest category, which consists of those discourses that are produced in the Diaspora and speak of the spatial imagination of Oromia. This version is intimately related to the Oromia-discourse among refugees in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia, in particular Sudan, since active contacts were maintained between the actors in the Diaspora and the OLF in Sudan. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, the main publications were by student organizations in Europe and North America. The Union of Oromo Students in Europe (UOSE) published Bakalćća, Sagalee Oromo and Kara Wallabuma, whereas the Union of Oromo Students in North America (UOSNA) published Wallaanso and Sagalee Wallaanso. For a while there also existed a Union of Oromo Women in Europe with a separate publication called Oromtittii.[13] Although many of these publications still exist, since the 1990s most visible activity has taken place in the United States within the academic community: the students became teachers devoting themselves to the promotion of the spatial imagination of Oromia. Asafa Jalata, Lemmu Baissa, Mohammed Hassen, Sisai Ibssa and Kuwee Kumsa are some of the more prolific writers.[14] This activity is slowly being noticed by non-Oromo academics and has led to a fifth line of investigation with a number of studies describing and analyzing the discourse and practices of Oromo communities in the Diaspora. Zitelmann (1988, 1992, 1994a) was probably the first to do detailed research in this field and his work on Oromo communities in Germany is still one of the few that seriously incorporates what Manning has recently advocated as the “homeland plus Diaspora model” (2003, 494): an analysis that incorporates both the homeland and the Diaspora and pays attention to continuities, breaks and interactions between them. More recently, Gow (2002) has presented a committed ethnographic study of the Oromo community in Melbourne, Australia. A book by Matsuoka and Sorenson (2001) deals with the construction of identity and community among refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea in Canada. Although the main emphasis is on Eritreans and Ethiopians (that is, Ethiopian nationalists defending a unitary view of the state), one chapter is specifically devoted to the Oromo. Also, Bulcha recently published The Making of the Oromo Diaspora (2002) that interprets the Oromo from a global perspective, while at the same time incorporating centuries, from the Arab slave trade to the present.
My thesis can be seen as a contribution to this “homeland plus Diaspora model.” With an emphasis on what Braudel called the longue durée of historical time, the thesis works through a number of continuities that have, in my view, more or less stayed the same over a longer period of time and that have hardly lost any of their force. At the same time, attention is paid to decisive breaks that occurred during these spatial practices towards the Diaspora, causing a “disruptive spatiality”[15] in the process. On a conceptual level, this involves a clear rejection of the state-centrism still prevalent in most texts that deal with the relationship between Oromia (imagined or real) and Ethiopia. Although the center-periphery conceptualization did much to develop the idea of separate but interconnected societies within the state of Ethiopia, the conceptualization of Oromia is still overwhelmingly interpreted as only a reaction to oppression by the Ethiopian state and not as also the result of transnational spatial practices.[16] In contrast, this thesis tries to show the constitutive role these spatial practices 1) have played in the construction of the spatial imagination of Oromia, and 2) still play in everyday politics in Ethiopia.
1.3 Organization of the Text
This thesis is divided into two sections and eight chapters. The first section (comprising the chapters II and III) is dedicated to an exploration of a number of theoretical issues and the clarification of the central concepts that will guide the historical analysis of the spatial imagination of Oromia. Acknowledging the fact that geography – here in a physical sense: mountains, escarpments and rivers – has played an important role in the social, cultural, economic and political construction of Ethiopia,[17] I have decided to approach the diverse theoretical literature on space and place from the perspective of geographical theory. It is guided by the conviction that embedding theory in larger disciplinary traditions – thereby acknowledging its historical nature - serves a better understanding of both theory and its appropriateness to grasp social phenomena. Chapter II discusses the concepts of region, place and locale. A summary description of the different ways the concept of region has been used in a number of older traditions provides the necessary background against which the developments in geographical theory since the 1970s should be understood. Of particular importance is the concept of place used by humanistic geographers as an antithesis to the abstract and objective concept of space from spatial science. The concept is central to this thesis, since it provides a way of thinking beyond a political field inhabited by purely rational actors. At the same time, the major strength of this humanistic approach is also its main weakness. Its emphasis on the human character of place too often leads to a conflation of place with community and to an internal view of place-construction. Through a critical discussion of Giddens’ concept of locale in the final part of this chapter, first steps are made to connect this concept of place to larger structures and to deconstruct this internal-external dichotomy. Chapter III conceptualizes the role of regional, national and global processes on the construction of place, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of the agency of specific actors. The first part discusses the importance of Marxist theory on the conceptualization of space. Leaving behind a view of space as absolute or as merely a spatial structure in which social life takes place, Marxist geographers argued that capitalism produces spaces because of its expansionary nature and that this results in processes of de-territorialization as well as re-territorialization. Through a discussion of an important 1989 book by Harvey and his concept of time-space compression, I want to point out some of the limitations of this approach. The main critique is that Harvey offers a top-down approach to time-space compression. Taking my lead from feminist theory, I argue that one has to attend to the question of positionality in order to grasp these processes “from below.” Actors are not simply victims of capitalism, but actively make use of the new possibilities offered by time-space compression: through an appropriation of spaces – discursively as well as in social practice – they try to reconstruct their place. The term spatial imagination will return again and again in this thesis as shorthand for these processes of association. The third part of this chapter returns to questions of structure that delimit these spatial imaginations. It makes use of recent theorizations of scale that argue that geographic scale is actively appropriated by actors as part of their arguments and practices in order to convince others of the usefulness of a certain scale, while denying legitimacy to other scales. Combining this aspect of scale with the conceptualizations of space and place makes it possible to attend to, what I have called, the scalar positionality of spatial imaginations.
The second section comprises the case study of the spatial imagination of Oromia. The emphasis on the longue durée (as already indicated above) of the Ethiopian state and its continued relevance to the interpretation of the spatial imagination of Oromia necessitates an historical overview that incorporates much of the twentieth and even nineteenth century. That this approach is useful to get a grip on the dynamics of Ethiopia seems clear not only to me, but also to a number of other observers.[18] Chapter IV discusses the politico-economic developments of the Ethiopian state that even now form the structural coordinates for many of its subjects. The first part describes the internationalization of the state since the end of the 19th century. Both state-controlled trade and Ethiopia’s military alliance with the United States during the Cold War (until shortly after the 1974 revolution) emphasized the connections between the scale of the state and a number of international actors, while at the same time making the state less dependent on the sub-state scales it encompassed. The second part discusses the process of centralization and territorial expansion of the state during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Focusing on the question of control over land, it analyzes how the southern peripheries were connected to the center, developing a hierarchy with actors occupying a range of socio-spatial positions. The third part provides a critique of the center-periphery concept and argues that the conflict between the Amhara and the Oromo as represented by its elites should not be interpreted as a struggle between the center and its periphery, but instead as a struggle between two differing elements of the same center. Chapter V will explore this argument in more detail through an analysis of this center – Addis Ababa – and of the university students before the 1974 revolution in the capital and abroad, since it was in this context that the OLF discourse on Oromia emerged. Describing two transnational spatial practices – the arrival of scholarship students from other African countries and the studies abroad by Ethiopian students – it will be shown how the specific spatial imaginations of the student population, including the OLF, was the result not only of difficulties with the state, but also of these transnational spatial practices and the access they enabled to spatial imaginations not available before. The impact this had on the representation of Ethiopian history is illustrated through an analysis of an important rebellion in the 1960s and the way this rebellion was represented by the OLF. Chapter VI discusses the revolutionary period from 1974 until 1991, but is less concerned with specific developments inside the country, as it is with the exclusion of the OLF from the center. After a discussion of the early revolutionary years that were characterized by a process of homogenization – within four to five years all organizations and divergent voices were annihilated, assimilated or excluded from the center, leaving the Derg as the only power with direct access to the resources of the state – the focus will be on the OLF and their spatial position in the border area between Sudan and Ethiopia. It will be argued that this move towards the periphery should not be interpreted as a marginalization, but instead as an opportunity of globalization, since in Sudan the OLF was able to establish connections with actors all over the world. An important correlate of this argument and central to my thesis is that this embedded the spatial imagination of Oromia in another spatial network: the move towards Sudan turned Oromia into a diasporic imagination. Chapter VII discusses some of the changes concerning both the spatial imagination of Oromia and the new region of Oromia since 1991. As already mentioned, the year the OLF was part of the TGE led to the construction of Oromia as a region within the federal framework of the Ethiopian state. Building on my previous argument, it will be shown how the OLF was not only excluded from the coalition as a result of the Ethiopian tradition of a monopolization of power, but also as the result of a diasporic imagination of Oromia that could not imagine a cooperation with the Ethiopian state. The continued but separate access of both the OLF and the OPDO/EPRDF to global resources and mediators provides the key to understanding why it has been impossible for the parties to find any “common ground” since 1992. Chapter VIII summarizes the arguments made in this thesis and will briefly compare them with another case – Western Sahara – in order to offer some first impulses to a possible comparative study and to test the more general applicability of my conceptualization of transnational politics.
II.1 The Region as an Analytical Concept of Order and Clarity
The concept of region is one of the most basic and oldest in the discipline of geography. If one accepts the working hypothesis that space is abstract and universal (I will discuss different conceptualizations of space in the next chapter), then a region is always a more or less bounded space that possesses some sort of unity through which it can be distinguished from other regions. As a further specification of this general definition, one can discern between two, partly overlapping, discourses that have made extensive use of this concept: 1) the region in its loose pre-nineteenth century usage, and 2) the region in areal differentiation and spatial science.
In the first case, the region retained a loose, almost “commonsensical” usage and could refer to anything from a vast tract of land to whole continents and to areas of specialized economic activity such as port-cities and their hinterlands. Most writers working from an international relations perspective or in a tradition of political and economic history have constructed their arguments around this definition of the region. In particular the top-down imageries dividing the world into distinctive macro-regions have been harshly criticized since the 1970s. Placing “Europe” at the center of attention and installing “Africa,” “Asia” and “America” in distinctive positions within this “matrix of difference and deferral,” as Gregory called it (2000b, 687), has enabled writers to assign cultural stereotypes to each region. Excluded from these regional imaginations was the acknowledgment that these were largely structured by European exploration in the first place. In particular travel writing has been a vital source for the discursive production of these regions as bounded spaces. India became associated with hierarchy, the Mediterranean with honor-and-shame and Africa with kinship. Appadurai has usefully characterized these imageries as gate-keeping concepts “that define the quintessential and dominant questions of interest in the region” (1986, 357). It was largely the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978 that made many writers more aware of the imaginary nature of these geographies and their own involvement in the construction of hierarchical relationships separating the Occident from the Orient. It has since spawned a whole new field of postcolonial studies dedicated to the deconstruction of the many stereotypical images and discourses on “the Other” as produced by “the West.”[19]
The second general discourse dealing with the concept of the region brings us closer to the traditional heart of the geographical discipline. Seen from this perspective – usually referred to as areal differentiation - the region becomes one of the basic “building-blocks” of geographical inquiry. The assumption was that the world could be divided into bounded spaces that, put together, would add up to a larger totality. Geographers such as Vidal de la Blache, Hettner and Hartshorne were among the leading proponents of this approach. This “building-block” approach was shared with the successor project of spatial science. Although this new generation of geographers after the Second World War attacked the “traditionalists” for seeing locations as unique and for justifying a regional geography in which “areal differentiation dominated geography at the expense of areal integration” (Haggett qtd. in Agnew 2000, 35), both approaches were interested in constructing regions as ways of classification and organization. The main difference between them was that the practitioners of spatial science argued for a positivist view of geography. Their work was part of the quantitative revolution that dominated the larger field of the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of connecting a particular identity or culture to a region and its natural environment, as proponents of areal differentiation tended to do, spatial scientists were mainly interested in discerning central organizing principles within societies largely severed from its physical landscape.
It has been against this positivist tradition that most geographers since the 1970s have directed their critique. In a general way, one can discern four discourses that argued against the “spatial fetishism” of spatial science: 1) a return to traditional regional geography; 2) the development of a humanistic geography; 3) the application of structuration theory on questions of space and place; and 4) the use of a Marxist vocabulary to theorize the production of space. Although Marxism had a lasting influence on the discipline, I will discuss this approach in the next chapter. Because of the theoretical meta-nature of many of these texts, this discourse seems to have had its major influence on the definition of the concepts of space and scale.
II.2 Traditional Regional Geography
One line of critique against spatial science involved a picking up of the earlier descriptive tradition of areal differentiation. The practitioners of spatial science had directed their harshest criticism against this approach, but never fully succeeded in convincing the traditionalists from the benefits of the quantitative revolution. In addition, the many practitioners of spatial science became disenchanted with the paradigm’s limitations and started looking for new methods. It was in this context that defenders of the descriptive approach attempted to gain more ground. Hart is often quoted as one of the central figures in this movement. In his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, he described regional geography as an integrative discipline, which made it, according to him, “the highest form of the geographer’s art” (1982). Hart’s approach, however, is hampered by a general refusal to conceptualize his vocabulary, relying instead on the power of description. This causes at least two conceptual failures.
A central problem is Hart’s refusal to explicate the status of regions as objects of study. The study of regions should take central stage in the discipline of geography, he argues, because it is only by using the region-concept that one can tie together “all of the wildly disparate phenomena with which we deal” (18). What defines a region, however, remains unclear, since “regions are subjective artistic devices, and they must be shaped to fit the hand of the individual user” (22). This might be true, but it makes for a critical concept of limited value, since no attempt is made to incorporate questions of power that play a role in formulating the characteristics of a region. Connected to this is a second fallacy of Hart and other traditional regional geographers, namely the implicit use of a framework of naturalism that assumes correspondence between human and geographical patterns. The implication is that by describing the physical features of a region, one is able to infer the characteristics of the people living inside this region. At the same time, Hart seems reluctant to accept such a naturalistic approach and posits human beings (as a universal concept) as unconstrained by social relations. As he puts it: “I would remind you that most of the truly significant changes in our society have been initiated by individuals, or by numbers of people so small as to be totally insignificant in any statistical sense” (5). Such a view, however, ignores the embedment of individuals in social structures, unveiling, as Pudup has pointed out, traditional regional geography’s commitment to voluntarism and methodological individualism (1988, 376), thereby reducing human life to a struggle between man and nature.
II.3 Humanistic Geography and the Experience of Place
A second line of critique against spatial science and one that – in contrast to traditional regional geography – privileges the subjective experience of place is the tradition of humanistic geography which emerged in the Anglo-American discipline during the 1970s. Although its roots have been traced to traditions as diverse as the French school of human geography, the Chicago school of sociology, the work of Heidegger or even the anarchism of Kropotkin (Gregory 2000a, 361), its main impetus came from a rejection of the spatial science paradigm. Dismissing the idea that human beings could only respond passively to abstract spatial structures, humanistic geography argued for an emphasis on the active role of human agency and creativity in the construction of places.
Notice the move towards place. Whereas the practitioners of areal differentiation and traditional regional geography mainly concerned themselves with regions, humanistic geographers explicitly appropriated the concept of place to distinguish themselves from spatial science’s concern with abstract space. Authors like Relph (1976) and Tuan (1977) interpreted place as more subjectively defined and were interested in the ways people attach elements like language, human attitudes and events to specific places. According to Tuan in a later article that focuses on the role stories and myths play in place-construction:
“[…] storytelling converts mere objects ‘out there’ into real presences. Myths have this power to an outstanding degree because they are not just any story but are foundational stories that provide support and glimmers of understanding for the basic institutions of society; at the same time, myths, by weaving in observable features in the landscape (a tree here, a rock there), strengthen a people’s bond to place.” (1991, 686)
This is an important move, since it enables a more discursive view of place that is constructed by actors through social interaction. This humanistic concept of place would later be picked up by geographers interested in structuration theory and by those working in the now burgeoning field of cultural geography, leading to a further specification and transformation of the concept of place. Of particular importance and the major strength of this humanistic tradition is its emphasis on people’s emotional attachment to places. Refusing to interpret this attachment as merely an expression of political and economic considerations by rational actors, this non-reductive approach to place acknowledges the need many actors feel to relate to something they can call their place. By stressing this human aspect, humanistic geography has in my view more than any other tradition made explicit the difference between location and place. Whereas a location can be seen as only a delimited physical area embedded in abstract space, place is always humanized i.e. it is a location to which meaning has been attached.
Despite all this praise, the humanistic version of place is by no means unproblematic. For one, it is often accompanied by a tendency to neglect power differentials, constructing a nostalgic view of place that conflates place with community. Relph, for example, used the term placelessness to describe the loss of place specificity that he saw as a result of industrialization and modernity. From such a perspective, the modern world can only seem as a threat to the existence of authentic communities and places. What this ignores is that these places and communities themselves are often highly structured and hierarchical. Therefore, while attending to the humanizing aspect of place-construction, one should at the same time address the fundamental political aspect of place. It seems to me that the main reason humanistic geography finds it difficult to discuss these questions of power has to do with the fact that it sees place-construction as an immanent process. Too often actors are seen as appropriating i.e. humanizing elements of the land on which they live in order to create an attachment to this place – to create a sense of place. It ignores, however, the external face of place; the fact that actors construct certain places to re-define their own position towards the larger spaces they also inhabit. This difficult topic will be dealt with in the chapter on space and scale.
II.4 The Concept of Locale and the Container of the State
Another line of criticism against spatial science can be summarized under the heading of structuration theory. Although other writers such as Bourdieu and Bhaskar[20] have left their mark on the discipline of geography, it is the work of Giddens that in the 1980s deeply influenced most geographers interested in theorizing the spatiality of social life.[21] Giddens identified the central problem in modern social theory as a dualism between “agency” and “structure.” Instead of analyzing structure as a framework in which different actors are able to live their lives, he argued that structure is and should be analyzed as implicated in every action. In other words, it is only through human agency and their constituting moments of interaction that structure is reproduced and transformed. This is what Giddens calls the recursive character of social life: every act of production is at the same time an act of reproduction. It was mainly Giddens’ own explicit concern to ground his social theory in a spatial context that separated him from most other social scientists and that made him such a central figure among geographers during the mid-1980s. However, despite Giddens’ initial popularity, his structuration theory in general and his conceptualization of space and place in particular know a number of deficiencies, two of which will be addressed here: first, Giddens’ conceptualization of the locale as a setting for interaction, and second, the connection of this locale to larger structures.
Giddens argues that the continuity of everyday life largely depends on routinized interactions between people who are co-present in time and space. He uses the locale-concept to describe the spatial setting within which these interactions occur. According to Giddens (1979, 206-07):
“Virtually all collectives have a locale of operation, spatially distinct from that associated with others. ‘Locale’ is in some respects a preferable term to that of ‘place’, more commonly employed in social geography: for it carries something of the connotation of space used as a setting for interaction. A setting is not just a spatial parameter, and physical environment, in which interaction ‘occurs’: it is these elements mobilised as part of the interaction. Features of the setting of interaction, including its spatial and physical aspects, […] are routinely drawn upon by social actors in the sustaining of communication – a phenomenon of no small importance for semantic theory.” (Italics in original)
Besides Giddens’ tendency to see a locale as occupied by one collective - thereby excluding the more realistic situation of a locale occupied by a number of (overlapping) collectives - there are other, more serious problems to his characterization. One is his equation of locales as settings for social actors in interaction. This, however, externalizes the formative influences of the environment and politico-economic factors such as state politics, warfare and capitalist restructuring processes on the character of these settings. Also, this approach reduces the concept of locale to one of physical location and thus misses out on the discursive representations of a locale that is constructed by specific actors. From a slightly different perspective, Kilminster (1991, 99) makes a similar criticism: “Despite the word relations, individuals are seen here only in the first person, as positions. There is no conceptual grasp of the perspective from which they themselves are regarded by others in the total social web, nor of their combined relatedness. Structuration theory is a one-dimensional view of society that does not permit the sociologist to show this combined interplay of relations and perspectives in all its richness and complex balances of power” (Italics in original). What Giddens also ignores is the fact that social actors through their (inter)action reconstruct the locales they inhabit. Although he does seem to argue something similar - he writes that actors in their social interaction “mobilize” spatial elements – he does not follow through on the consequences of this mobilization, which is that this mobilization can also lead to a transformation of these spatial elements. Here, Giddens’ theory seems limited by a view of space reminiscent of the earlier tradition of spatial science, with a locale as nothing more than a spatial location and with actors involved in the application (not transformation) of these elements in daily life. Although Giddens in general succeeds in retaining a tension between structure and agency – that was after all the main goal of his structuration theory - in his theorizing of the spatiality of social life he certainly accords too much power to a stable and indifferent spatial structure.[22]
That said, Giddens is very much aware of the connections a locale has with larger structures, but unfortunately these connections are too often theorized in a too restricted way. For example, Giddens accords central place to “dominant locales.” These should be seen as physically demarcated settings for interaction – “power containers” - that provide the major structural principles of a society. However, since Giddens puts this concept of the power container in a highly general developmental scheme – the change from city-states as centers of power to the development of the nation-state[23] – he fails to clarify, as Gregory has pointed out, “the hierarchy of locales involved in these societies (and beyond them): the ways in which […] domains nest within one another, overlap and confound another, in a changing web of interactions” (1989, 209). Although Giddens certainly does not see the state or a society as a unitary totality, through his bounded view of the power container called the state that encompasses all other locales, he tends to ignore other sources of social power that know spatial structuring processes of their own and to re-route these processes as being only a part and result of the state.
Although Giddens in his influential work of the 1980s certainly tried to align his structuration theory with conceptualizations of space and place, his view of locales and of the power container called the state seem both too bounded and too stable to be of analytical value in a world in which locales are connected in highly complex ways. This is not to say that in a global world “everything flows,” as Castells (1996) would have it, but it is to say that every critical analysis needs to address those expressions, phenomena or practices that cannot be contained by the state.
It seems to me that one of the reasons Giddens largely fails to pursue a non-state-centered approach has to do with his difficulties in theorizing space. Despite his extensive use of a spatial vocabulary – regionalization, locale, front regions and back regions, time-space distanciation and time-space edges, among others – he remains indebted to a concept largely derived from spatial science that sees space as abstract, universal and absolute. This is reflected in his concept of time-space distanciation that refers to the processes by which societies are “stretched” over time and space (Giddens 1981, 92-97). Although this concept is clearly an acknowledgment of the complexity of modern social life – an attempt to theorize the influence of world-wide media, travel and migration on daily life and societies – it nevertheless makes social life seem simpler and more logical as it probably is, since it is couched in a covert thesis of modernization that implies the progressive dissolution of separate locales. Interpreting globalization in this way, however, reduces it to a question of physical and material integration, and ignores other conceptions of space – in particular discursive representations of space – that are not reducible to this material integration.
In this chapter I will address these problems concerning the theorizing of space and develop a conceptualization that does justice to the idea of space not as objective and abstract, but as subjective and social. Since the theoretizations of space are far too diverse to summarize under a single heading and after having discussed in the last chapter three lines of critique against spatial science – traditional regional geography, humanistic geography and structuration theory – I will here start my discussion with the fourth line of critique – Marxist geography – and from there develop a concept of space that is more discursive than the Marxist version usually allows.
III.1 The Production of Space and the Question of Positionality
Critical of the objectivism of spatial science and the non-theoretical nature of space in traditional regional geography, since the 1970s geographers started to develop concepts of space that were no longer absolute – i.e. simply there as a framework in which social life took place – but where space was seen as constituted in social practice. Similar to the move in theorizing about place and region, these new conceptualizations of space were guided by the acknowledgment that spatial analysis required socialization and that social analysis required spatialization. The traditional approach saw places as embedded in larger spaces, but the space-concept itself was usually left untheorized and the connections between space and place too often remained unclear. Many of the first attempts to reconceptualize space made extensive use of Marxist theory, leading to the development in the 1980s of a highly materialist history of space. The general argument usually was that capitalism produced spaces because of its expansionary nature, which brought along very specific processes of re-territorialization in order to make these new spaces suitable for the penetration of a capitalist space-economy.[24]
This was an enormously important contribution to the theorizing of space, but one of the major drawbacks was that many of these analyses offered a top-down approach to the explanation of socio-spatial change. Privileging capitalism as its explanatory locus, actors appeared as nothing more than spatial positions waiting to be engulfed by the next wave of capitalist expansion. The formative influence of cultural practices on the production of space was almost always insufficiently theorized. In this part I want to discuss the concept of time-space compression as developed by Harvey – one of the main representatives of the Marxist approach in geography – in order to get a grip on this conceptualization of space. After pointing out some of the weaknesses in his argument, the next part will be dedicated to the exploration of a concept of space that is more attentive to culture and agency.
In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), Harvey offers a synthesizing history that tries to explain the state of the world we are living in. The main argument of his book is that, beginning around 1972, there has been a “sea-change” in political, economic and cultural practices, which has led to the emergence of a postmodern sensibility.[25] In causally linking postmodernism to capitalism, Harvey’s approach is similar to the famous article by Jameson (1984) that interprets postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Both argue that postmodernist capitalism causes, on the one hand, fragmentation – leading to the construction of multiple and simultaneous ontologies, “a potential as well as an actual plurality of universes,” as Harvey calls it. The “disruptive spatiality” that is the result of these multiple ontologies leads to the impossibility of constructing any coherent, general narrative that could describe this fragmentation (Harvey, 301-302). On the other hand, confronted by precisely this fragmentation, people want to reach out for anything that gives them security in a highly unstable world. Harvey sees mainly dangers involved and interprets this need for attachment as an “aesthetics of space,” which tends to lead to us celebrating the “fetishisms of locality, place, or social grouping, while denying that kind of meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes […] that are becoming ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity, reach and power over daily life” (117).
That is in a very general way the argument of Harvey’s book. Here I would like to concentrate on two elements that are of particular importance in theorizing space and that direct us to the limits of Harvey’s approach: the concept of time-space compression and the issue of positionality. Time-space compression should be seen as the product of what Marx once called “the annihilation of space and time” by those processes acting according to the rules of commodity production and capital accumulation. According to Harvey, the term implies “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240). By explicitly referring to the changes that took place in representing space and time, Harvey incorporates an experiential dimension that is missing from the more analytical concept of time-space distanciation by Giddens. But it is exactly here – the experiential dimension that I see as subjective and social - that Harvey’s concept is too restricted. It seems unlikely that time-space compression is only the result of capital accumulation and the expansionary nature of capitalism. Here, Harvey’s argument clearly suffers from an economic reductionism that reduces all other important factors in shaping time and space – such as politics and culture – to the ultimate logic of capital. Second, a result of this reductionism is a complete failure to socially differentiate the concept of time-space compression. In Harvey’s world-view the social only exists as part of the global restructuring flows. All activity is based in capital, whereas actors are seen as on the receiving and passive end. To counter this tendency, Doreen Massey (1993, 61) has argued that one should attend to “the power-geometry of time-space compression:”
“For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.” (Italics in original)
There is a more general problem with Harvey’s approach, which one could describe as a refusal of positionality.[26] Despite his own analysis that interprets postmodernity as creating fragmentation, leading to an impossibility of constructing a coherent, general explanatory narrative, Harvey does precisely what his own interpretation forbids. He holds on to Marxist historical materialism as the ultimate explanatory framework and relegates other viewpoints to a subordinate place within this framework. By doing so, Harvey – as a Marxist analyst – is able to organize the world for him in an understandable way, providing, as Hall once remarked when commenting conventional Marxism and its interpretation of culture, “a way of helping you sleep at night” (1988, 72). What this top-down approach does not do, however, is to construct a view of (global) change that is socially informed. One could even argue, as Deutsche does in a marvelous fashion, that this kind of theorizing leads not to an explanation of societal and spatial changes, but that instead it leads to an explanatory image of the analyst himself. Instead of attaining a “whole view” by observing from a distance, Deutsche argues, these visual and spatial strategies themselves are constituted by a “desire for exteriority, and the image that they produce is not a reproduction of the world but a self-image” (1996, 213).
III.2 A Situated Concept of Space
Acknowledging the critique directed at Harvey’s approach has a number of implications for a more grounded view of space. The centrality of situated subjectivities demands a view of space that is itself situated. Instead of conceptualizing space as abstract and universal – as in spatial science – or as produced by capitalism – as in Harvey’s approach – I would like to conceptualize space from the bottom up. This is, of course, a very general statement and needs to be specified, since it raises the question how places and spaces should be connected. Although I tend to agree with the view that the construction of places is increasingly dependent on – or at least influenced by - other spaces and that this can have the result that places are “drowned by other more powerful abstract spaces such as communications networks,” leading to a situation in which the “truth of an experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place” (Dear 1997, 58), one should at the same time attend to the other side of this argument. This side – one which is all too easily forgotten – is that actors in places are not passive, as Harvey would have it, but that these actors themselves make imaginative use of the increased availability of spaces in order to pursue certain goals and to take a stand among other social actors.
This way of conceptualizing space enables an open and political view of place, in which actors seek to reconstruct their place by reaching out to spaces – discursively as well as in social practice (through the establishment of networks). It is here that the limitations of the humanistic concept of place become clear, since in the here proposed view place-construction is not an immanent process, but, on the contrary, a construction dependent on its association with larger spaces – an externalized view of place. In this thesis I will often use the term spatial imagination as shorthand for these processes of association. Spatial imaginations are thus specific ways of imagining and / or materially constructing the embedment of your place in larger spaces. Obviously, this conceptualization avoids a conflation of community with place and chooses to see place-based political struggles not as the result of external destabilizing influences, but instead as struggles over the right to re-define the hegemonic character of place.
Taylor has usefully characterized this situation as one of place-space tension (1999, 12), but he gives a twist to it that I would like to avoid. According to Taylor, place-space tensions arise when different persons treat the same location in different ways. This is certainly correct and overlaps with my view of place-based political struggles. Unfortunately, his conceptualization suffers from a dichotomization – the result of his reliance on Tuan’s book Space and Place - that sees place as enabling and space as repressive and disenabling. The main problem with this view is that it retains a concept of space as inhuman and abstract, whereas I have argued for a view of space as social and subjective. As I see it, the tension arises not because “the same location can be both place or space depending on whose perspective is involved” (12), but it arises because of differences in spatial imaginations. There is no such thing as a place without space. The limits of his conceptualization become clear when he discusses the role of the state. In Taylor’s view the state is seen as converting places into spaces through processes of bureaucratization and territorialization. The later rise of nationalist thought made it possible to combine state and nation, merging national territory with an imagined community, which in effect reconstructed places out of the national space, creating highly effective and powerful entities. Without a doubt something like this occurred, although one can question the analytical value of such a sketchy approach. The result of this approach, however, is that the state as a spatial entity remains curiously unexamined. In Taylor’s view, bureaucrats working for the state produce spaces for no apparent reason other than as a means to create territories with populations to be taxed (14). Certainly this plays an important role, but such a view reduces the importance of cultural formations to a question of politico-economic considerations. By doing so, spatial imaginations are once again excluded.
The next part will address this problem by emphasizing the importance of scale in thinking about the state. As I see it, differences over place – my characterization of place-space tensions – often arise because different social actors occupy or have access to different scales. It is this difference that plays an important role in delimiting actors’ spatial imaginations.
III.3 The Political Construction of Scale and Spatializing the State
Geographic scale has long been treated as a relatively fixed hierarchy of bounded spaces. Each scale represented a different level of analysis (local, regional, national, global) in which different (social) processes took place that could be analyzed. This approach has its analogy in the particular-general discussion of anthropology,[27] but has been increasingly challenged in the last decade or so by a number of (mostly political) geographers. Central to this new body of thought is that geographic scale is no longer pre-given or simply a conceptual tool of the geographer, but that it is actively appropriated by social actors as part of their arguments and their practice in order to persuade others, “to create in the minds of others a kind of mental map or image of the difference that scale makes” (Delaney and Leitner 1997, 94).
It is this spatial imagination, which always involves a strategy of re-scaling, that constructs a specific view of the spatial embeddedness of place. Since every view necessarily includes a certain perspective but excludes others, politics is essentially concerned with the promotion of specific spatial imaginations at the expense of others. According to Swyngedouw:
“These struggles change the importance and role of certain geographic scales, reassert the importance of others, and sometimes create entirely new significant scales, but – most importantly – these scale redefinitions alter and express changes in the geometry of social power by strengthening power and control of some while disempowering others.” (1997, 169)
Thinking about politics in this way clearly requires an adaptation of those discussions about politics and the state that interpret the state as the logical vehicle of political processes. In the view that is being sketched here, no longer can the scale of the state be taken for granted, but instead it has to compete with other spatial imaginations that make use of different scales. This means that one of the main functions of state representatives – in particular, the bureaucracy, the military and often the media – is to provide the people living on its territory with spatial imaginations that can successfully compete with these other non-state spatial imaginations.
In a recent article, Gupta and Ferguson (2002) – working within an anthropological tradition, but appropriating geographical theories - have discussed some of the ways in which states represent themselves – or, more precisely, how state representatives represent the state – as reified entities with particular spatial properties. From this perspective, not only are nations “imagined,” an argument made by Anderson and a host of others,[28] but states are as well. Two images are of particular importance; those of verticality and encompassment: “Verticality refers to the central and pervasive idea of the state as an institution somehow ‘above’ civil society, community, and family. Thus, state planning is inherently ‘top down’ and state actions are efforts to manipulate and plan ‘from above,’ while ‘the grassroots’ contrasts with the state precisely in that it is ‘below,’ closer to the ground, more authentic, and more ‘rooted.’” This image is combined with the image of encompassment: “Here the state (conceptually fused with the nation) is located within ever widening series of circles that begins with family and local community and ends with the system of nation-states” (982). Together these images are of central importance in the state’s attempts to naturalize its authority and position itself as “above” other centers of power.
Although Gupta and Ferguson question this state-image of vertical encompassment in order to develop a Foucault-influenced concept of transnational governmentality, let me here point out another implication of thinking about scale and the state. Taking scale seriously means that every analysis has to acknowledge the, what I would call, scalar positionality of spatial imaginations. First of all, this means that social actors always position themselves towards a particular spatial imagination. One could describe this as an anticipatory act, since it involves an association of actors with certain spatial imaginations in order to “improve” their own place. This is the imaginative part. Secondly, however, actors are never free to choose whatever spatial imagination they like, since they do not live in a void, but are obviously part of a specific socio-spatial structure. Actors do position themselves towards spatial imaginations, but at the same time others position them. Attending to the question which actors have access to what scale provides one way of understanding the politics of certain spatial imaginations and the power differentials implied by them.
III.4 Summary
To close this theoretical section, a short summary of the central concepts used in this thesis will be given. The term scalar positionality of spatial imaginations should be seen as an attempt to incorporate the concepts of location, place, space, scale and positionality within an all-encompassing shorthand and to emphasize that these concepts cannot be seen in a clearly distinct way, but instead should be seen as fundamentally interconnected. Nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity and analytical reasons they will be used as separate concepts to illuminate certain aspects of a multifaceted social practice.
Location is the most basic concept, but at the same time the most elusive. This is because the concept is supposed to describe a delimited geographical area before any meaning has been attached to this area. That is, of course, a non-possibility. The very fact of delimitation involves a human observer that does the delimiting. Nevertheless, in order to retain at least a minimum amount of ground under my feet, the concept will be pragmatically used in this thesis as a rough reference to a geographical area somewhere on this planet. Thus, if I write the location of Addis Ababa, my goal is not to provide a clear definition of how to delimit this city, but it is simply meant as a starting point for analysis.
The concept of place, then, humanizes i.e. attaches meaning to this location. A place, in other words, always evokes aspects of subjectivity, such as “belonging” and “home.” Where my concept differs from the humanistic version is that I emphasize the open and political character of place. Instead of seeing place-construction as an immanent process of attaching meaning to a location by appropriating elements already there, as it were, my version sees place-construction as a process of place-embedment within larger spaces not simply in place.
This is what I have described as a view of space “from below” and that should be seen as both a critique of and complement to the top-down version as proposed by many Marxist geographers. The concept of positionality has been offered to describe this double-sidedness of actors: being embedded in a certain space, but at the same time seeing yourself as part of other spaces. It offers a way of connecting local politics with global changes and imaginations. Thus, instead of interpreting globalization as a momentous change leading to homogenization and the destruction of local cultures, in this thesis I choose to put the agency of specific actors in the center of attention. The shorthand spatial imagination will be used to refer to the specific ways actors imagine and / or materially construct the embedment of their place in larger spaces.
Finally, the last part of the theoretical section has tried to bring both the state as well as the question of scale back into the picture. Making use of scalar theory, I have argued that geographic scale is not simply pre-given or a conceptual tool, but that it is appropriated by specific actors in order to promote a certain spatial imagination at the expense of others. From this perspective, the state is nothing more than one of these spatial imaginations. Since switching scales involves a redefinition of power – including some, excluding others – attention to the scalar positionality of spatial imaginations provides one way of analyzing the politics behind these imaginations.
The past is of major importance in the understanding of the Ethiopian present. Of course, to a certain extent this is true for all countries, communities and biographies all over the world, but in the Ethiopian case highly divergent representations of history are used on a daily basis as strategic weapons: to politicize or to personalize certain narratives in order to take a stand – to develop a specific positionality – among and against other social actors.
This chapter will focus on the more material politico-economic developments that have led to the construction of this specific form of the Ethiopian state and in which the current actors are still, if only partly, embedded. On a general level, two interconnected changes have been of central importance: first, the internationalization of the Ethiopian state and second, its centralization and territorial expansion. Internationalization, as the name suggests, is dependent on connections between nations - which, in this context, means states - and more precisely on a connection that acknowledges the state’s right of existence by other states. In that sense, the Ethiopian state as such did not really exist before Menelik II, whose victory over the Italians at the battle of Adwa in 1896 led to a range of international agreements that endorsed the sovereignty of Ethiopia. The centralization and territorial expansion of the state was directly connected to this changed international embeddedness. It led to the incorporation of Oromo-speaking and other non-Oromo societies into the modern state in a relatively short period of time and was driven by Menelik’s success in the international trade of southern products. In this process, the southern peripheries were connected to the center in a number of ways. Northern traditions of land-control were partly transplanted onto these southern areas and its peoples and this led to the development of specific hierarchies with actors occupying a range of socio-spatial positions between, as it were, the land and the main urban center of Addis Ababa. This will be discussed in the first two parts of this chapter.
The third part should be seen as a preparation to the next chapters whose focus is on the question of spatial imaginations rather than material spatial structures. To a certain extent, it involves a critique of the center-periphery concept as described above. In my view, the main deficiency of this concept is that it involves too much structure and too little movement. Although Donham acknowledges that “local histories were never simply determined by the centre” and that “what happened was also influenced by the organization of local societies” (1986, 44) this conceptualization ignores those more powerful actors that can move from the periphery to the center and beyond. Through a conceptual critique of the frontier thesis – the frontier as a border area between the center and periphery – I want to point out some of its limitations and open up the spatial imagination of Oromia to questions of representation and power, which will then be addressed in the following chapters.
IV.1 The Internationalization of the Scale of the State
The territorial shape of the Ethiopian state until the revolution of 1974 was largely the result of processes that took place at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1769 and 1855, so the story usually goes, the Abyssinian Kingdom that would later form the core of the Ethiopian state was largely governed by a series of factional wars.[29] It was only after a governor called Kassa was able to seize power by defeating and incorporating his other regional competitors that one could again start to speak of Abyssinia as a material entity and not merely as a spatial imagination. By crowning himself “King of Kings” and taking the title of Emperor Tewodros II, he consciously positioned himself as part of the ancient Solomonic legend, tracing the legitimacy of his rule to Menelik, the son of Solomon and Sheba, who is said to have brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. According to Levine, Kassa renamed himself Tewodros, since it was prophesied in the Fikkere Iyesus (the Interpretation of Jesus) that after a period of divine punishment a just and popular king called Tewodros would come to the throne and rule for forty years (1974, 157).[30] Rhetoric and power have always been intimately connected in Ethiopia.
Crummey (1969) has argued that Tewodros II was far more serious than previous rulers in seeking to harness expatriate technology to the tasks of strengthening the state and economy. Considering later developments, one is tempted to say that the modern Ethiopian state was an international project from the day it was born, since its survival has always depended on the ability to cultivate these connections.[31] This internationalization of the Ethiopian state[32] increased when Menelik II came to power in 1889. The famous battle of Adwa in 1896, where Menelik’s army defeated the Italians confirmed on an inter-national scale the right of the Ethiopian state to exist as part of the international state system. Although Italy was allowed to maintain possession of Eritrea, it had to acknowledge the sovereignty of Ethiopia, enabling Menelik in the following years to enter into agreements with France, Britain and the Mahdists in Sudan, in which the territorial integrity of his state was ensured (Keller 1981, 528).[33] This international recognition was paralleled by measures to develop and stabilize national institutions in Ethiopia. With financial support of France and Russia the military was professionalized and as early as the 1890s young Ethiopians were sent abroad for studies to Europe, Russia and Sudan. These students would later occupy central positions in the bureaucratic and military institutions of the state (Zewde 2002, 20-34).
It is important to note that this international recognition was one on the scale of the nation-state (the terms are conflated here) and it involved the construction of a spatial imagination that was to become hugely popular among many movements around the world. The battle of Adwa, the myth of a Solomonic lineage and the later coronation of Haile Selassie were all connected to the spatial imaginary of “Ethiopia” and for a long time provided important identity-markers for many Afro-Americans, Pan-Africanists and Rastafarians.[34] Notwithstanding the liberating possibilities this imagination might have had for these actors in the face of suppression and inequality, in the case of the Ethiopian state the effect has surely been a “flattening” of history with the majority of interpretive frameworks implicitly re-scaling all social practices in order to make them fit with and part of a united image of the state.
This re-scaled spatial imagination, however, was not merely the result of fantasy. It was also consistent with material re-scaling processes that took place during Menelik’s rule, since the acknowledgment of Ethiopia as a legitimate state involved a re-routing of international connections through the mechanisms of the state. Representatives of scales below the state were now increasingly confronted with state structures that had backing from the international state system and thus privileged access to the world of commerce and arms.
Haile Selassie, first as a regent (1916-30) and then as emperor (1930-74)[35] continued and intensified many of the policies pursued by Menelik. In the attempt to internationalize the Ethiopian state, he was most successful after Mussolini’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia from 1936 until 1941.[36] The intervention of British military troops and their training of the new national army re-established and even increased his power that had been eroded by the occupation and the strategic alliances between the Italians and those excluded or disadvantaged under the rule of Haile Selassie. His return to power was followed by a political strategy that sought to capitalize on international support in order to retain and expand his domestic control. The polarizing logic of the Cold War in geopolitical considerations certainly facilitated this process. With the USSR supporting Somalia, the United States developed a “patron-client relationship” with Ethiopia (Lyons 1990, 169). In 1953 this relationship was formalized in a series of agreements, guaranteeing US military assistance and resulting in Ethiopia receiving more than $200 million in military and economic aid over a twenty-year period, in exchange for continued access to the US communications facilities at Kagnew.[37] By the end of the 1960s, the Ethiopian state received about 60 per cent of United States military aid for all of sub-Saharan Africa (Tareke 1991, 52).
IV.2 Centralization and Territorial Expansion
This embedment of the Ethiopian state in international relations enabled a greater control of different kinds of peripheries by the center (i.e. areas made peripheral relative to the center of the state). In the theoretical section I mentioned the importance of geographical features in the making of Ethiopian history. From a perspective of political economy, one is struck by something similar, namely the importance of land and the mechanisms of control over this land (and thus the people on it) as a central explanatory paradigm of Ethiopian history and society. Political centralization has surely been the most obvious feature of Ethiopia for the largest part of the twentieth century, but this can only be understood by relating it to the question of control over land.[38]
To understand the situation in southern Ethiopia, one has to grasp the social and material relations active in the Abyssinian heartlands, since these were later partially transplanted onto the newly conquered Oromo and non-Oromo inhabited peripheries. The question of land-ownership was central to the situation in the north and part of an earlier debate among academics about the usefulness of the feudal paradigm for explaining Ethiopia.[39] In principle – and this speaks against the feudal paradigm – it was the peasantry that owned the land. Not only did they own the land, in most cases they even had direct access to the associated means of production, which in plough-cultivating Abyssinia usually meant access to oxen. These rights were called rist and were hereditary in an ambilineal way. In other words, both the father and the mother could pass them on to their children. Although this could be seen as a sign of gender equality, in practice this ambiguity in inheritance opened up the question of land-ownership to politics, since it regularly led to one side of the family pressing claims against the other. These claims were dealt with in peasant corporations, but the communal character of these organizations should not be overestimated, since it was here that the land-question was integrated into a hierarchy that was focused towards the Emperor and the central state. Ellis has described this integration as following: “In order for one descent group – or for an individual – to press land claims against another, or for two claimants to resolve a conflict, it was necessary to appeal to the judiciary; and the judge was, of course, the gult holder. In such circumstances, it is understandable that there were a number of ‘honorary’ members of the descent group who were allocated lands” (1976, 281). The privilege of gult – which indicated a granting away of “sovereignty” (Donham 1986, 9) – was handed out by the central state and in effect constructed a military-administrative structure on top of the rist system.
This was the major difference between the Abyssinian mechanisms of control over land and the European era of feudalism. Whereas in Europe a small elite owned the land, forcing the majority of the population into a situation between slavery and wage labor (and into the growing cities), in Abyssinia the peasants controlled the land, leading to another form of domination by the elites. The gult-system provided one way of governing a large territory without actually having direct access to the land. The central state carved up all the land in gult estates and distributed these areas among loyal actors. In return for this favor, the gult holder could enjoy judicial rights over the subjects inside his territory, collect tribute from the peasants working the land and maintain a private army for his own security as well as for the center. In contrast to the system of rist, gult privileges were not hereditary. The monarchical center could and did take gult privileges away in order to give them to other, more loyal actors. This increased the power of the center and divided the actors agitating at scales below the state, creating a highly individualistic society with numerous attempts at personal advancement. Ironically, this hierarchical patron-client structure was also the main impetus behind the pervasive idea of social mobility that has been observed by many commentators.[40] In principle, everyone could become part of the nobility and receive a gult by showing deference to the Emperor. Crummey has used the metaphor of the pyramid to explain these processes: “Strongly hierarchical, Abyssinian society was not rigidly stratified in the sense that one social layer was sharply marked off from its neighbours. Quite the reverse. The bonds of patron-client relations were close; class relations were fluid. Abyssinians perceived their society as mobile” (1980, 137). At the same time, in the core areas a status quo between the peasants and the nobles seems to have developed, with the peasantry accepting a certain surplus-extraction in return for security and as protection against further exploitation by those directly working for the Emperor. This in turn enabled the nobility to claim gult lands as hereditary and a rejection of this by the Emperor would often cause rebellions by peasants that saw their relative security threatened. In other words, the granting away of sovereignty in the form of gult tended to create relatively autonomous bases of power below the scale of the state. Donham has argued that this situation provided one major internal dynamic leading to territorial expansionism. With the core areas of the state increasingly in the hands of actors acting below the scale of the state, an Emperor that wanted to stay in charge had to enlarge his empire and offer new gult grants on these new lands (1986, 13-17).
The rule of Menelik II and the territorial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century was, however, surely supported by the political-economic possibilities created by the larger, international context. With most of the northern regional rulers of the time occupied with the expansionist activities of the Europeans and Egyptians at the coastal area since the 1870s, Menelik – whose own region of Shewa was far enough from the coast to be relatively safe – could increase his own power relative to other regional competitors. Not war, but trade was to be the solution in dealing with the Europeans and Egyptians. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 offered major possibilities for Menelik, since he could now directly export the products he appropriated from the areas south of the Abyssinian highlands (Tareke 1991, 39-40).
The territorial expansion connected to this international trade created a situation, in which the highly diverse southern areas were connected to the center through various means. In a simplified way, one can distinguish three different kinds of linkages: semi-independent enclaves, gebbar-areas and fringe peripheries.[41]
Rulers of the semi-independent enclaves retained a certain amount of local power and were connected to the central state through the practice of tributes. In the case of the Oromo, the kingdom of Jimma that has been described by Lewis (1965) belongs to this category. These enclaves were, however, increasingly incorporated into the mechanisms of the Ethiopian state, reducing them to the status of gebbar-areas (gebbar is Amharic for peasant). With the return of Haile Selassie and the bureaucratic reforms of 1941, these areas were made part of the regularized territorial administration.
The second linkage involved a partial transplantation of the northern system of rist and gult on southern societies. The principle of control was the same as in the north, but whereas in the north it had been established as part of a centuries-long struggle between peasants and nobility, in the south it was largely imposed on people in the highland-areas suitable for sedentary production and surplus extraction during the rule of Menelik. As part of this territorial expansion gult grants were given to the northern nobility and soldiers, the so-called neftennya (Amharic for riflemen), who conquered and settled in these areas. Whereas in the northern core this system was stabilized through the ambilineal system of kinship and the idea of social mobility that tied both nobility and peasants together, in the south this stability had to be created in different ways. First, military force underlay the territorial expansion and the later system of extraction. The neftennya were located in fortified towns in strategic areas, from where the southern peripheries were further penetrated and the land was divided among the state, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the balabbat. Besides the military, the balabbat were the second pillar of stabilization. This term, which in Amharic literally means “he who has a father” (Haji 1994, 587), referred in the north to a local notable that occupied a position between the governor and the peasantry. In principle, this was the function they fulfilled in the south as well.[42] Local men of standing were incorporated into the mechanisms of the state through the distribution of gult grants, which gave them the privilege to take tribute from the peasants working the land. In return for this privilege, balabbat fulfilled the function of intermediaries between the northern settlers and the southern peasants, doing work that ranged from translation to the allocation of gebbar to plots owned by the nobility.
The third kind of linkage was established with the lowlands areas that were not suitable for sedentary cultivation and were inhabited by pastoralists. In these areas, balabbat were appointed, but their work was usually limited to demanding a fixed tax on cattle and, in the early twentieth century, the raiding for slaves. In these areas, the existence of an international border with Sudan, Kenya and Somalia paradoxically presented a distinct advantage for pastoralists, since it could be crossed in times of exploitation by Ethiopian officials and used as a temporary refuge. The Boran Oromo that are nowadays seen by many Oromo nationalists as “the cradle of Oromo civilization” belong to this third category of linkage with the Ethiopian state.