"Ethiopia’s emergence as a regional hegemon is, of course, not inevitable.
World Bank economists, ambassadors, and NGOs fret over the stability of the
country’s financial system, the enduring poverty in rural areas, and the
discontent of millions of citizens who lack civil liberties.
Internationally, Ethiopia has contained conflict in South Sudan and Somalia
but has not been successful at resolving it—historical grievances against
Addis Ababa run deep in the region and this limits its capacity to act as a
neutral broker. Moreover, “no war, no peace” relations with Eritrea remain
the Ethiopian security establishment’s obsession, with the hawks offering
little beyond continued containment of what they call Africa’s “rogue
regime.” Ethiopia needs Eritrea’s ports to further boost its economic
transformation, yet Addis Ababa has no credible plan to either deal with a
predicted collapse of Eritrea (and the giant refugee flows this would
generate) or to spur reform from within"
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143664/harry-verhoeven/africas-next-hegemon?cid=rss-rss_xml-africas_next_hegemon-000000
Africa's Next Hegemon
Behind Ethiopia's Power Plays
By Harry Verhoeven
APRIL 12, 2015
In 1991, as the Cold War drew to an end, the only African country that had
never been colonized by European imperialists was but a pale reflection of
the Great Ethiopia that generations of the kingdom’s monarchs had pursued.
A million people lay dead following two decades of civil war. Secessionist
movements in the provinces clamored for self-determination. The economy was
in tatters, and another catastrophic famine loomed. The world came to
associate Ethiopia with images hoards of starving children, and the
country’s regional and domestic decline opened questions about its very
survival.
Nationalist historians trace the Ethiopian state’s roots to the second
millennium BCE. With the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba as
one of its founding myths, Ethiopia’s history has between entwined with the
development of the Abrahamic faiths: the Jewish presence in the Ethiopian
Highlands predates the destruction of the Temple; Ethiopian Orthodox
Christians claim that the Ark of the Covenant is located in Axum; and the
first Muslim *hijra*, or flight from Mecca to escape religious persecution,
was to Ethiopia. Mystical ancestry and military greatness provided
legitimacy to Ethiopia’s rulers for centuries as they controlled their
formidably diverse empire through a policy of violent internal assimilation
and external expansion.
But ideas of that greatness lay shattered as rebel soldiers from the
countryside marched on Addis Ababa in May 1991 and overthrew the (formerly
Soviet sponsored) dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The leftist
liberation movement promised a constitution that would give
self-determination to Ethiopia’s ninety-plus nations and nationalities and
address the political-economic inequities that had torn the country apart,
but observers were sceptical about the ability of the Horn of Africa’s once
mightiest empire to reconstitute itself. When the northeastern territory of
Eritrea voted for and got independence in 1993, it not only cut Ethiopia
off from the sea, but also risked triggering cascading claims for
self-rule.
A quarter-century on, though, the mood in Addis Ababa could not be more
changed. Between 2001 and 2012–13, Ethiopia’s economy grew more than seven
percent per year <
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2013/cr13308.pdf> on
average. It was the only African country to move at a pace comparable to
the East Asian tigers—and to do so without a hydrocarbons boom or a huge
mining sector. The economic miracle resulted in real pro-poor growth,
lifting millions of people out of the vicious cycle of poverty, hunger, and
poor health. While the country’s population soared from roughly 40 million
in the 1980s to nearly 100 million today, it achieved the 2000–15
Millennium Development Goals for child mortality and is likely to also meet
them for combating HIV/AIDS and rolling back malaria
<
http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ethiopia/overview>. Ethiopia is also
making giant strides tackling income volatility and illiteracy. And, with
sequential bumper harvests of Ethiopia’s staple crop, tef (a cereal similar
to millet), millions of smallholder farmers might well be able to escape
the productivity traps that historically have kept them in abject poverty.
[image: Ethiopian farmers collect wheat north of Addis Ababa, October 21,
2009.]
Ethiopian farmers collect wheat north of Addis Ababa, October 21, 2009. (Barry
Malone / Reuters)
Ethiopia’s economic resurgence has underwritten an ambitious state-building
project by the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
(EPRDF) that differs resoundingly from Washington Consensus recipes of
electoral democracy and laissez-faire economics. Ethiopia has become the
prime example of what my colleagues and I have termed “Africa’s illiberal
state-builders
<
http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/publications/working-paper-series/wp89-africas-illiberal-state-builders-2013.pdf>.”
In the aftermath of two decades of war, the EPRDF established a durable
political order that seeks autonomy from internal and external threats,
builds functional institutions, and establishes hegemonic control over the
political economy. The economy’s commanding heights are in the hands of
state-owned enterprises and business elites closely wedded to the EPRDF
project. In the last parliamentary election, the EPRDF and its allies
<
http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/publications/working-paper-series/wp89-africas-illiberal-state-builders-2013.pdf>
won
all but two of 547 available seats. The party is emphatically statist when
it comes to development, and it relies on a relatively narrow social base,
but its organization is extraordinary in political and coercive terms. The
latter is derived from decades of armed struggle and close cooperation with
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which advised the EPRDF in its drive to
recruit five million new members between 2005 and 2010 and has developed
deep party-to-party ties. There is no state in Africa where talk of a
“China Model” sounds more substantive than in Ethiopia under EPRDF rule.
With its domestic authority seemingly firmly consolidated, a decade ago,
the Ethiopian government re-embraced huge regional ambitions under Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012821115259626668.html>,
who governed Ethiopia from 1991 until his death in 2012. Central to this is
a vision of a Great Ethiopia “finally” fulfilling its historical destiny by
casting off the shackles of poverty to lead Africa: domestic and regional
ambitions were always closely entwined in the mind of the premier. On the
one hand, Meles understood that forging alliances and acquiring
international legitimacy would boost the Ethiopian economy and consolidate
ERPDF rule. On the other hand, he saw a domestically secure Ethiopia as
uniquely capable of ridding Africa of the epithet “the hopeless continent
<
http://www.economist.com/printedition/2000-05-13>.”
To fulfil his ambitions, the prime minister developed excellent relations
with a wide variety of partners, guided by the belief that depending too
closely on one set of friends would expose Ethiopia to their whims. And so
Meles struck up personal friendships with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Bill
Gates and Joseph Stiglitz. He also went on trips to study the South Korean
economic miracle, and debated the economics of big infrastructure with Hu
Jintao. He played the role of spokesman of the developing world with equal
verve, representing Africa at the G–20 and climate change summits, where he
denounced the inequities of the global political economy and the
marginalization of his continent. And as the EPRDF developed its
institutional ties with the CCP, Meles saw no contradiction with Addis
Ababa fulfilling the role of Washington’s regional “deputy sheriff” in the
Global War on Terror. Ethiopian diplomats, generals, and spooks have been
crucial U.S. allies in the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of
Aden. With U.S. officials fretting over the stability of old allies in
Egypt, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia’s reliability and effectiveness in
the war on terror is seen as vital.
[image: A boy stands in front of wind turbines at the Ashegoda Wind Farm
485 miles north of Addis Ababa, October 25, 2013.]
A boy stands in front of wind turbines at the Ashegoda Wind Farm 485 miles
north of Addis Ababa, October 25, 2013. (Kumerra Gemechu / Reuters)
Meles, his successor Hailemariam Desalegn, and the party’s powerful
politburo cast their vision of a Great Ethiopia in terms of benign regional
hegemony: What is good for Ethiopia is good for the Horn of Africa. And so,
growing Ethiopian clout is increasingly projected through the regional
organizations that Addis Ababa dominates. Its immediate security agenda for
the region focuses on conflict prevention (it deployed thousands of
Ethiopian UN peacekeepers
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012821115259626668.html> to
the Abyei border region between Sudan and South Sudan), conflict management
(hosting mediation efforts for the South Sudanese civil war), and combating
terrorism (continual military action against Somalia’s Al-Shabab). Its
longer-term strategy revolves around regional integration
<
http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/19482_0611bp_verhoeven.pdf>
through
energy and water infrastructure. The plan is to tie the region to Ethiopia
by exporting thousands of megawatts of electricity
<
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/2002/20120411.short>
generated
by dams on the Blue Nile and Ethiopian rivers.
This is a financially lucrative proposition for Ethiopia and its
energy-hungry neighbors, but above all, it would shift the regional balance
of power away from Nairobi, Khartoum, and Cairo to Addis Ababa. The
construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
<
http://grandmillenniumdam.net/> (GERD) in particular is an audacious bid
to reset power relations in the Nile Basin, with one mega-project. The dam
is Africa’s biggest infrastructural project; because of the sheer volume of
its reservoir, GERD will be singularly able to undermine the hydropolitical
status-quo that for decades gave Egypt such disproportionate weight in
regional politics. The EPRDF vision for regional integration is thus one of
economic interdependence, but very much on Ethiopia’s terms. The relative
gains of Ethiopia’s dam program are as important as the absolute gains
stressed in technocratic language of “benefit sharing.”
[image: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is welcomed by Ethiopian
Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.]
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is welcomed by Ethiopian Prime
Minister Hailemariam Desalegn at the Bole International Airport in
Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, March 23, 2015.(Tiksa Negeri / Reuters)
Take, for example, the heavily publicized “Nile Deal
<
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32016763>” of March 2015 between
Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan: the “Declaration of Principles
<
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/0/125941/Egypt/0/Full-text-of-Declaration-of-Principles-signed-by-E.aspx>”
includes an embryonic mechanism for dealing with water disputes and the
recognition that downstream countries such as Ethiopia have the right to
prioritize electricity generation. It is therefore a de facto admission by
Cairo’s General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that Ethiopia, and not Egypt, is now
the most influential state on the Nile. In other words, Ethiopia’s vision
of regional integration under emerging Ethiopian hegemony is increasingly
becoming a reality. African and Arab states alike (and Egypt in particular)
are fast recognizing that it is better to improve relations with Addis
Ababa now, than try to postpone it and be forced into cooperation in five
years’ time with an even stronger Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s emergence as a regional hegemon is, of course, not inevitable.
World Bank economists, ambassadors, and NGOs fret over the stability of the
country’s financial system, the enduring poverty in rural areas, and the
discontent of millions of citizens who lack civil liberties.
Internationally, Ethiopia has contained conflict in South Sudan and Somalia
but has not been successful at resolving it—historical grievances against
Addis Ababa
<
https://martinplaut.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/ethiopia-somalia-a-history-of-conflict/>
run
deep in the region and this limits its capacity to act as a neutral broker.
Moreover, “no war, no peace” relations with Eritrea remain the Ethiopian
security establishment’s obsession, with the hawks offering little beyond
continued containment of what they call Africa’s “rogue regime.” Ethiopia
needs Eritrea’s ports to further boost its economic transformation, yet
Addis Ababa has no credible plan to either deal with a predicted collapse
of Eritrea (and the giant refugee flows this would generate) or to spur
reform from within.
Ethiopia has come a long way since the dark days of a quarter-century ago.
Its resurgence, domestically and internationally, is unmistakable. Never
have so many Ethiopians had so much reason to be optimistic and confident
about the future. The Ethiopian vision of a Nile Basin where resources no
longer lead to zero-sum competition and violent (proxy) wars, but rather to
joint strategies to tackle poverty, unemployment, and climate change
deserves wide-ranging support. Simultaneously, however, Ethiopia’s rulers
know that they will face a long, uphill struggle to persuade their
neighbours of their good intentions: In a region where interdependence has
historically been considered a political liability as opposed to an
economic opportunity
<
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/african-government-politics-and-policy/water-civilisation-and-power-sudan-political-economy-military-islamist-state-building>,
Ethiopia’s strategy generates plenty of blowback. How successful the
country will prove in its mission will determine the sustainability of its
own resurgence and the future of the Horn of Africa.
Received on Tue Apr 14 2015 - 22:30:35 EDT