The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization

5. Interactive State Formation in the Horn of Africa

85 5 Interactive State Formation in the Horn of Africa INTRODUCTION In the first part of this work I tried to trace the evolution of the nationstate and its presumed midwife, the principle of internal self-determination (popular sovereignty) and external self-determination. Self-determination was originally conceived as a vehicle through which the people coalesce to constitute the nation that exercises sovereignty over the state whose power over a clearly defined territory is presumed unchallengeable both from within and without the designated geographical space. Numerous forms of convergence supposedly characterize the nation-state resulting from this neat correspondence between people, nation, state, territory, and sovereignty. In particular, the nation-state is premised on the congruence of the political, cultural, linguistic, and economic and physical security community. Achieving the above match and the attendant congruence has proven problematic in the African reality, thus forcing people , nation, and popular sovereignty to live under the shadow of the state, territory, and external sovereignty.Although this is the gravest consequence of the mismatch between the relevant categories, problems persisted even where a better fit gradually evolved. Some social sectors found themselves within the state territory but outside the cultural and linguistic nation due to their peculiar racial, cultural, or linguistic markers. Property ownership and gender often served as the pretexts for excluding even bona fide members of the national/linguistic community from the politically empowered citizen category. Progress has been registered in stemming this exclusion in the nation-state’s birthplace of Western Europe through the extension of universal suffrage and other political rights. The predicament of those who found themselves within the state territory but outside the cultural/linguistic nation, however, has proved more enduring.This has necessitated recognizing nations without states and their right to autonomous existence within the constraints of prevailing interdependence within states, regions, and the world. How both the state and self-determination are being rearticulated to deal with these issues was the topic of Part i. In Part ii, I will attempt to explore the circumstances that brought the states of the Horn of Africa into existence and how this impacted on their legitimacy. The legitimacy of many African states is deficient, as has been so aptly elucidated by Okafor (2000).Okafor traces the legitimacy crisis currently afflicting African states to political developments that go back to pre-colonial and colonial times, and that persist into the post-colonial era. His observation that European colonial subordination of African peoples was facilitated by the pursuit of the same aspirations by African empire-builders rings particularly true for the Horn, with one particular difference. Unlike other failed attempts in the rest of Africa, Abyssinia’s empire-building aspiration was successfully consummated, thus bringing forth the contemporary Ethiopian state. And this peculiar success resulted from the process of the imperial ambitions of a number of European powers and of other local Africans cancelling each other out. Even more remarkable, the events that brought the Ethiopian state into existence and led to its international recognition proceeded in a mutually interactive manner with the processes that resulted in the formation of the other Horn entities. The legitimacy crises of the concerned Horn states went on to manifest themselves in the almost ubiquitous invocation of self-determination. And the Ethiopian Empire is the central actor in the tensions and contests between and within states that have become the hallmark of the Horn region. This resonance of diverse forms of conflicts, their historical roots, and the central role of Ethiopia are explained in the following manner by Partick Gilkes: “There is a long history of state formation and con- flict within the Horn of Africa, largely though not exclusively, centred upon what is now the polity of Ethiopia: ethnicity, religion and control of resources have been at issue within a highly complex region” (1999: 4). The Sudan (the other major Horn state) has also been the scene of interminable conflict involving ethnicity, religion, and control of resources. Somalia was set on the course that ultimately led to the chaos currently reigning there when its irredentist hopes of absorbing almost half of the Ethiopian Empire started dimming.Once this outward orientation was eclipsed by internal self-examination, the supposed homogeneity of Somali society was found significantly deficient in sustaining cohesion. The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland 86 86 In the following pages I will try to...