Bashing Liberalism: Can “Revolutionary Democracy” be Democratic without Espousing Liberalism?

Yosyas Kifleyesus yosyas.kifleyesus@gmail.com May 16, 2010

I have been following the recent debates in the run up to the 2010 elections in Ethiopia. It is sad to observe that most, if not all, opposition politicians seem to be unable to defend “liberalism” from the ideological attacks of EPRDF politicians. Their inability was most visible when Lidetu Ayalew, the usually witty and gifted orator, could not respond well to Bereket Simon’s characterization of the EDP’s (and other opposition parties’) views on liberalism as an invitation to western domination. What is even more saddening is that the EPRDF and its acolytes including one Adal Isaw attack liberalism as a recipe for disaster in the Ethiopian context.(http://aigaforum.com/articles/revolutionary_demo_view.htm#_ftnref2)

The attack on liberalism is based on confusing two terms: liberalism and neo-liberalism. I do not think that the EPRDF or its supporters unaware of the distinction between these two terms. Adal Isaw’s piece on Aigaforum.com clearly shows that he is aware of the historical and philosophical roots of liberalism as his references to Hobbes and Locke testify. The simple explanation of the confusion is thus that there is a deliberate attempt to befuddle the debate and push an agenda that the EPRDF is not comfortable to pursue publicly.

So what is the difference between liberalism and neo-liberalism? Liberalism is a political ideology based on the belief that the power of the state should be limited by some inviolable rights of individuals. Its roots, as Adal Isaw noted, go back to the Enlightenment in Europe. Its immediate precursors were the religious conflicts and persecutions of minorities in European countries. True, one of the fundamental rights that many liberal thinkers including J.S. Mill thought as fundamental in curbing the powers of the state is the right to property. What exactly constitutes this right, however, is a matter of political discourse, and legal definition. The more fundamental rights that are at the core of liberalism are the rights to life, to liberty, to freedom of belief and expression, and to have an effective participation in the political process. These rights have formed the basis for internationally recognized rights under several international treaties that EPRDF-led Ethiopia has signed. They are also rights that take more than one third of the FDRE Constitution.

Through time, and the progression of democratic political thought, liberalism has come to characterize the political organization of states not only in Europe and North America, but also in Africa (South Africa, and Botswana to just cite two), Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile etc), and Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India and others). Liberalism is closely related to capitalism. There is, however, no single capitalism in the world. Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia are strongly socialist oriented. Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, as well as most West European states are welfare statists with deep roots in social democratic thought. So also is Canada. In South Korea, and Taiwan,(countries that the EPRDF holds up as its models) the economy is characterized by the strong presence of and direction by the state.

Neo-liberalism, on the other hand, is a designation that has come to characterize the set of micro-economic prescriptions that political regimes in the United States and the United Kingdom (the Reagan and Thatcher administrations) as well as the World Bank and other powerful agents of international development adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. It is composed of a relatively simple set of prescriptions: privatization of the economy, deregulation of the market, and downsizing of the public sector. In other words, governments have to sell state owned enterprises. They have to let the market determine the price of goods and services including essential utilities. They have also to reduce government spending on social services and shrink the size of government agencies by, among others, reducing the number of people employed by government agencies.

The most explicit formulations of neo-liberal prescriptions were the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s and 1990s. Following the realization that these programs had largely failed, the World Bank and other international development agencies have adopted the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper process. Ethiopia under the EPRDF had not only carried out these neoliberal reform programs, but in fact had benefitted from them. It may appear a long time ago, but it was after the EPRDF came to power that many state owned public enterprises were sold (often at suboptimal prices).

The EPRDF had also shrunk the size of the public sector through dismantling several public agencies known at the time as Corporations. The most notable of these, of course, was the Agricultural Marketing Corporation (in its Amharic abbreviation E-Se-Ge-D). Many also remember the time of 20/45 when many public employees had to leave their employment if they had twenty years of service or were above 45 years of age. Since 1997, Ethiopia has also been in the process of carrying out the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers through its adoption of the Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper and the Program for Accelerated and Sustained Poverty Eradication and Development Program (PASDEP). Because of these programs that are designed in consultation with and carried out with the blessing and support of the World Bank and the IMF, the archdeacons of global neo-liberalism, Ethiopia has benefitted from a huge infusion of foreign aid.

It is also interesting to note the claimed resistance of the EPRDF to neo-liberalism. The cases cited as exhibiting the EPRDF’s resistance in this respect are its refusal to privatize land, the banking sector, and the telecommunications sector. While the most preferred position of the World Bank and other proponents of neo-liberalism is that of total privatization and deregulation of the economy, the specific ways in which they propose these measures differ from country to country. In the case of land, their prescription is not that land should necessarily be privatized. Even in the United States, where the Federal Government owns thirty per cent of all land (and that does not include land owned by states and cities), land is not fully privately owned. The demand made on the EPRDF and resisted by it was for security of holding by land users, and transparency and regularity in the administration of land (such as in its leasing). It is these demands that the EPRDF has generally managed to resist. I am not quite sure if the result of its resistance is something that it can be proud of.

With regard to banking and insurance, the EPRDF has managed to resist the demand to open the market for foreign banks. Truth be told, however, whether the EPRDF has succeeded because of its inherent strength or because of the traditional lack of interest by foreign banks to work in a country where the market is extremely limited, the investment environment is fragile, and there are no colonial historical ties, is open to examination.

The resistance of the EPRDF to allow foreign capital to be involved in utilities and telecommunications may be a case of success. Yet, what leads to this success needs closer examination.Furthermore, whether the country’s economy has benefitted from the exclusion of foreign investment in the sectors (especially in the telecommunications sector) is something open to question.

Even in these cases, however, the neo-liberal demand has been more on separating the regulatory power of the state from its role as a market competitor. In other words, what the advocates of neo-liberalism demand is that the state should have agencies to make rules about how utilities and telecommunication as well as banking businesses should be carried out, and other agencies operating on market principles to actually carry out these businesses. Through the establishment of the Ethiopian Telecommunication Agency, and strengthening the supervisory powers of the Ethiopian National Bank, the EPRDF has complied with this requirement.

Whether the allegedly market led pubic companies such as the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation, are really working on purely market considerations is doubtful. I am saying “doubtful” not only because of the apparent inefficiency of these firms, but more significantly, because of the almost rampant corruption within these agencies that the EPRDF led government itself acknowledged on a number of occasions. Another requirement of the neoliberals is that the state should not subsidize the price of utilities like water and electricity. Through successive rate hikes, the EPRDF has been very compliant with these demands too, as anyone who pays for electricity, water or phone services in Ethiopia knows.

If the EPRDF’s practice is not fully antagonistic to the economic prescriptions of neo-liberalism, its recent rhetorical attacks on liberalism-cum-neo-liberalism cannot be anything but attacks on the political ideology of liberalism. What is being attacked is the view that the state should be constrained in its powers and should not be allowed to unduly violate the rights of individuals.

One line of argument that the EPRDF suggests is that there is a necessary contradiction between the rights of individuals that liberalism holds dear and the rights of groups, such as nations or other collectivities, to exercise their group rights. Unfortunately, this is also an attack line that opposition politicians seem to be unable to counter successfully at least in the context of the election debates. For the most part, the distinction between individual and collective rights is more worthy of academic discussion on political and legal philosophy. The simple truth is that no state that is not constrained by, and does not respect, the rights of individuals can truly claim to respect the rights of groups. Group rights (to language, to the collective expressions of traditions, cultures, and beliefs, as well as to exercise group self-determination) do not exist in the abstract. They find their expressions through concrete actions by individuals who exercise them.

The liberal protection of individual rights allows individuals to engage in activities that give effect to group rights. Note that liberal though arose because of the denial of groups to exercise their rights to freedom of religion. The right to hold and practice religion is a collective right of a religious group. It is given effect through the exercise of individual followers to practice their religion. In like manner, the right of an ethnic group to use its language and to develop its culture is a group right that can only have meaning and effect when individual members of the ethnic group have the full right to use their language and to engage in cultural activities. No group right can be respected by denying the rights of individuals. What constrain a state from denying the rights of groups including the rights of ethnic groups, is limits on its abilities from denying the rights of individuals – in other words the limits demanded by liberalism.

There may be cases where individual rights and collective or group rights come into conflict. A person’s exercise of his religion’s demand to behead those who do not agree with his beliefs or denying the rights of religious minorities to practice their religion within societies with different dominant religions can be cited as example.

The recent controversy about wearing the Burqa in France is an example. But these are exceptional cases, and liberal societies, from Canada to South Africa, from the United Kingdom to India, have found ways of accommodating them. The more common case is illiberal regimes that violate both individual and through them group rights. The prohibition of the use of languages other than Amharic in schools in pre-1991 Ethiopia is an example that is closer to home. As further illustrations of the equivalence of denials of group and individual rights, one can cite Eritrea’s persecution of minority religious groups, China’s repression of Tibet, Sadam Hussien’s persecution of the Kurds, Iran’s repression of the Baha’i, and hundreds of other denials of group rights by regimes antithetical to liberalism and at the forefront of violations of individual rights.

History teaches us that attacks on liberalism and individual rights are usually harbingers of human suffering on a massive scale deliberately inflicted by repressive regimes. From Stalinist Russia to Nazi Germany, from Maoist China to Pinochet’s Chile, from Apartheid South Africa to Mengistu’s Ethiopia, from Eritrea to Rwanda, millions of individuals have been sacrificed for the sake of an abstract collective. You can give that abstract collective any name: in Russia and China it was “communism”. In Chile, it was the “communist threat.” In Nazi Germany, it was the “Superiority of the Aryan Race.” In South Africa, it was the “protecting white culture.” In Rwanda, it was the “Hutu Fatherland”.

In Mengistu’s Ethiopia, it was “the Revolutionary Motherland.” In an Orwellian turn of phrases, in Eritrea, it is called “NETSANET.” There is one thing that is common to all of these and similar other costly follies by dictators. It is the desire, in Adal Isaw’s words, “to empower people more than … to empower the individual [and the belief that] the rights of an individual should not at all tramp the collective rights of a people.” Is this why EPRDF’s attack on liberalism?