The Cost Of Ideological Self-Awareness: A Case Of Ethiopia’s Relations With The West

Since the demise of the military rule in 1991, the incumbent government of Ethiopia formulated home-grown policies and strategies to emancipate the country from the deep-rooted poverty. It is after critically evaluating the existing options of development routes that the country took this firm stand to effectively address the prevailing political, economic and social problems which its people were facing for ages.To that end, the country adapted a democratic developmental state model(DDSM) where both democracy and development are matters of life-and-death and failure to achieve either of them inevitably leads to a failure of both in the Ethiopian context. DDSM, which considers both democracy and development as matters of lifeand-death, is the only feasible way to save the nation from total collapse and failure for the country has been suffering from poverty and lack of democratic governance for ages.Since Ethiopia is a developing country that lacks, accumulated capital, matured business class, industrial base, trained man power, advanced technology, and developed infrastructure, Ethiopia’s DDSM demands active involvement of the state in the economy without which rapid and sustainable development is highly improbable. And this directly confronts with central pillars of liberal political economic order. Hence, the prime cause of the tension with the West crops up from this front, i.e the tension springs from the nature of Ethiopia’s DDSM.As Ethiopia is a diversified nation with 80 different ethnic groups with their respective history, culture, tradition, settlement patterns, language, and religious beliefs too, it constitutionally ensured equality of all ethnic groups, religions, languages and sexes as well. Likewise, individual human and democratic rights and freedoms are constitutionally guaranteed. The other source of tension between Ethiopia and the West, therefore, springs from the nature of Ethiopia’s democracy where it attaches equal weights and values to both individual and group rights while the West disregards group rights and freedoms.However, Ethiopia’s DDSM is not free of challenges though its success significantly outweighs its problems. Lack of good governance, lack of strong national consensus on developmental approach, chauvinism and destructive nationalism, and religious fundamentalism and extremism are the major challenges to Ethiopia’s DDSM.To sum up, the underlined factors that intensify the tension between Ethiopia and the West are of ideological in nature which the former preferred to incur short term pains so as to achieve its long term democratic and development dreams.