War and the politics of identity in Ethiopia: the making of enemies and allies in the Horn of Africa, by Kjetil Tronvoll, Oxford, James Currey, 2009, 256 pp., £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781847016126
The nexus of war and state building is a staple theme in Western historiography. Succinctly put by Charles Tilly, the scholar credited with its formulation, ‘war made the state, and the state made war’ (1985, p. 183). That is because waging war requires resources, and extracting them requires organisation and institutions which promote power centralisation and state making. This analysis of state formation refers to the early modern history of Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because state building in that region is linked to the onset of modernity and technological progress, particularly in warfare, this concept has not been tested in Africa. Warfare in precolonial Africa has not shed the ‘primitive’ label stamped on it by colonial historiography. It is not simply crude technology and artless tactics that define it so. It is also the absence of wider strategies and broader aims allegedly lacking in precolonial warfare in Africa, and the implication that it seldom served grand political designs or stimulated social change. While fascinated with the colourful ritual and religious symbolism that attended ‘tribal warfare’, historians found the rest of it meaningless: ‘African war was seen as less the mother of invention than an ongoing process of wanton destruction’ brought to an end by colonialism (Reid 2007, p. 2). This generalisation is challenged recently by Richard Reid in a study of warfare in precolonial eastern Africa – the Great Lakes region and the Ethiopian Plateau – which concludes that warfare there had similar motives and objectives as elsewhere, and that ‘war facilitated social, political, cultural and economic innovation, as well as causing great suffering’ (2007, p. 235). State building at the time did not involve nation building because the concept did not exist then. Later, when the nation state became the universal model, it involved a far more complex and difficult building process that not many modern states have managed to complete successfully.
Tronvoll's study is a variation on the theme of war and nation-state building. It strives to ascertain the impact of war on people's self-perception, their national identity and loyalty to the state; neither of which is unambiguous or can be taken for granted in many countries, and especially so in Ethiopia. Ethiopia's history conforms closely to the notion of war as the midwife in the birth of states. Dating back to the thirteenth century, Ethiopia's royal chronicles record the martial achievements of its rulers, and more recently ‘there was no time at which the empire as a whole could have been said to be at peace’ (Clapham 2000, p. 5). These were not ‘tribal skirmishes’, but involved large, well-equipped armies. In the Battle of Adwa (1896) the Ethiopians mustered a force of more than 100,000 to annihilate an Italian invading force of some 20,000. To field an army of this size required a degree of organisation and tactical sophistication which, in this instance at least, out performed a European force sent to colonise Ethiopia.
Ethiopia at the time was in the midst of its own expansion which turned the legendary Christian kingdom known as Abyssinia into a veritable empire. Not a victim but a participant in the imperialist ‘scramble for Africa’, Ethiopia doubled its territory and population, and thereafter proudly styled itself the ‘Ethiopian Empire’. The title is not a misnomer, since Ethiopia's rulers exploited their new possessions in more or less the same way as other imperial powers have done. Subsequently Ethiopia fought a series of wars against African and European rivals to preserve its independence and territorial integrity, and in the process forged a state that is by far the most powerful in the Horn of Africa. In the heyday of African nationalism during the second half of the twentieth century, Ethiopia's rulers sought to reinforce its foundations with cultural homogeneity and a distinct national identity for its vastly heterogeneous population. Unsurprisingly, the model they chose was the Abyssinian cultural tradition and the policy pursued sought the assimilation of the rest. This met with stiff resistance within and outside the state's borders, from ethnic groups incorporated in the imperial expansion, and from neighbouring states with their own rival nation-state building projects.
The response of Ethiopia's rulers was twofold. Resort to force, the initial instinctive reaction, led to a steady growth of the military and its gradual autonomy from political authority, until finally the soldiers took over the running of the state. A parallel search went on for a formula that would give the state legitimacy and secure the loyalty of its subjects, and at the same time define a national identity broadly enough to represent a heterogeneous population. After an aborted attempt at ‘Abyssinianisation’, resort was had to socialism and more recently to cultural pluralism and federalism. None of these addressed the fundamental political issue that continues to galvanise resistance, which is the assumed exclusive right of the ruling elite to govern the state and unilaterally plot the course leading to national integration.
The war referred to in this study is the second round in a bloody conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea that dates back half a century. Beginning in 1998, this round came to a halt in 2001 with a ceasefire that left the rival armies glaring at each other across a narrow buffer zone occupied to this day by UN peacekeeping troops. Tronvoll sets out to test the common assumption that war galvanises peoples' national consciousness and reinforces their loyalty to the embattled state, using this incident as the prism that reflects war's diverse impact on the politics of identity and attitude towards the state. Predictably, given the convoluted nature of politics in this country, the pattern that emerges is exceedingly complex, reflecting, as one would expect, every political split and grievance that has accumulated over recent times. Out of this murky water the author, who was able to carry out research in the area during the conflict, draws conclusions. One is that war, while it may impact positively on national solidarity, also creates fragmentation, division and distinctions which dilute national solidarity. This is not solely due to the complex nature of existing social relationships, but also due to the reshaping of these relationships by the war itself. This is a valid point and one worth making.
The reshaping process provides the entry point for actors striving to manipulate feelings stirred by war for their own ends, with incumbent regimes at the forefront. The thick cloud of mendacious official propaganda that rose from both sides in this conflict effectively concealed its causes, leaving nonplussed observers to label it ‘senseless’. Tronvoll rejects this ‘simplification’, believing ‘the war made sense to the holders of power in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and to many people participating in it’ (p. 7). Obviously the criteria that ‘made sense’ are different at the two levels, and this difference is reflected in the regimes' own spin and the way people perceived the war and their involvement in it. People's perception is formulated and framed within the boundaries of their particular identity, and given the multiplicity of identities, people's reactions are highly diverse. Whether such divergence renders the war ‘sensible’ is a moot issue. Much ink has been spilled searching for the objective causes of the conflict. This book is about consequences rather than causes; even so the author cannot avoid giving his own reading of it. Casting aside notions of clashing identities and loyalties, he perceives the war as the latest incident in ‘a long chain of conflicts and wars fought by the Abyssinian elite as part of their constant internal state power struggle’ (p. 203). The impact of the war on the politics of identity in Eritrea is not part of this study. However, in his own reading of the conflict's essence, the author seems to attribute identical motives to ruling elites on both sides.