This, below, is a very interesting, and rather careful, economic analysis of the interaction between ethic/national diversity and developmental state by Tom Lavers.
Although economists often tend to be ahistorical in thinking through Ethiopia’s “national question,” the care and sensitivity with which Tom Lavers approached it was remarkable.
However, the fact that even he thinks ethnic federalism hasn’t worked for three decades—which apparently has become an unexamined received wisdom of late—is incorrect.
This is because: 1st) the federalism hasn’t been implemented. It was merely aspirational. In fact, the change Qeerroo was seeking during its protest (2014-2017) was a manifestation of the itching towards the implementation of the federal system. The mottos were mostly demanding the government to respect the constitution and the right of self-determination, political, economic, cultural, and linguistic; and
2nd) the persistence of the ethnic/national tension, often threatening the developmentalist imperative, was not because of federalism’s entrenchment of ethnic/national rationality. To the contrary, it was because, despite the formal declaration of ethno-national federalism, the “national question” did not find a resolution (there was no exercise of self-determination, not even undisputed free and fair election). In fact, ethnicity/nationalism persisted because the vestiges of imperial-structural domination and exploitation continued to sabotage the project of recognition (ie, ethno-national aspirations to self-determination) and of distribution (i.e, transformation of the exploitative economic arrangement into an equitable and redistributive one).
So, the solution, even now, is not to be sought in de-emphasising federalism (presumably to eradicate or minimise ethnic/national rationality) but rather in working towards its resolution by giving it its fullest expression in the form of self-determination. This alone will do away with the vestiges (and imperial legacies) of exploitative structures that continue to foment ethic/national conflict in such a way that the latter trumps the imperatives of economic redistribution.
After all, in the process of coming out of imperial domination and exploitation, nations don’t “live by bread alone.” The economic imperative doesn’t necessarily trump the political one. The economic kingdom cannot come before the political one.
https://youtu.be/kAAutm75iKY?si=5JvCuxWvagIi-xYA