Institutionalising the right to self-determination as a human right solution to problems of ethnic conflict in Africa: the case of Ethiopia and South Africa
Written under the supervision of Prof. Michelo Hansungule at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, Centre for Human Rights
Ethiopia's “Leap in the Dark”: Federalism and Self-Determination in the New constitution
Benjamin Disraeli took a calculated “leap in the dark” in 1867, when he extended the right to vote to almost all British men. With hindsight, his leap can be seen to have been a necessary (but not sufficient) means of defusing discontent and promoting democratization. Ethiopia seems poised for an even bigger constitutional leap into a murkier realm, into an ethnicized attempt at democratization. To gain acceptance, a new constitution like Ethiopia's must seem to be all things to all people and, in Ethiopia and elsewhere, the end of the Cold War has seen an explosion of ethnic nationalisms similar to the one occurring in Europe late in the 19th century. Without benefit of hindsight one can only make informed guesses about the effects of a new Ethiopian “constitutionalism” on events which are largely beyond the drafters’ control. I will argue that there are grounds for a guarded optimism over Ethiopia's leap.
The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century
The explosion of national emotions in Eastern Europe in the last few years has demanded a serious re-evaluation of the historic clash between Marxism and nationalism. The Soviet system claimed to have resolved the national question, and now the questions of the day would seem to involve why the Soviet system failed to resolve the national question, and why so many people have been fooled into believing that it had. There is a lot of fuel for future research. Leonas Sabaliunas's study of Lithuanian social democracy demonstrates that even in the years of Soviet stagnation scholars in the west were examining aspects of the question of nationalism and Marxism. Scholars with a centrist orientation to Moscow tended to dismiss such particularism, but in the new era of Soviet life, the character of the national movements has gained new importance for comprehending Moscow's problems. Sabaliunas's topic concerned socialism in a particularly complicated region with conflicting traditions—Polish culture, Jewish socialism, and an emerging Lithuanian national consciousness, all fermenting under a Russian administration. According to the author, the national question would seem to have been more important than class, and the Lithuanian Social Democrats who refused to join Bolshevik ranks eventually ran afoul of their own contradictions in advocating class conflict and class conciliation at the same time. The fundamental tension in social democracy in Lithuania lay in the problem of defining a cultural, ethnic, and economic entity. Marxism anticipated the existence of one workers' movement representing all toilers in a territorial unit, but how was one to define that unit? Lenin defined it as the Russian Empire, others claimed smaller territorial identities, and the Lithuanians, and the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP) considered Lithuania just such a distinct entity. They held that workers of all nationalities—Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian—should accept the leadership of the LSDP, but leaders of those other groups had their own territorial identifications. Such is the meat of Sabaliunas's work. The work includes statistical evaluation of LSDP publications, strike action, and organizational development. Although the work was mainly done in the period of stagnation in the Soviet Union, the author apparently even had access to some party materials in Vilnius. In the" light of the struggle for control of the Institute of Party History in 1990 and 1991, one has to worry about the safety of the materials for future scholars.