Page 142 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

CHAPTER VI
Beyond Nationalism:
The Challenges of a Genuine
Multicultural Democracy
his concluding chapter highlights the important lessons we can draw from the
experiences of the struggles of African Americans and Oromos, the role of op-
Tpressed nationalism and its limitations, and the necessity of a genuine multi-
cultural democracy to challenge and to solve the problem of the racialized/ethnicized
state and to promote peace and justice. It also addresses the issue of the appropriate
professional ethics that scholars need to embrace in order to establish a single standard
for humanity and to promote social justice, egalitarianism, and popular democracy.
This comparative study has utilized an analytical framework that draws from theo-
ries on nationalism, the world system, globalization, and social movements to critically
understand the dynamic relationship between global racist capitalist structures and so-
cietal agencies.As the experiences of African Americans and Oromos show, the strug-
gle to challenge and transform a racialized state is very complex and difficult. Social
changes in colonized societies and structural transformations in the capitalist world
system always facilitate the development of revolutionary forces.
We can better understand these changes by listening to the voices of the subjugated
population groups in the world. The experiences of African American and Oromo
movements demonstrate the long-term and large-scale consequences of the dialecti-
cal interplay between oppressive social structure and human agency.There were racist
capitalist social structural and conjunctural factors that led to colonialism, racial/eth-
nonational dictatorship, underdevelopment, poverty, and ultimately, the emergence
and development of national movements.“Human beings produce society,”Anthony Gid-
dens notes,“but they do so as historically located actors, and not under the conditions of their
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own choosing”[Giddens’ emphasis]. The current study addresses the attempts of the
subjugated oppressed human groups to change their subaltern positions within avail-
able political opportunities and the structural limitations of oppressive institutional
structures imposed upon them.
The African American movement reached its highest point in the 1960s and de-
clined due to institutional violence and the internal crisis of the movement. But these
setbacks came after it legally dismantled racial segregation. Its objectives of cultural
self-determination and the transformation of the African American community have
not yet been achieved or abandoned. However, the Oromo struggle is a movement in