Page 156 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Beyond Nationalism
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town meetings. If Oromos start to believe that the internal structure of the Oromo
population determines whether they can use available political opportunities,they will
take collective action to determine their destiny as people. Particularly, Oromos in the
diaspora must start to overcome their infrastructure and organizational shortcomings
by effectively mobilizing resources such as members, communication networks, lead-
ers, money, skills and knowledge, information, and friends.
In this era of globalization, Oromos need to build an effective national organiza-
tion that can mobilize resources and use the media and communication technologies
to effectively attract members and friends, discredit enemies, and influence the public
through framing new meanings, ideologies, and programs and packaging and dissem-
inating them. Since the Oromo struggle is the Oromo national project, every Oromo
must take action through macro-, meso-, and micro mobilization. At the same time,
Oromo liberation organizations must continue to build alliances with other colonized
ethnonations and oppressed groups and classes that are determined to create a revolu-
tionary multicultural democracy.
Nationalism is a transitory social process that emerges to solve certain problems of
an oppressed or colonized society. Oppressed nationalism as an ideology plays a lim-
ited purpose by helping the efforts of cultural reclamation and liberation struggle.
Once cultural reclamation and national liberation are achieved, nationalism proves it-
self to be inadequate and “neglects the integration of that earned and achieved con-
sciousness of self within ‘the rendez-vous of victory.’” 49 In The Wretched of the Earth,
Frantz Fanon explains the pitfalls of national consciousness and the failure of post-
colonial societies to transform nationalism into true liberation, and recommends the
necessity of transforming nationalism into “social consciousness” while overthrowing
colonial domination. In his words: “National consciousness, instead of being the all-
embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people,instead of being
the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in
any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have
been. . . .We shall see that such retrograde steps with all weaknesses and serious dan-
gers that they entail are the historical result of the incapacity of the national middle
class to rationalize popular action, that is to say their incapacity to see into the reasons
for that action.” 50
Nationalism is revolutionary when it fosters all forms of social consciousness to dis-
mantle race-, class-, and gender-based oppressive social relationships.The struggles of
oppressed people, groups, and classes have a foundation of revolutionary democratic
multiculturalism:“The ferment in minority, subaltern, feminist, and postcolonial con-
sciousness has resulted in so many salutary achievements in the curricula and theoret-
ical approach to the study of the humanities as quite literally to have produced a
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Copernican revolution in all traditional fields of inquiry.” With the intensification of
globalization and the development of communication technologies, cultural borrow-
ing and integration will increase. Since collective identities are socially and culturally
constructed, depending on structural conditions and human actions, progressive inte-
gration is inevitable among all humanities.Asmarom Legesse states that “every culture
has something vital to offer. Man’s [and woman’s] wider cultural identities must be al-
lowed to grow, not by the predatory expansion of one civilization but by the com-
plementary integration of many diverse cultures. No human community, however
humble, should be forced to give up its cultural identity without making a critical
contribution to the larger reality of which it becomes a part.” 52 In precapitalist and