Page 18 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Introduction
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skirmishes of worldwide struggles of movements of national liberation against Eu-
rope’s world political hegemony, which had been based on the latter’s temporary tech-
49
nological advantages and deep-rooted racism.” The second global historical wave
was characterized mainly by territorial nationalism and ethnonationalism that opposed
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direct colonial domination. Global historical evidence demonstrates that nationalism
has been the leading political ideology in guiding the political and cultural actions of
a territorially or culturally defined human group that sees its common destiny as a
people or a “nation.” The struggles for democracy, national self-determination, and
popular sovereignty emerged in opposition to political absolutism and colonialism on
the global level.This understanding is necessary to clearly comprehend the principles
for which the struggles of African Americans and Oromos developed.The inability of
the nation-state to solve the contradictions among competing nationalisms within its
geopolitical boundaries facilitated the proliferation of nationalisms.
The nation-state mainly serves the interests of the dominant classes and racial/eth-
nonational groups whose members occupy key positions in the structures of the state
machinery and political economy. For those ethnonations that do not have access to
state power and major institutions within a given country or an empire,states have be-
come instruments of oppression,exploitation,cultural destruction,and continued sub-
jugation.As we will see in the following three chapters, the U.S. government until the
1960s and the Ethiopian government until the present have played these destructive
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roles against African Americans and Oromos respectively. Although the racial caste
system was legally dismantled in the United States in the 1960s, the Black majority is
still in poverty because of the past historical and structural discrimination and current
institutional racism. With regard to the Oromo, as demonstrated in chapter III, the
United States as the hegemonic power has played a key role in maintaining Ethiopian
settler colonialism and the subordination of the Oromo between the 1950s and the
1970s and from 1991 to present.The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics also played
a key role in maintaining the Ethiopian empire during the 1970s and 1980s by ally-
ing with the Ethiopian military government. Today, the ideological or biological
grandchildren of the Ethiopian warlords have become “pimps” for the West and at-
tempt to destroy the Oromo and their national movement. 52
Anchored on social stratification and connected to others through the imperial in-
terstate system, the nation-state has become the basic unit of modern political orga-
nization. However, with the intensification of globalization and proliferation of
ethnonationalisms, 53 the future of the nation-state is not yet clear. Global capitalism
has constantly introduced new technology, communication systems, organizational
techniques, and economies of scale that have been based on industrialization, ex-
change, and a global division of labor.This division of labor has been racialized or eth-
nicized. As the dominant ethnonational groups have used the creation of racial
national categories to exploit colonized ethnonational groups, the subjugated eth-
nonations have used reform or/and revolutionary nationalism to challenge this racism
and oppressor nationalism. Capitalism introduced globalism, racism, and nationalism. 54
It facilitated the centralization of political power and the development of a political
vision that Anthony Smith calls “the national idea,” saying,“No other vision has set its
stamp so thoroughly on the map of the world, and on our sense of identity.We are
identified first and foremost with our ‘nation.’ Our lives are regulated, for the most
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part, by the national state in which we are born.” But Smith does not take into ac-
count the racial/ethnonational, class, and gender stratification and oppressions that