Page 16 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Introduction
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in its travel through Europe.” The French nation-state emerged as a world model; it
radically broke away from the old regime and took all necessary steps to build the new
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state. The French people initiated the French Revolution in 1789 to change their po-
litical status from subjects of the monarch to citizens of the French nation, and to trans-
fer sovereignty from the French monarchy to the French nation.As a result, the French
people or nation theoretically became the source of all sovereignty and introduced to
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the world the principles of national self-determination and popular sovereignty. The
Constituent Assembly that came to power as the result of the French Revolution de-
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clared that “The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.”
Since then the struggle for democracy,national self-determination,and popular sov-
ereignty have become recognized as the important political principles in the modern
world system. Practically, however, the European capitalist class and the nation-state in-
tensified the process of class, racial/ethnonational, and gender oppression and colonial
expansion. Class oppression, racial/ethnonational stratification, and colonialism led to
the emergence of the two types of what the world system theorists call anti-systemic
movements:social movements and national movements.“The social movement defined
the oppression as that of employers over wage earners, the bourgeoisie over the prole-
tariat. . . .The national movement, on the other hand, defined the oppression as that of
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one ethnonational group over another.” State nationalism and bourgeois democracy
conceal the contradictions that exist among the citizens of the nation-state.The con-
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cept of common citizenship glosses over the real existing contradictions between the
ideological claim of equality of citizens and the vast material differences that are struc-
tured into socioeconomic conditions of distinct social forces within the nation-state.As
we will see, the cases of African Americans in the United States and Oromos in the
Ethiopian empire demonstrate clearly these contradictions.
African Americans and Oromos were in effect denied a basic aspect of their hu-
manity when they were forced to enter into the global capitalist system via slavery and
colonialism. Some African warlords, as slavers and colonizers, fully participated as
agents of European imperialism in enslaving and colonizing these two peoples. Euro-
peans and their African collaborators were involved in enslaving the ancestors of
African Americans and in colonizing and enslaving Oromos:“With a human cargo to
dispose of, the native chief was ready to negotiate with the trader. Generally the lat-
ter began by offering presents to the king—hats and bunches of beads.” 33 Some
African chiefs, warlords, and kings captured, enslaved, and exchanged some Africans
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for European goods with White slave merchants. Similarly, Abyssinian or Ethiopian
warlords and England, France, and Italy collaborated in creating the Ethiopian empire
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and colonizing and enslaving Oromos and other peoples. The capitalist world sys-
tem through colonial expansion brought the collaborative classes under its control di-
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rectly or indirectly. Just as African Americans were enslaved and shipped to America
by the joined forces of African and European slave hunters and merchants, Oromos
were enslaved and colonized by the combined forces of Ethiopians (Amharas-
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Tigrayans) and European colonialists.
Several scholars have persuasively developed the idea that the capitalist colonial
powers used their superior military force and collaborators to colonize directly or in-
directly precapitalist societies to exploit their labor power and economic resources
through genocide or ethnocide, looting, enslavement, piracy, and annexation; this was
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the way the original accumulation of capital occurred on a world scale. There have
been two global historical waves in the modern world system: The first wave was