The Problematic of Democratizing a Multi-cultural Society: The Ethiopian Experience

This paper argues that the practice of experimenting ethnic federalism has neither been easy nor appears to succeed. It argues that it seems to have created more problems than it set to solve partly because of the hegemonic aspiration of the ruling elite, and partly because of the tensions in the attempt to implement both collective rights, which is the moving spirit of competing ethnic nationalisms in the country as well as the individual rights of citizens, which are basic to the now universally accepted liberal version of democracy. The central objerctive of this paper is to identify the major pitfalls in the on-going experiment at the democratization of Ethiopia’s multi-cultural society so as to suggest possible ways of creating a political structure that can accommodate both groups of rights in a more developmentalist way.