Federalism

Federalism is a system of government in which power is divided between a national (federal) government and various state governments.   In the United States, the U.S. Constitution gives certain powers to the federal government, other powers to the state governments, and yet other powers to both.

States have their own legislative branch, executive branch, and judicial branch. The states are empowered to pass, enforce, and interpret laws, as long as they do not violate the Constitution.

The federal government determines foreign policy, with exclusive power to make treaties, declare war, and control imports and exports.  The federal government has the sole authority to print money.  Most governmental responsibilities, however, are shared by state and federal governments and these include taxation, business regulation, environmental protection, and civil rights.

Federalism in the United States has evolved quite a bit since it was first implemented in 1787. Two major kinds of federalism have dominated political theory. There is dual federalism, in which the federal and the state governments are co-equals.  Under this theory, there is a very large group of powers belonging to the states, and the federal government is limited to only those powers explicitly listed in the Constitution.  As such, the federal government has jurisdiction only to the extent of powers mentioned in the constitution.

Under the second theory of federalism known as cooperative federalism, the national, state, and local governments interact cooperatively and collectively to solve common problems. Cooperative federalism asserts that the national government is supreme over the states.

Regardless of the kind of federalism, the Constitution does provide some very specific powers to both the states and the federal government. 

They are:

  • Delegated Powers – Delegated powers are those powers specifically assigned to the Federal Government.  The national government has very specific enumerated powers including the regulation of interstate and international trade, coinage and currency, war, maintenance of armed forces, postal system, enforcement copyrights and power to enter into treaties.
  • Reserved Powers – In this case, all powers not specifically delegated to the Federal Government are to be reserved or saved for the State Governments. These powers include power to establish schools, establishment of local governments, and police powers.
  • Concurrent Powers – Concurrent means “at the same time.” Concurrent powers are those that both the federal and state governments share simultaneously, for example the power to tax, maintain courts and the ability to construct and maintain roads.
  • Implied Powers – These are powers that are NOT specifically delegated in the Constitution, but are understood to be necessary or allowed. The “necessary and proper clause” of the Constitution state that Congress has the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers” (art. I, sec. 8 of the US Constitution).
  • We Can’t Wish Away Federalism in Ethiopia – No Matter How Hard We Try (Tsegaye R Ararssa, January 2019)

    Posted by Ibsaa Gammadaa
     January,22, 2020

    Ethiopia’s multinational federalism has not been without its detractors. For years, we had debated this endlessly and, for a while, the detractors seemed to have come to terms with it because they had run out of ammunitions.

    In a more extensive piece, I will engage with the antifederalist moves resurrected by PM Abiy’s reckless and polarizing rhetoric (who, by the way, did not hesitate to characterize it as ‘racialiazed or racist, aka ዘረኛ federalism). But for now, it is important to point out some of the distortions in Mamdani’s piece.

    Apparently misinformed by his Ethiopianist (not to say Amhara supremacist) students at Makerere University, and partly manipulated into it by those who knew of his well know scepticism about ethnic-based distinctions between natives and non-natives elsewhere in Africa, Professor Mahmood Mamdani added his voice to the band of those who bash what he calls ‘ethnic Federalism in Ethiopia.’ As a view from a distance, its inaccuracies may be forgiven. But the distortions and bogus claims can’t.

    Mamdani deliberately uses the term ‘ethnic federalism’ to refer to Ethiopia’s federal arrangement showing his prejudgement about the system before analyzing whether it is so. In this, he only followed tack of the habesha commentators who used this phrase and several others ( eg., tribal [የጎሳ] federalism, racialized [የዘር] federalism, apartheid, balkanization project, Stalinist federation, etc, etc) more to justify the imperial and socialist pasts in which non-habesha peoples were conquered, subjugated, and exploited (and subsequently ‘given out’ to nafxannyas literally as salaries because they are viewed as useful chattels to work the land they were dispossessed of through conquests) than just to vilify the current dispensation.

    It is interesting to observe that, in contrast to Ethiopianist writers’ frequent but reckless use of the phrase “ethnic federalism,” the phrase actually does not occur anywhere in the text of the constitution, or anywhere in the Ethiopian public law regime in general.

    The Amharic equivalent for ‘nations, nationalities, and peoples’ is “ብሔር፣ ብሔረሰቦችና፣ ሕዝቦች”, a terkm roughly the same in meaning as its English version. In the constitution, in art 39(5), there is no difference in significance if any group is referred to by any of those three words (nations, nationalities, or peoples). (There was, of course, a difference in size and rights during the derg era. And many of the derg era folks, especially habesha supremacists, still make that distinction to deny some groups, especially in the South, the self-determination rights granted them by the constitution on account of being ‘nationalities,’ or peoples, as opposed to nations).

    Foreigners often use it recklessly either as a shorthand for the rather cumbersome ‘nations, nationalities, and peoples’ phrase or, at times, just to be lazy and uncritically follow tack of the habesha writers. Mamdani’s NY Times article is one such piece.

    More careful scholars (eg. Will Kymlicka, George Anderson, James Tully, Jan Erk, Alan Tarr, Robert Williams, Ronald Watts, Ferran Reqejo (who also uses ‘plurinational Federalism’), Michael Burgess, Thomas Fleiner, Lidja Basta Fleiner, Brendan O’Leary, and a host of others use the term ‘multinational federalism’. I myself use the same phrase although I also use ‘plurinational federalism’ in more sophisticated professional venues.

    For Amharic speakers who have sense in them, the proper term to use is ‘multinational federalism’. The amharic equivalent for multinational federalism is ሕብረ-ብሔራዊ ፌደራሊዝም. This is in perfect congruence with the (historical) fact that the federal dispensation was negotiated to solve what was characterized in the student movement of the 1960s as the “national question.” It took years, and a lot of consistent insistence on our part, for the generation (including those in the EPRDF leadership) to catch up with this phrase. It had almost become a word of mainstream use until Abiy came and started to make speeches that seek reversal of the rights of nations, especially that of the Oromo. (He is on record criticizing Oromo nationalism more than any of the other nationalisms in the country!) Naturally, the Amhara supremacists jumped onto his bandwagon of disparaging Oromo nationalism as tribal-local.

    And this is what we have now.

    Contrary to what Mamdani says, the trouble with Ethiopia is not ‘ethnic fderalism’ as Ethiopia’s federalism is not ethnic in the first place. (One needs only to look up the meaning of ethnicity in a dictionary to see that it is not!). The trouble with Ethiopia is not federalism (as, absent democratic consent, federalism is impossible to practice). The trouble with Ethiopia is not even ethnicity.

    The fundamental trouble with Ethiopia is the nature of its state that still operates on the basis of values that divides citizenship unevenly between the habesha core and the ‘heathen’ periphery, the ‘civilized’ semitic center and the ‘savage’ other, the imperial settlers of the garrison towns and the dispossessed and displaced indigenous groups.

    The problem with Ethiopia is the explicit (in the past) and tacit (in the present) ranked relationship that operates to differentiate between Ethiopians as citizens and subjects.

    The trouble with Ethiopia’s federalism is that it wasn’t yet federal enough as there was not the prerequisite democracy to make genuine federalism operational.

    In deed, the trouble with Ethiopia is not more, but less, federalism.

    Unlike Mamdani’s claim, the trouble with Ethiopia is not as much a flawed constitution as lack of democracy. The problem, in the eyes of many Ethiopians, is the failure of EPRDF to deliver on the promises of the constitution.

    It is no accident that all the recent resistance against the regime in the course of the #Oromoprotests and beyond, from corner to corner, were invoking and calling for the delivery of the constitutional promises. (This was the case in the Muslim’s quest for freedom of religion; the Oromo demand for self-rule, land, and equitable share in resources, opportunities, and power; the Qemant and Walqayit demand for recognition of identity; the Sidama and Agaw quest for autonomous statehood; the Konso quest for local self-rule; the Somali quest for equality and/or self-determination in Ethiopia, etc, etc.)

    Yes, there is a polarity among ethnic groups in Ethiopia today, but that is more because of the PM’s agitation to curtail and limit the rights of the nations, by wanting to reconfigure their territory, by seeking to revise the constitution which was the rallying point for their struggle so far. It is also because of his stalling of the much anticipated democratic transition by short-circuitiing it to an Amhara supremacist Ethiopian nationalism.

    Mamdani is wrong in saying that land rights are granted on the basis of ethnicity. Land is a state property currently being sold around by the government to displace farmers and give it over to (foreign and local) investors.

    Mamdani was also wrong in characterizing the resistance to the Master Plan as an ethnic resistance to civic citizenship. It was a resistance against forced evictions and displacement, a resistance against a strategy designed to push out and, working under the imperative of a typical settler colonial logic, to eliminate the Oromos (along with their language, identity, and culture) from their own country.

    Mamdani talks about inconsistencies of the “ethnic federal system” that created only nine states out of ninety ethnic groups. Precisely! If it was ethnic, how could this have happened? The problem is that you called it ‘ethnic’ and then failed to find it on the ground!

    And by the way, the two city administrations are not ‘city states’. Not by a long shot. Finfinnee was a city state between 1991 and 1994, but no more. Dirre-Dawa has never been a city state. In fact, constitutionally speaking, it has always been, and it still is, an Oromo city, illegally wrested from the latter by TPLF’s Abay Tsehaye who, ever since, have made a mess of the administration including through an illegal and unconstitutional Charter that projects the city as an autonomous city.

    No, there are no ethnic mobilizations for homeland today. There are only mobilizations for self-rule in their homeland, either as a separate state in the federation or as a unit of self-administering local government at the Zonal, Woreda, and/or Special Woreda levels.

    There are no disenfranchised groups anywhere in Ethiopia today. There are places, mostly urban sites, where settlers lived for decades (as part of the settler colonial legacy) or newcomers (as beneficiaries of freedom of movement recognized in the constitution) are concentrated. They have all the rights, often the more privileged rights, in their places of residence. They have full rights of voting, election, and right to property there. They often complain that they couldn’t run for office because of the legal requirement [which, incidentally, is now repealed since August 2019] that they should speak the local language. That’s as it should be because they can’t serve their constituency unless they can communicate the language of the people there. In stead of learning the language of the people in whose midst they live, these (often Amhara) residents seek to create an enclave of Amhara colony where they are the viceroys (for their Amhara region), and yet complain that they are discriminated on the basis of language, that their freedom of movement is limited, etc. Nothing is farther from the truth. (This is a peculiar phenomenon noticed in the garrison towns of Assalla, Gobba, Adoola, Shakkiso, Nagellee Borana, Dilla, Yirgalem, Hawasa, Harar, Adaama, numerous other towns of the Empire, and, now, in large parts of Benishangul-Gumuz, Gambella, and Afar.)

    Mamdani ends his piece by saying that the way forward is to change the constitution to abolish ‘ethnic federalism’ (the ethnic federalism that never was!) in order for the reform to succeed. First, he should have shown a rational (causal) link between the federalism and the stalled transition. Second, he should have shown what the alternative is and how that alternative helps facilitate the desired ‘reform’.

    The assumption is that Abiy is a reformist PM obstructed by the constitution. The truth is that Abiy is not a reformist. Yes, he was propelled to power by a resistance struggle (orchestrated by none other than Mamdani’s own former student Jawar Mohammed). However, Abiy ended up an opportunist that sabotaged the struggle for freedom by turning, for support, to reactionary right wing politics of imperial ‘nationalists’ that masquerade as Ethiopian nationalists. That’s why, in stead of working to facilitate democratic transition, PM Abiy is still dabbling in the platitudes of imperial politics of yesteryears, often pathologizing the people, if only to set the scene for his messianic delivery to come.

    And while we are at it, there are also those who think that the so-called border conflicts are caused by ‘ethnic federalism’ and that if we just stop to be federal, these conflicts will all go away.

    First, there is no causal link between the federalism practised (if at all) in Ethiopia and the current conflict. In fact, we all know that the border conflicts are TPLF’s proxy wars declared against Abiy and severely undermining federal self-rule and the federalist mode of managing intergovernmental relations. Poor Abiy is fantastically playing it into TPLF’S hands when he is routinely making antifederalist gestures. Secondly, any attempt to tamper with the constitutionally sanctioned multinational federalism is simply a recipe for disaster, even an endless civil war in Ethiopia.

    Given the fact that politics is the art of the possible, the more realistic–and the simpler–thing to do is to enhance the transition to democracy while also aggressively implementing the constitution thereby delivering on the promises of multinational federalism. To do this, first, demilitarize the politics. Then, form a consultative inter-party platform where to engage ALL parties on the directions, roadmaps, and modes of bringing about the democratization to come, i.e, conducting a credible, peaceful, competitive, free and fair election.

    The tinkering with the constitution, or the federalism therein, will come later.

    Else, if you want a quick route to civil war, tamper with federalism. And, granted, you shall see the abyss. And quickly!

    ************** 
    Federalism is a constitutional arrangement where at least two levels of government rule the same territory and people in a framework of shared rule and self-rule.1 The question of why a political community forms a federal state rather than a unitary one has been the subject of normative federal theory. One reason why political communities opt for federalism is that it gives them “the best of both worlds: the advantages of being a relatively small, homogeneous polity, along with the advantages of being part of a stronger, more secure larger state; while at the same time avoiding some of the worst disadvantages of being either too small or too large.”2 For example, while being part of a larger state could provide military security and economic prosperity, being part of a small one could enable effective democratic self-government. The “best of big, best of small” rationale explains the origin of federalism in the United States of America, which, in turn, has inspired many nations worldwide, including regional organizations such as the European Union, to follow a similar course or to incorporate some federalist principles and practices. With the emergence of new states after the Second World War (especially those associated with decolonization) and the Cold War, federalism has been used to accommodate ethnic, religious, linguistic, and racial diversity within states. Therefore, in addition to offering the “best of big, best of small” service to political communities, federalism has been mediating and managing diversity and pluralism within such societies.3 Ethiopia adopted federalism in 1995 primarily to hold together the ethnolinguistic groups it includes, of which there are more than 80. Although this was not the first time Ethiopia had resorted to federalism, the 1995 federal experiment is by far the most complex one, involving novel normative commitments and institutional configurations. The first Ethiopian experience with federalism was with Eritrea in the 1950s when the latter obtained its independence from Italy. After a decision by the United Nations General Assembly, a federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia was formed in 1952.4 From 1952-1962, Ethiopia was a federal state until the federation was dissolved to form a unitary one.5 The dissolution of this federation led to the Eritrean War of Liberation, which also inspired many other ethnic liberation movements, such as those of the Tigray, the Oromo, and the Somali. Beyond this formal experiment of federation, the empire of Ethiopia had operated under a federal logic that recognizes that the provinces have substantial power.6 However, with a rationale of modernization, Emperor Haile Selassie I dismantled the pre-existing regional powers of the Rases, or the governors of the provinces, by reconstructing feudalism in a way that enhanced the political power of the monarchy and his direct descendants.7 As such, the turn to federalism in 1995 to regulate the ethnic diversity of the Ethiopian state was a logical and necessary step in the right direction. The 1995 federal experiment, as David Turton has observed, is “both radical and pioneering.”8 It is radical because it restructured the Ethiopian state anew based on the principle of ethnic groups having self-determination. It is pioneering because “Ethiopia has gone further than any other African state, and further than ‘almost any other state worldwide’ in using ethnicity as its fundamental principle.”9 Ethiopia has established a federalism in line with ethnicity, dubbed ethnic federalism.”10 Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism is as contested today as it was when it was first established more than a quarter of a century ago. Ethiopian scholars, politicians, and the public hold different and sometimes contradictory views on the nature, operation, and usefulness of the federal system to the country.11 On the one hand, proponents of the federal system—mostly ethnonational political groups—claim that if Ethiopia is to continue as a unified nation, it must maintain its current federal structure, which is undergirded by ethnicity and the corporate conception of group rights.12 The argument states that the contemporary political problem in Ethiopia is not related to the ethnic character of the federal system but, instead, is connected to the lack of democracy and accountable government.13 For this group, what is needed is democratization and constitutionalism, not federal reform. On the other hand, opponents of the federal system—mostly pan-Ethiopian political groups—contend that if Ethiopia is to persist as a unified nation, it must change its ethnic-based federal system to a non-ethnic one that considers the individual the primary subject of the political order, as is the case in other liberal democratic states.14 For this group, ethnic federalism does not only intensify ethnic conflicts and tensions across the country, but it also erects some structural barriers to the practice of democracy and constitutionalism.15 Without federal reform, this group posits, it is difficult to establish and operate a democratic constitutional order in the country. The ethnic character of this federal system has dominated political debate and scholarly discussion about federalism in the country from its establishment to the present. Indeed, this is justified, as the normative innovations and institutional setups of the 1995 Constitution were shaped by the quest to address the issue of ethnicity and ethnic diversity. From the preamble to the basic principles of the Constitution, including the bill of rights and the structural parts of the Constitution, all the elements emphasize the primacy of ethnicity. Ethnicity animates the very foundation of the constitutional order, and the ethnic federal arrangement is just one manifestation of it.16 The exclusive focus on the ethnic aspect of Ethiopian federalism, however, ignores its other important and interesting aspects, which should have been included in the discourse regarding federalism. In this article, I argue that ethnic federalism, or as I call it here, “Ethiopian federalism,” is so much more than “ethnic federalism” and even more than federalism itself. Ethiopian federalism has four main faces, and indeed, federalism may have many faces across federal states. For example, J. R. Mallory identifies the five faces of Canadian federalism—the quasi- federalism of the Macdonald era, the classic, emergency, and co-operative federalism types, and, finally, double-image federalism—all of which characterize the different forms of Canadian federalism across different time periods.17 Similarly, Byron Dailey reveals the five faces of federalism the United States Supreme Court Justices adhere to in deciding major federalism cases.18 These faces of federalism in Canada and the United States sit within its broader domain and largely arise in its application. But the four faces of Ethiopian federalism I expound in this article extend beyond the contours of federalism and are mainly found in the constitutional text. By taking the Ethiopian Constitution and the political theory that underpins it seriously, this article explores and examines the four faces of Ethiopian federalism, which have thus far been systematically and comprehensively understudied and have different implications for the operation of a federal and democratic state and government. First, when we consider Ethiopian federalism while viewing ethnic groups as corporate entities, it is a federation of convenience, a potentially destructible and divisible federal union. Second, when we examine it within the context of power allocation between the tiers of government or from the vantage point of regional states, Ethiopian federalism is a centralized federation—closer to a unitary state. Third, when we observe it from the perspective of citizenship or individuals, Ethiopian federalism is a confederation. Fourth and finally, when we analyze it by assessing ethnic relations as collective entities, Ethiopian federalism has institutionalized an ethnocracy rather than a democracy. These four faces of Ethiopian federalism have brought about a novel political and constitutional experiment in the form of a “new state system” that has unitary, federal, confederal, and ethnocratic elements. In this article, I develop these four faces of Ethiopian federalism in their order and explain how each of them may affect the experimentation with federal democracy in the country.


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