In what follows I am going to argue that ethnicity, nationalism and the values, which mediate them, are all contingent, and not essences. Modern Ethiopian politics, in these turbulent times of the affirmation of sovereignty will be examined from the standpoint of contingency and against essences.

Nothing in this world is forever. This is the motto of the philosophy of contingency.

Values are highly appraised organizing principles by which humans orient themselves to the world. Ethnicity, nationalism, sovereignty, Truth, compassion, care, difference are kinds of values, which enable individuals to make sense of their preferences and choices. Through these values individuals in all cultural systems make sense of their experience. Although all cultures consider values as organizing principles of their everyday lives, not all cultures share the same values. Values have a uniting and disuniting force. Ethnicity, for example, I argued in two Concepts of Ethnicity is positive when it unites people and is negative when it divides people.

As is well known Badme has now fully divided the Ethiopian and Eritrean people in a way that may take long time to heal. Of course, Hegel is right when he observed that time is a great healer, and that there is no wound that time could not heal. I wonder if this a timeless truth. I can only hope that the philosopher is right, infact, I am desperate that he is right.

Be that as it may, let me return to the issue at hand. Badme and the profound questions of sovereignty that it has raised has left a rift in the Ethiopian mind. Ethiopians and Eritreans of all colors fully resent themselves now, and the rift is being anchored on essences, as I understand the term. Think for a moment how contingency as opposed to essence can frame the meanings of the rift. For now anything that rings Eritrean is an anathema to almost all Ethiopians, as if Eritreans and Ethiopians have not eaten, mourned, laughed, worked and fought together in the past. After all, Eritrea was once part of Ethiopia. Essence did not play a pivotal role then. Eritreans spoke fluent Amharic, lived among their brothers and sisters in different parts of Ethiopia. They were not told then that their Eritrean essence did not qualify them to make Ethiopia their beloved home. It was only after independence that they were given an Eritrean essence. That was an old vocabulary of framing a new identity.

In Contingency Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty, originates the name, “ Final vocabulary” to capture the group of words which individuals use to refer to the myriad ways by which they rationalize their beliefs and actions. Final vocabulary is precisely what both classical and modern Ethiopians have been using to justify the contingently originated idea of Ethiopianity. I have already addressed these issues in a series of articles published by the Ethiopian Reporter.

The raging debate over the heated question of Badme is also justified by Final vocabulary, which by definition is not static but dynamic, not essential but contingent and necessary. The sovereignty of modern Ethiopia, under a radically ordered idea of Ethiopianity can easily create a new Final vocabulary to appeal to thinking Ethiopians and Eritreans to patch up the unnecessary war over symbolic territories, and together develop a final vocabulary which would help both nations to create a new identity blended with their Pan-African heritage which could empower them to stop relying on foreign aid, thereby stigmatizing their States, as states of beggars and sickly bodies. None of these remarks are meant to belittle the importance of boarders and the rewriting of histories intended at justifying the importance of Badme to Ethiopia. I am very respectful of the impressive array of good historical and legal research that Ethiopian scholars are producing. My point is not overthrowing these documents but rather attempting to underscore their importance with a new final vocabulary, the vocabulary of what I called in a recent article “ Thinking from the standpoint of contingency.”

The new final vocabulary is that ethnicity, nationalism, and sovereignty are contingent. These phrases are nothing more than necessary truths for now. They fuel hate and sediment resentment. When we think clearly and distinctly however, othing about these flamboyant phrases is ultimately essential, but practically necessary, necessary only because the formation of States and nations requires the contingent ideas of an ethnic belonging, a national identity, and a sovereign foundation, to justify their fragile foundation.

Belonging to a group, identifying with a nation, and founding both, on sovereignty are therapeutic. All people need these pillars to distinguish themselves from others. When necessary individual risk their lives for the sake of contingent tools of nationalism, a convenient tool for leaders to divide people and rule. It is an old trick, reinvented at the end of every century, when the ruled become vigilant to their material conditions and they refuse to be bamboozooled by the tools of ruling, justified as essential. What matters to enlightened people are their dignity, their material condition, and not highly idealized abstractions of language such as ethnicity and nationalism. For politically enlightened people, life is concrete and not abstract, contingent and not essential, negotiable and not frozen.

Discourse, free of domination, and under the rubric of the sovereign imagination of dialogue should occupy the center stage of the final vocabulary. For years, Ethiopians have employed the instrumentality of war to settle differences and to protect the sovereignty of historic Ethiopia. This worked in Adwa, did not work with the Derg, had a limited impact in 1998 against Eritrea, although most analysts think that this incomplete war was unnecessary, since it achieved very little. So now what we need is a fine strategy that works through the power of thought and contingent strategies that would free Ethiopia and Eritrea from the menace of AIDS, terminal poverty, hate and contempt.

Discourse, yes Discourse, and more of it should guide our interactions with our brothers and sisters in Eritrea and beyond. The existential vacuum in both States requires a deliberate and effective methods of talking, working out differences, articulating fears and anxieties, before we submit ourselves to neo-colonialism of democratic interventions. Open your eyes to the situation in Iraq. Look at what happens to people who cannot put their own house in order. Others come to do it for them. The price is too heavy to pay.

Need we Ethiopians soon be the transitional sites of the UN?