Water, national identities and hydropolitics in Egypt and Ethiopia

Abstract

Individual identities and national ideologies structured around water are intrinsic not only to religions in the Nile Basin but also to unfolding politics, although often in subtle ways. The very identities structured around water work at different levels – individual, national and regional in between states – sometimes overlapping but often contradicting, causing unity but also tension. Dams, large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and irrigation schemes consuming water may cause domestic conflicts, but also conflicts between states in a transboundary river basin. A central element in this constitutive process of collective identities in national ideologies is control and security, which are two fundamental aspects of autonomous state governance. Control of water is a powerful tool, which state leaders have used to mobilize collective identities of nations as well as shaping perceptions of other countries. A national ideology ideally unites all people in a country. According to Benedict Anderson, the nation can be seen as an imagined community or representing a deep, horizontal comradeship regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail, and this makes it possible for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for the nation or such imaginings (Anderson, 1993: 7). Water is not only the basis for all life, but also worth fighting for, and scenarios of water wars, particular in between Egypt and Ethiopia, have frequently been portrayed in the media fuelled by political rhetoric. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to address different and changing ideologies and collective identities shaping part of the unfolding hydropolitics. Politics, negotiations and agreements of water allocations are obviously about different needs and water as a physical resource, but it is more than just mere shares of water. Why certain arguments in discourses are presented as justifiable reasons legitimizing rights to water is founded in ideologies. In this context, rather than perceiving ideology in a Marxist sense as an illusion concealing means of exploitation, I will use a more collective and inclusive definition of ideology as ‘the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual’ relating directly to individual and national identities. Identities are constitutive in national ideologies in various but often contradicting ways; but collectiveidentities tend to be presented and understood more coherently and reductionist when describing one group or nation in relation to another. The Nile has throughout history linked Egypt and Ethiopia together. The long historical trajectories of collective identities structured around the Nile continue to shape national ideologies and hence hydropolitics in the region. In this chapter I will therefore focus on parts of Egypt’s and Ethiopia’s perceptions of water as a national identity in relation to each other. This will be done by first examining the more distant past and then the recent history, since conceptions of a shared identity, even shrouded in an unknown past, may have relevance without everyone in a culture or nation knowing all origins and mythologies shaping the different levels of collective identities.