Posted by Thomas L. Knapp

Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi died on Monday of an as-yet unspecified illness. Zenawi, writes the New York Times‘s Jeffrey Gettleman, “lifted his country from the ruins of civil war and transformed it into one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies and one of the United States government’s closest African allies.”
In reality, Zenawi, who ruled Ethiopia first as president and then as prime minister for more than 20 years, after leading the putatively Marxist-Leninist Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front to victory over the previous regime, was a premier example of the modern managerial statist.
The economic and political fusions he orchestrated in Ethiopia — between state socialism and multinational corporations the one hand, pan-Africanism and US client statism on the other — are the textbook case of a dying form (the Westphalian nation-state) jumping directly from semi-feudalism to complete political vapor lock at the expense of its people.