The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

Ethiopia . A loosely structured feudal empire until the 20th century, Ethiopia has also made repeated attempts to deal with the challenge of size and diversity. Ethiopia started directly confronting the problem of how to become a modern state after World War II. Emperor Haile Selassie tried to develop a formal bureaucratic administration, but it remained quite thin on the ground, never extending below the district level and leaving local communities to the authority of landlords and traditional authorities. Selassie also tried to develop a common Ethiopian identity and culture by making Amharic the language of instruction and government. In feudal style, he also tried to bridge domestic divides by carefully building a network of intercultural marriages for the royal family. It worked for a while, but after the emperor was deposed in 1974, the country started to fall apart. The new, Marxist-oriented military regime sought to set up a centralized, party-dominated system. The out- come was disastrous. The regime did not have the tools to control the political and economical systems it envis- aged. With the help of the Eritrean insurgents, ethnic liberation movements developed throughout the country. When the military regime was defeated by the Eritrean and Tigrean movements in 1991, Eritrea seceded, leaving the Tigrean insurgents to find a means to govern the divided country. The outcome was a bold experiment with ethnic nationalism. Ethiopia became a federation of ethnic states with a considerable level of autonomy. Following the example of the Soviet constitution, the Ethiopian constitution recognizes the right of nationali- ties to self-determination, even to the point of secession — and it remains to be seen whether such a right would be respected in practice any more than it was in the Soviet Union. The system is held together by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, a Tigrean-dominated amalgam of the ethnic parties of each region. The system has been successful in keeping together a country that in 1991 appeared headed for dis- integration, but unity in the country remains somewhat precarious. F O C U S M A Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31