Ethnic Federalism in a Dominant Party State: The Ethiopian Experience 1991-2000 Lovise Aalen r 2002: 2

Representation and the rule of law
As mentioned in the fourth point of King’s elaboration of his definition, there
have to be specific procedures for how regional representation can be altered.
In federations, regional autonomy and regional representation is
constitutionally guaranteed, which means that the central government has no
judicial right to abolish, amend or redefine territorial units and the constitution
cannot be changed without an extraordinary majority of the constituent units.
When the rule of law is so much emphasised, the way in which the constitution

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is interpreted is of great importance and those who interpret it should be
completely independent from political forces. Most federations rely therefore
on the courts to play the primary adjudicating role in interpreting the
constitution and adapting it to changing circumstances. One exception is the
Swiss federation, where the legislative referendum has the major adjudicating
role in defining the limits of federal jurisdiction (Watts 1998:126).
Constitutionalism and democracy
Federalism means according to the previous elaboration, a fully constitutional
government where citizens and regions are truly represented on the central level
of government. This implies that the government has to be subjected to the law
and committed to the principle of constitutionalism
8
, but does it necessarily
mean the Western, liberal democratic sense of emphasis on the law? Burgess
(1993a:6) argues that federations, in order to be genuine, cannot be a result of
force and coercion from above or sustained by the threat of military power.
King (1982) concludes in the same vein by stating that only those governments
that are subordinated to the law, and thereby practice democracy, are judged
as federations. The Soviet and Yugoslav federations should therefore not be
considered as genuine, because the unity of their ethno-regional parts was
maintained from above through coercion.
Other writers of federal theory have a more moderate view upon the
relationship between democracy and federations. Riker claims, as previously
mentioned, that the link between federalism and freedom and democracy is an
ideological fallacy. An implication of this argument is that one should not take
for granted the democratic credentials of Western liberal federations. Although
there is rule of law, representation of citizens and regions at the central level is
not necessarily efficient and true. Smith points out that it is important to
acknowledge that federal projects might take a variety of forms which cannot
be simply equated with late modern democracies: “To ignore this diversity is to
limit our understanding of federations and to impoverish comparative analysis,
let alone to ignore the fact that multi-ethnic policies whose democratic
credentials are suspect may be capable of moving on to experiment with more
democratic forms” (Smith 1995a: 8). When exploring the literature written on
federal systems, it is apparent that it is biased towards Western, liberal
democracies. The essential part of the literature is on Canada, Australia, United
States and more recently the European Union, Spain and the emerging
structures in the British Isles (de Villiers 1994; Burgess and Gagnon 1993).
Less attention has been paid to the federal systems in the non-Western world,
like those of Nigeria, India, South Africa and Ethiopia, although some of them
have been the basis for case studies in comparative volumes on federal systems
(Ghai 2000; Smith 1995). Federations are not stable and constant, but change
according to the shifting social, political and economic conditions of each
country. It is therefore of great importance to include a variety of states in
federal studies. A federation that initially has good democratic credentials
8
The term constitutionalism refers to the idea of limiting the powers of government. These
limits are in some sense self-imposed and are aiming at making the rulers accountable to the
law and preventing arbitrary actions (Elster and Slagstad 1988: 2-3).

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might develop more coercive sides, and a federation which has been through
autocratic periods might progress in a democratic direction. The Nigerian
federation is an example of this, which started off with a democratic
government but was soon overtaken by military rule, and after the fall of the
2
nd
republic democratically elected government was reinstalled. This underlines
also the importance of not only looking at the legalistic and institutional
aspects of federations, but the actual implementation of the systems, and how
they are affected by the particular political, economic and social conditions of
the respective countries.