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

Is the Ethiopian model really federal? Particularities and
ambiguities of the Ethiopian federation de jure
Throughout the transitional period, all the proclamations issued indicated that
the regions and their sub-units would be subordinate to the central government
and their ministries and agencies (Cohen 1995:160). Despite the transitional
charter’s stress on national self-determination, the regional power was
restricted and there were no definite signs showing whether the Ethiopian state
would be a decentralised, unitary system or a federation. But the constitution of
1994 removes this doubt. It clearly states that the government intends to leave
the unitary structure and go for as federal solution (Art.1). But as we have seen
above, there are several ambiguities and particularities in the Ethiopian federal
arrangements. This makes the conclusions on whether the Ethiopian federation
corresponds or conflicts with fundamental principles of federal theory and
practice of established federations more complicated than it might appear in the
first place. The right to secession, the granting of sovereignty to “nations,
nationalities and the people” instead of the member states, the lack of an
independent constitutional court and the strong executive are among the
factors contributing to this complexity.
The contradiction of regional power – meagre authority but the right
to secede
There is an apparent paradox in the Ethiopian federal arrangements, which has
been noted by several writers (Abbink 1997; Paul 2000; Brietzke 1995). On the
one hand, the nations, nationalities and peoples have been granted the right to
exit from the federation if certain conditions are fulfilled. This makes the
independence of the constituent units more extensive than in other federal
systems. On the other hand, the powers of the member states are relatively
meagre, and the regional governments remain dependent on the federal level to
be able to carry out their duties. As expressed by Brietzke, the constitution
“proposes few self-determination remedies, since nothing is specified as lying in
the gaps between secession, quite a narrow form of self-determination and a
limited cultural autonomy” (1995: 35).
Certain federal theorists, among them Duchacek, go as far as arguing that
the right to secession disqualifies a state as federal. It is argued that the right to
secession will gradually undermine citizens’ loyalty to the central government.
Moreover, when regions are free to leave the union, the political arrangement
between the centre and the states are more similar to a confederation without
strong sub-national control than a federation (Duchacek 1987: 207). The fact
that sovereignty in the Ethiopian federation is given to “nations, nationalities
and peoples” and not to clearly defined member states means that national
groups can secede not only from the federation, but also from each member
state. This is clearly a constitutional anomaly, and does not have any parallels
in other federal systems today. Whether the right to secession disqualifies
Ethiopia from being a federal system is a matter of opinion. If we look at other
federal states, there are some of them which have granted ethnic groups or

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regions extensive self-determination rights, but these are in most cases defined
outside the constitutional framework.
Multiethnic federations like Spain and Canada have chosen to give
concessions to ethnically based regions, but these concessions are basically
defined elsewhere than in the constitution. This has made the arrangements
more flexible and it has thus been possible to adopt them gradually to meet the
demands of the current political situation. A large change in the Canadian
political system, which took place when political forces in Québec sought to
secede from the Canadian federation, occurred outside of the formal
constitutional amending process. Parti Québecois governments asserted
Québec's right to declare itself to be a sovereign country if such a move were
approved in a referendum. The 1995 draft sovereignty bill was the legal
framework that would have been used to realise independence if the
government had won the referendum that year (Hechter 2000:196).
The Ethiopian constitution could be compared with the Spanish constitution
of 1978 (Brietzke 1995:37). Like Ethiopia, Spain has been facing the problems
of violent secession movements and an undemocratic past. In order to solve
these problems, the Spanish government wanted to introduce some forms of
regional autonomy, but chose not to define member states and state boundaries
in any fixed way or to grant the contentious regions the right to secession
through constitutional provisions (Colomer 1998). Instead, the so-called
“autonomous communities” gained gradually broader powers of self-
government, more than what is common in other federal states, through
bargaining between political parties in the regional and central governments.
Yet the most important powers, such as military and economic security are
reserved to the central government. The autonomous communities have been
granted different kinds of self-determination rights, all according to the
outcome of the bargaining. This asymmetry has some similarities to the
arrangements of the new Russian federation. In the first Russian federal treaty
of 1992, the various ethnorepublics were given the right to secede, which also
was a theoretically available option during the Soviet Union era, but this was
abandoned in a revised treaty of 1993. Instead, the federation entered a “post-
constitutional process” where the centre began to negotiate a series of bilateral
power sharing treaties with each ethnorepublic (Smith 2000: 350)
The Canadian, Spanish and Russian constitutions have thus chosen to
exclude the right of secession, but have in practice granted quite extensive
“remedies for self-determination” through various areas of self-government for
the constituent units. The Ethiopian federation has to a large extent chosen to
do the opposite: asserting the most extreme right to self-determination, the
right to secession, at the same time as the powers given to the regions in the
administration of daily affairs are quite scanty in a comparative perspective.
Land and natural resources in the member states, for instance, are administered
under federal law. The regional governments have to follow national standards
in the conduct of day-to-day affairs. This means in practice that the five-year
plans adopted by the EPRDF in the House of Peoples’ Representatives have to
be followed by the regional governments in every aspect of administration. The
regional revenue sources are few and insubstantial compared to those that are
left for the federal level, which means that the regional governments have to

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rely on grants and subsidies from the federal government to be able to carry
out their duties (Eshetu Chole 1994:8).