The Political and Legal Fiction of Ethio-Eritrean Federation under God’s mandate of an Ethnocratic and Sacral Empire

The concepts of federalism and empire discussed in this article are in relation to the 1952-1962 Ethio-Eritrean federation. Eritrea is a pluralist state in the Horn of Africa where accommodation and celebration of diversity enabled the diverse ethnic and religious groups to coexist in peace and harmony for the most part of the pre-and-post-colonial eras. After the Second World War, however, the former Italian colony was forced to enter into political, ethnic, religious, and legal entanglements with the Ethiopian Empire which led to 30 years of war. This article examines the compatibility of federal arrangement with a centralist and sacral empire that envisioned a homogenous ethnolinguistic state and distinctively vertical and hierarchised duality between its center and its peripheries with no supreme constitution to limit the center’s power or protect a federal member state. A “godly anointed” Ethiopian emperor who is neither accountable to humans nor be questioned by human subjects had a misaligned interest, conflicting objectives, and incompatible ethnocritical ideology and “divine right” mythical belief devoid of ethnolinguistic, religious and political pluralism and political decentralisation that federal governance entails. Therefore, the author argues that it was not a genuine federation in a contemporary sense of federal governance that meets the standard of sovereign equality of autonomous state(s) under international law. The article comes to the conclusion that the UN-legislated federal arrangement was a legal ruse and political cul-de-sac with neither exit options nor guarantor(s) to uphold the integrity of the Federal Act if the centralist empire violates the UN Resolution and Eritrea’s autonomy. It was designed to mask the true intention of the initiative-forced annexation, integration, and assimilation of post-colonial Eritrea into a regional empire.