Ethiopian development: The politics of emulation

Abstract Since the mid-nineteenth century, Ethiopian rulers have sought to ‘develop’ by emulating models from more developed but ostensibly comparable states. The first such model, imperial Russia, was followed by Japan, and after the Second World War by the United Kingdom and other Western states. The 1974 revolution led the new military regime to turn to the Soviet Union, which provided the most devotedly followed of Ethiopia's exemplars. Its overthrow in 1991 led not to a return to Western models, but to a revised Marxism distinguished especially by adherence to Stalin's theory of the ‘national question’. None of these models has ‘worked’. Several of them, indeed, became discredited in their countries of origin not long after their adoption in Ethiopia. The search for an ‘Ethiopian road to development’ remains unfulfilled.