Sovereignty Is Not Conditional: Obsessed Ethiopian Elites and the Abuse of History

By David Yeh

Introduction

Few ideas in the politics of the Horn of Africa are as reckless and as dangerous as the claim that a people’s right to exist can be nullified by another state’s geography and illusion to get sovereign access to the sea. Yet this is precisely what is asserted when Eritrea’s independence is framed as a mere tactic to deny Ethiopia a port, and Eritrean legitimacy is treated as something that would evaporate the moment Ethiopia acquires maritime access. This argument does more than distort history. It reduces sovereignty to a bargaining chip, converts geography into a moral hierarchy, and reintroduces a doctrine of conditional nationhood that international law was designed to abolish.

The historical record offers no support for such a claim. Ethiopia’s relationship to the Red Sea was never based on an assumed right to coastal sovereignty, nor was Eritrea created as an instrument of maritime exclusion. From the late nineteenth century onward, Ethiopian rulers pursued expansion primarily through inland conquest, often facilitated by European arms and diplomatic patronage. Their strategic interest in the coast was limited and instrumental, focused on securing access routes for weapons and slave trade rather than asserting territorial ownership. Menelik II himself explicitly requested that Ethiopia’s borders be drawn well inland from the Red Sea and far from the Indian Ocean, underscoring that capturing slaves and plundering their land mattered more than owning sea access. At the same time, Ethiopia actively solicited European intervention to displace Ottoman and Egyptian control of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, preferring imperial intermediaries to direct administration of the coast.

Eritrea, by contrast, emerged through a distinct colonial trajectory, shaped by Italian rule, separate legal and administrative institutions, and an evolving political identity that developed independently of Ethiopian sovereignty. Its subsequent struggle for independence was not a project engineered by Ethiopia’s adversaries, but a prolonged, mass-based movement grounded in self-determination, law, and popular consent. Eritrea did not come into being to deny Ethiopia anything; it came into being because a people asserted the right to decide their own political future and paid the full price for that choice.

To treat Eritrean nationhood as contingent on Ethiopia’s port access is therefore not only historically false, but normatively dangerous. It revives a logic in which borders are negotiable only when they constrain power, peoples exist only at the pleasure of delusional neighbors, and sovereignty becomes a revocable privilege rather than a legal right. Such thinking does not clarify the past. It destabilizes the present and risks reopening conflicts that international law exists to prevent, and the descendants of yesteryear’s slaves are going to be condemned to be minesweepers and cannon fodders.

Access Without Entitlement

The assertion that Eritrean independence exists primarily to deprive Ethiopia of a seaport, and that Eritrea’s national legitimacy would collapse if Ethiopia obtained sovereign maritime access, is both historically inaccurate and analytically unsound. From the outset of modern state formation, Menelik did not seek sovereignty over any portion of the Red Sea littoral, he did not think is was necessary. As long as he was allowed to import weapons and export slaves he was fine. Menelik II, often regarded as the architect of modern Ethiopia, explicitly requested that Ethiopia’s northern boundary be drawn approximately 60 kilometers inland from the Red Sea shortly after his victory at Adwa. This was not an isolated decision but part of a broader pattern in Menelik’s boundary negotiations.

In 1897, for example, Major Cesare Nerazzini, acting on behalf of Italy, received from Menelik a map delineating Ethiopia’s proposed southeastern frontier with Italian Somaliland. That boundary was drawn roughly 180 miles inland from the Indian Ocean, though the precise unit of measurement was never clarified and the map itself was not jointly archived or formally ratified. The understanding rested on a German cartographic source and remained deliberately imprecise. Elements of this arrangement were later referenced in the 1908 Italo-Ethiopian Convention, which confirmed Italy’s acceptance of the 1897 line northeast of the Shebelle River, while leaving unresolved the ambiguity surrounding the inland depth of the frontier.

These choices were not concessions imposed under duress, nor evidence of maritime dispossession. They reflected a consistent Ethiopian strategic posture that prioritized conquest of non Abyssinian land and people. Menelik was demanding tribute from conquered lands not gold or silver but slaves, which he sold to get more weapons. Ethiopia’s historical relationship to the sea was therefore one of access for these two “commodities” not a sovereign entitlement.

The Treaty of Wuchale of 1889 formally recognized Ethiopian sovereignty while Ethiopia accepted Italian control of the entire Red Sea coast extending inland toward the Eritrean highlands. The agreement regulated trade, customs administration, and Italy’s privileges of diplomatic representation, reflecting a negotiated framework of access rather than a claim to territorial possession. At no point did Ethiopia demand or assert sovereign ownership over the Red Sea coastline, even in minimal form. Maritime access was treated as a matter of treaty, and transit, not as an inherent territorial entitlement. To suggest otherwise is to project contemporary grievances onto a historical record that consistently points in the opposite direction and to misuse history to retroactively deny another people’s nationhood.

This distinction matters because it establishes the baseline: Ethiopia’s historical posture toward the sea was pragmatic and negotiated, not absolutist. Once this is understood, the claim that Eritrea was created to block Ethiopia collapses, and attention must shift to the actual forces that shaped the Red Sea coast.

Empire, Not Port Denial: The Colonial Formation of Eritrea

The creation of the Italian colony of Eritrea did not arise from a deliberate strategy to deny Ethiopia maritime access. It emerged from the broader context of nineteenth-century European imperial expansion along the Red Sea, driven by the opening of the Suez Canal, the logistical demands of steamship trade, and rivalry among European powers. Italy’s initial foothold was commercial, not military. In 1869, the Rubattino Shipping Company purchased Assab as a coaling station. Only later were these holdings transferred to the Italian state, and only then did Italy gradually expand inland.

This pattern reflects the standard sequence of the Scramble for Africa: private commercial entry followed by formal imperial annexation. There is no documentary evidence that the colony was conceived as a device to punish or contain Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s eventual landlocked condition was the consequence of imperial competition and strategic bargaining, not the outcome of a project aimed at negating Ethiopian sovereignty through Eritrean identity.

The occupation of Massawa in 1885 further undermines the port-denial thesis. Massawa was not seized from Ethiopia. For centuries, the Red Sea littoral had been embedded in Ottoman-linked imperial systems and, in the nineteenth century, administered by Egypt under Ottoman suzerainty. When Egyptian authority collapsed after defeats inland, Italy stepped into the vacuum with tacit European approval. This was a transfer of imperial authority, not an expropriation of Ethiopian territory. The formal proclamation of the Italian Colony of Eritrea in 1890 merely consolidated territories acquired incrementally through these processes.

Crucially, contemporary treaties confirm this nuanced relationship. The Hewett Treaty of 1884 with Emperor Yohannes IV and the Treaty of Wuchale of 1889 with Menelik II allowed Ethiopia transit through Massawa (Assab was not an established port by this time), including free passage of goods and arms. Ports along the Red Sea were historically administered within Ottoman, Egyptian, and local sultanate frameworks rather than by Abyssinian highland states. Attempts to retroactively impose Ethiopian sovereignty erase centuries of regional political geography.

Alongside Abiy Ahmed’s rhetoric about Ethiopia’s supposed entitlement to “two waters” the Nile and the Red Sea has emerged an equally misleading claim: that European powers once sought to annex western Ethiopian provinces in order to sever Ethiopia from the Nile. No credible historical record supports such a design. What does exist is well-documented postwar British advocacy for the Bevin–Sforza plan, which proposed partitioning Eritrea and attaching its western lowlands to Sudan, a proposal Ethiopia itself supported at the time. There was never a parallel plan to annex western Ethiopia into Sudan. Had Britain pursued such an objective, Ethiopia lacked the power to prevent it. The persistence of this narrative therefore serves a different purpose: not historical clarification, but the fabrication of grievance to mobilize the population around contemporary territorial ambitions, particularly claims to maritime access.

Conclusion

Eritrea’s independence rests on a distinct colonial experience, a separate administrative and legal trajectory, and a prolonged, mass-based struggle for self-determination. Contrary to the narrative advanced by Ethiopian leaders, the European powers so often labeled “Ethiopia’s enemies” did not midwife Eritrean independence; they resisted it. Until the final defeat of their Ethiopian client state in May 1991, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and their regional allies aligned consistently against Eritrean liberation. Eritrea prevailed not because of external sponsorship, but in spite of it. Its legitimacy was forged through the sacrifice of its people and anchored in internationally recognized principles of decolonization, law, and popular consent.

The current Ethiopian fixation on sovereign access to the sea has no foundation in history or law. It reflects instead the political desperation of a leadership seeking to compensate for domestic failure with external ambition. As living standards collapse, inflation soars, and public trust erodes, maritime fantasies are deployed as distraction, not strategy. Eritrea’s independence, however, is not contingent on Ethiopia’s internal crises or geopolitical aspirations. It is a settled historical and legal fact.

To conflate Ethiopia’s desire for access with Eritrean nationhood is to weaponize geography and invert sovereignty, transforming access into entitlement and power into permission over another people’s existence. Such reasoning does not illuminate the past; it falsifies it. Claims that Eritrean legitimacy dissolves once Ethiopia secures a port amount to a doctrine of conditional sovereignty that finds no support in international law, the UN Charter, or the founding principles of the African Union. They selectively challenge borders only where they constrain power and reduce entire peoples to expendable variables in strategic calculations.

History offers no evidence for this logic, and law provides it no shelter. Persisting in such narratives risks reviving old injustices, eroding hard-won legal norms, and reopening conflicts whose costs the Horn of Africa cannot afford. Eritrea’s independence is not a bargaining chip. It is an accomplished fact, secured by struggle, recognized by law, and beyond revision by political frustration or historical distortion.