By David Yeh
Empire, Geopolitics, and Resistance: This is a Critical Historical Study of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and International Power Politics (1936 – Present)
History does not usually announce injustice with a single dramatic moment; it reveals it through a sequence of decisions made elsewhere, in rooms far removed from the people whose lives they reshape. Eritrea’s modern history, from 1936 onward, is one such case. It is a story in which imperial ambition, great-power calculation, and Cold War strategy repeatedly collided with a small nation’s demand for self-determination. From the collapse of Abyssinia under Italian invasion, through postwar diplomatic bargaining over former colonies, to decades of Eritrean resistance, the fate of Eritrea was too often discussed as a strategic asset rather than as a people with political rights. Yet it was precisely this persistent marginalization that forged one of the most determined liberation movements of the twentieth century.
The crisis that set this trajectory in motion began in 1935–1936, when Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia with overwhelming force, employing aerial bombardment and chemical weapons in open violation of international law. As Italian troops closed in on Addis Ababa, Emperor Haile Selassie fled via Djibouti and Palestine, ultimately settling in Bath, England, leaving Abyssinia under Italian occupation. To many contemporaries, his departure appeared as abandonment; to the Emperor himself, it became the foundation of a diplomatic strategy. From exile, he sought not only restoration to the throne but also territorial expansion, above all, access to the Red Sea through Eritrea.
Between 1936 and 1941, Haile Selassie mounted an extensive lobbying campaign in Britain, cultivating support among politicians, activists, and intellectuals sympathetic to Abyssinian sovereignty. Figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst amplified his cause, presenting Ethiopia as a victim of fascist aggression while normalizing claims over Eritrean territory as historically justified or strategically necessary. These efforts coincided with British wartime interests, which increasingly viewed Ethiopia as a useful regional partner rather than Eritrea as a distinct political entity.
The end of World War II in 1945 transformed these ambitions into concrete diplomatic leverage. With Italy defeated, its African colonies: Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya, became subjects of intense negotiation among the Allied powers. At Yalta and Potsdam, the fate of these territories remained unresolved, but it was clear that Eritrea’s future would be shaped less by the wishes of its inhabitants than by Western concerns over Red Sea security, Middle Eastern stability, and the emerging Cold War. Eritrea was steadily reframed from a former colony entitled to self-determination into a strategic prize whose disposition could serve larger geopolitical ends.
A pivotal moment came on February 14, 1945, when Haile Selassie met President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The meeting, which followed Roosevelt’s encounter with King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, was part of a broader American effort to reorder the postwar world. Haile Selassie pressed his case for Ethiopian access to the sea and the incorporation of Eritrea. Roosevelt offered no explicit commitment, but the encounter elevated Ethiopia’s international standing at a time when British officials were already inclined to support Ethiopian territorial claims. In this context, Eritrean aspirations for independence were eclipsed by American priorities—oil security, regional stability, and the containment of rival powers.
From 1946 to 1952, the struggle over Eritrea intensified. Britain, administering Eritrea under military occupation, floated a series of proposals driven by strategic convenience rather than historical or democratic logic. The most notorious was the 1946 Bevin Plan, which called for partitioning Eritrea between Ethiopia and Sudan, granting Ethiopia the highlands and southern coastline it coveted. Notably, Haile Selassie did not insist on annexing all of Eritrea; his primary interest lay precisely in those regions that would secure Red Sea access and geopolitical leverage.
Meanwhile, inside Eritrea, political life flourished despite foreign administration. Civic movements and political parties, including the Eritrean Muslim League, the Liberal Progressive Party, the Independence Bloc, and organized trade unions, mobilized across religious and social lines to demand full independence. Their arguments were clear, coherent, and rooted in international law. Yet time and again, Eritrean voices were sidelined in favor of British strategic calculations and Ethiopian ambitions. What followed was not a failure of information but a deliberate choice: self-determination was acknowledged in principle, then sacrificed in practice.
This early period, from Italian invasion to postwar diplomacy, set the pattern that would define Eritrea’s modern history. External powers treated Eritrea as negotiable territory; Eritreans responded by transforming political exclusion into organized resistance. The long road from 1936 to independence was not an accident of history but the cumulative result of decisions made over Eritrea without Eritrea. That legacy explains both the ferocity of the liberation struggle that followed and the uncompromising insistence on sovereignty that continues to shape Eritrea’s politics today.
After years of delay and contention, the United Nations finally turned to the question of Eritrea’s political future. In 1950, a UN Commission of Inquiry was dispatched to Eritrea to assess local opinion. The commission documented a wide spectrum of views among Eritreans but failed to translate those findings into a coherent or representative recommendation; its final report was itself deeply divided. Pakistan and Guatemala argued for full independence, Norway advocated outright annexation by Ethiopia, while Burma and the Union of South Africa proposed a compromise solution.
Rather than pursuing decolonization in line with its own charter, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 390 A(V) in 1950, imposing a federation between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Implemented in 1952, the arrangement granted Eritrea nominal autonomy, including its own parliament, constitution, and internal administration. In practice, however, the federal system was undermined from the start. Emperor Haile Selassie moved systematically to hollow out Eritrean self-rule, curtailing parliamentary authority, banning political parties, suppressing local languages, imposing Amharic in administration and schools, removing Eritrean symbols and flags, and co-opting religious leaders to legitimize annexation.
In 1962, in open violation of the UN-mandated federal arrangement, Haile Selassie unilaterally dissolved the federation and annexed Eritrea as the 14th province of the Ethiopian empire. The act extinguished the last vestiges of Eritrean autonomy and transformed political grievance into mass resistance, setting the stage for the armed struggle that soon followed.
The Eritrean struggle for independence (1961–1991) stands as one of the most consequential nationalist movements of the twentieth century, but it did not begin with the first shots of war. Its foundations were laid in the decade preceding armed resistance, through a broad-based civic awakening shaped by labor activism, student protest, and political repression.
Following the UN-imposed federation with Ethiopia in 1952, widely viewed by Eritreans as a denial of their clearly expressed preference for independence, popular resistance emerged almost immediately. British and American diplomatic cables from Asmara at the time acknowledged that Eritrean public opinion favored independence by a wide margin. As the federal arrangement was steadily dismantled by Emperor Haile Selassie, Eritrean workers and students became the most visible carriers of nationalist opposition. The late 1950s were marked by coordinated labor actions, most notably the workers’ strikes of 1958, and by frequent student demonstrations in Asmara and other urban centers explicitly calling for independence. These protests were met with arrests, imprisonment, torture, and killings. Far from suppressing dissent, repression politicized a generation and pushed nationalism underground.
Out of this climate emerged the Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELM) in 1958, a clandestine organization that linked workers, students, and professionals in the cities with rural networks and articulated independence as the only viable political future. The ELM provided critical organizational and ideological groundwork, and by 1960 this momentum crystallized in the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). In 1961, under the leadership of Hamid Idris Awate, the struggle entered its armed phase, marking the transition from protest to protracted liberation war.
Over the next three decades, the Eritrean struggle evolved into a disciplined, ideologically coherent, and remarkably self-reliant movement. Initially led by the ELF and later, more decisively, by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), Eritreans constructed not only an effective fighting force but a parallel wartime society, complete with systems of administration, education, health care, and production. The movement confronted successive Ethiopian regimes, each benefiting at different moments from substantial external backing.
The conflict reached its most brutal phase after the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution. The Derg military junta, supported by the Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany, North Korea, South Yemen, Libya, and other Eastern Bloc allies, launched massive conventional offensives in 1978 aimed at destroying the Eritrean resistance. Towns were razed, civilian populations displaced, and losses were catastrophic. Yet the Eritrean fronts adapted strategically, reorganized internally, and gradually reversed the balance of power through popular mobilization and cohesion.
One of the defining features of the struggle was the central role of women. Women fought as combatants, served as medics and commanders, managed logistics, and organized communities in liberated areas. Their participation was integral rather than symbolic, making the Eritrean revolution exceptional in both the scale and depth of gender inclusion.
After thirty years of sustained resistance, Eritreans prevailed. On May 24, 1991, EPLF forces entered Asmara, ending Ethiopian rule in practice. Two years later, on May 24, 1993, Eritreans confirmed that victory through a United Nations–supervised referendum, with 99.8 percent voting for independence. Eritrea thus emerged as a sovereign state both de facto and de jure, its independence secured not by diplomatic decree or proxy intervention, but by decades of organized civic resistance, armed struggle, and collective sacrifice rooted in the popular will from the very beginning.
However, independence did not bring an end to external pressure on Eritrea’s sovereignty. From 1991 onward, the country has faced sustained efforts to constrain, punish, or reverse the outcome of its hard-won self-determination. The 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia, triggered by Ethiopia’s refusal to abide by clearly delimited colonial boundaries and later by the binding ruling of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission, was followed by two decades of “no war, no peace.” That war was reinforced by illegal UN sanctions and persistent diplomatic pressure, all of which reflected broader attempts to reshape the balance of power in the Horn of Africa at Eritrea’s expense rather than to uphold international law.
In recent years, these pressures have taken a new and more reckless form. The rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has reintroduced openly revisionist rhetoric into regional politics. His public assertions about sovereign access to the Red Sea, coupled with an increasingly centralized and militarized domestic agenda, have been widely interpreted in Eritrea as a revival of Ethiopia’s long-standing ambition to subordinate or coerce Eritrea. What is presented as reformist vision or regional integration has, in practice, carried the familiar undertone of entitlement to territory, ports, or political leverage that Ethiopia neither owns nor is entitled to claim. For Eritreans, this is not a new threat but a repetition of an old pattern: sovereignty treated as negotiable, borders treated as provisional, and international law treated as optional.
Despite economic hardship and sustained external pressure, Eritrea has continued to assert and defend its independence with resolve. This posture is not ideological obstinacy but historical memory translated into policy. Having experienced federation imposed against its will, autonomy dismantled by decree, and independence achieved only through prolonged sacrifice, Eritrea has drawn a clear lesson: survival depends on vigilance against imposed political arrangements and revisionist ambitions, however they are repackaged.
In the final analysis, Eritrea’s modern history, from the colonial era through federation, annexation, liberation, and post-independence confrontation, reveals a consistent tension between external ambition and internal determination. From Haile Selassie’s wartime lobbying for territorial expansion, through post-1945 Anglo-American maneuvering, the UN’s abandonment of decolonization principles, and today’s renewed Ethiopian irredentism, Eritrea has repeatedly been treated as an object of regional design rather than a subject of international law. Yet each time, it is the Eritrean people who have altered the outcome. Independence was not granted; it was imposed on history by endurance. And in the face of today’s reckless ambitions emanating from Addis Ababa, Eritrea’s response remains unchanged: sovereignty is not a bargaining chip, borders are not aspirations, and independence, once earned at such cost, will not be surrendered by rhetoric, pressure, or force.
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