ABSTRACT
The recent history of intervention has reflected, not the breakdown of previously respected conventions of state sovereignty, but a continuation of the complex interactions between political forces in the region that reach back decades, indeed centuries, into the past. This chapter focuses on the governments which seized power in both Addis Ababa and Asmara in May 1991, bringing about in the process the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia, and its emergence two years later as a recognised sovereign state. It is concerned with the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia that broke out in May 1998, and shattered the good relations between the two countries that had at least ostensibly been achieved since 1991, setting in train a new round of regional instability. The Ethiopian revolutionary regime, though it became from 1977 the leading African client of the Soviet Union, and broadly sympathised with radical causes, felt no urge to export revolution beyond its own frontiers.
