ABSTRACT
This chapter probes into Emperor Haile Selassie’s modernizing rule. In its early (interwar) period, the emperor and the intellectuals gathered around him settled on the Japanese Empire as an ideal model of national statehood for Ethiopia. This model was implemented through the country’s first constitution, which was promulgated in 1931. Later, this choice earned the interwar modernizers the sobriquet of ‘Japanizers.’ After the Italian occupation during World War II, Britain and the United States helped reconstitute Ethiopia as a state. In addition, the country was entrusted with the formerly Italian colony of Eritrea, leading to the founding of a Federation of Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1952. This challenge to the centralized character of Ethiopian statehood was accommodated by the adoption of the Revised Constitution in 1955. Subsequently, due to the spread of education and literacy, the country’s numerous ethnic groups, as spearheaded by university students, began questioning the ethnolinguistic and cultural Amharization of Ethiopia. The students also criticized the centralization of the state and vast economic inequalities observed across Ethiopia. At the turn of the 1970s, in the age of the Cold War, the Soviet ideology of Marxism-Leninism appeared to offer a ready-made solution to these burning issues. The imperial regime’s attempt to change the structure of the state more in line with the population’s wishes came belatedly in 1974. Later in this year, the Ethiopian Revolution deposed the emperor and his government.
