ABSTRACT
The Conclusion, first, reiterates the channels through which the two Central European models of statehood were successively adopted in 20th-century Ethiopia. The model of the centralized and ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, as originally implemented in the German Empire, arrived in Ethiopia by way of Japan. In turn, Ethiopia borrowed the model of ethnolinguistic (ethnoterritorial) federation – as initially developed in Austria-Hungary – from the Soviet Union. After the breakups of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Ethiopia became the world’s sole full-fledged large ethnoterritorial federation. How Ethiopia fares as a state in a decade or two will show whether this model of statehood works in the sociopolitical context of the Horn of Africa. The year 2019 marked a new opening in federal Ethiopia, because the EPRDF was transformed into the all-Ethiopia Prosperity Party (PP). However, the Tigray People–s Liberation Front (TPLF), which used to be the main force behind the EPRDF, decided to stay away from the PP. As a result, a de facto multiparty system might be ushered to Ethiopia.
