The 1987 Constitution of the People's Democratic Republic: Soviet Form, Mengistu Substance

Thesis

The 1987 Constitution of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia is the most extensively documented case in Ethiopian constitutional history of a text written to legitimate a regime rather than to constrain it. It was drafted with East German constitutional advisors and Soviet input, ratified by a popular referendum in February 1987 with the regime’s reported 81 percent affirmative vote, and entered into force on 22 February 1987 with the formal proclamation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia.¹ It enumerated rights, established a National Shengo as a legislative body, and provided structural roles for a Council of State, a President of the Republic, and a Council of Ministers — all formally separate organs. It also confirmed in its text the leading role of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, which Mengistu Haile Mariam chaired, in all spheres of national life.²

The document was, on paper, an unobjectionable mid-1980s Soviet-bloc constitution: rights-protective, institutionally complete, democratic in vocabulary. In four years of operation it constrained no executive decision of any consequence. It existed to demonstrate that the Derg had moved from the constitutional vacuum of 1974–87 to a constitutional order — but the substance of what changed when the vacuum was filled was nil. Mengistu’s authority continued as before. The wars continued as before. The state’s relationship to its citizens continued as before. The 1987 Constitution is the textbook case of constitutional form without constitutional substance, and it ends in the way that case had to end: with the document abrogated by force of arms in May 1991, with no constitutional institution attempting to defend it.

The drafting

The drafting of the 1987 Constitution began in earnest in 1985, when the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (formally established 1984) issued the directive that constitutional drafting should begin. The Constitutional Commission included Ethiopian jurists trained in socialist legality at East German and Soviet universities, alongside East German constitutional advisors who had drafted comparable instruments for other Soviet-bloc states.³ The model was explicitly the 1977 Soviet Constitution, the 1968 East German Constitution as revised in 1974, and the 1976 Cuban Constitution. The drafters worked under direct supervision of the WPE leadership and produced a text whose ideological commitments and structural assumptions were entirely orthodox for the late Soviet bloc.

The drafting process is well documented by Fasil Nahum, who served on the commission, in his 1997 study of Ethiopian constitutional development.⁴ What Fasil’s account makes clear is that the drafters knew they were producing a constitution that would not constrain Mengistu and worked within that constraint. The question was never whether the document would be a binding rule-set above the executive; it was how to produce a document with the form of a constitution that would simultaneously legitimate Mengistu’s authority, satisfy Soviet expectations for a “developed socialist” constitutional order, and create the institutional infrastructure for a one-party state. The drafters accomplished what they were asked to accomplish. The text is competent socialist-legal craftsmanship.

The text

The 1987 Constitution contained 119 articles in seventeen chapters. Its main features:

The political character of the state. Article 1 declared the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia “a state of the working people.” Article 2 declared the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia “the formulator of the development objectives of the country and the leading force of the state and in society.” This is the constitutional confirmation of one-party rule.⁵

The President of the Republic. Articles 86–90 established the office of President of the Republic, elected by the National Shengo for five-year terms, who would serve as head of state, chair of the Council of State (the standing committee that exercised legislative authority between Shengo sessions), and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Mengistu was elected to this office on 10 September 1987.⁶

The National Shengo. Articles 62–83 established the National Shengo as the supreme organ of state power, elected by direct universal suffrage for five-year terms. The Shengo elected the Council of State, the President, the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Court justices, and the Procurator-General. Its sessions were brief and ceremonial; between sessions the Council of State, chaired by the President, exercised its powers.⁷

Rights and duties. Articles 35–61 enumerated rights to work, to social security, to housing, to health care, to education, to freedom of speech and association “in accordance with the objectives of the Revolution and within the framework of the law,” and to participate in the management of state affairs. Articles 50–55 imposed duties on citizens including the duty to defend the country, obey the law, work for the development of socialism, and protect public property.⁸

Nationality structure. Articles 2 and 59 contained the first explicit constitutional recognition in Ethiopian history of “nations, nationalities, and peoples” within the state, including provisions for the establishment of “autonomous regions” for the larger nationalities. Five autonomous regions and twenty-four administrative regions were established under this framework in 1987–88.⁹ This is constitutionally significant: the 1995 Constitution’s ethnic federalism did not invent the recognition of nations and nationalities. It inherited it from the PDRE Constitution.

The party. Article 2 and Article 6 confirmed the WPE’s leading role; Article 6 added that “all political, economic and social activities of the country are guided by the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia.” There was no separation of party and state; the constitution required their fusion.

What it did in operation

The 1987 Constitution was in formal operation from February 1987 until May 1991, when the EPRDF took Addis Ababa and abrogated it. Four years.

In those four years:

The Mengistu government conducted the final phase of the war against the EPLF, TPLF, and OLF, including the offensives of 1988 and the collapsing campaigns of 1989–90. None of this military activity was meaningfully reviewed by the National Shengo, which met briefly and ratified what the Council of State and President proposed.¹⁰

The famine relief efforts continued; international donors continued to deal with the Derg as the recognised government of Ethiopia. The constitutional structure played no operational role in famine policy.

The economic crisis deepened. Aid was conditional on policy changes the regime resisted. The IMF and World Bank pressed for liberalisation that the constitutional commitments to socialist construction (Articles 1, 12, 13) explicitly forbade. The regime navigated this by treating the constitutional commitments as advisory.¹¹

Mengistu’s authority continued unconstrained. He had been the operational head of the regime since 1977; the 1987 Constitution made him also the formal head of state. The shift from operational to formal authority did not constrain him; it ratified the existing pattern.

The May 1991 collapse was effectively unresisted. When the EPRDF’s columns approached Addis Ababa in mid-May, Mengistu boarded a flight to Zimbabwe and the constitutional state of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia ceased to exist within seventy-two hours. No constitutional body — not the Shengo, not the Council of State, not the courts — attempted to assert continuity, conduct a transfer of power under constitutional process, or invoke any provision of the 1987 Constitution to manage the transition. The constitution simply ended, as the 1955 Constitution had ended in 1974, by act of the new sovereign.¹²

The Eritrea and Tigray questions

The 1987 Constitution’s recognition of autonomous regions has been read by some later commentators as an attempt to address the nationality question through federalism within a one-party state. The Eritrean Autonomous Region (established 1987) and the Tigray Autonomous Region (1988) appeared, on paper, to provide some institutional space for the demands the EPLF and TPLF were fighting to vindicate.¹³

In operation, the autonomous regions had almost no autonomy. Their councils were elected under WPE-controlled conditions, their executive authorities were appointed by the central government, their budgets came from Addis Ababa, and their authority over matters that mattered to the insurgencies — military affairs, security, land, language policy — was either nominal or non-existent. The EPLF and TPLF did not view the autonomous regions as offering anything meaningful and continued fighting.

The substantive lesson is that ethnic-regional federal arrangements can be put in constitutional text without producing federal-political substance, and that the recipients of the supposed federal recognition can tell the difference. This is a lesson the 1995 framers should have absorbed and largely did not, in the sense that they assumed institutional inheritance from the PDRE structure (autonomous regions becoming federal states with much expanded competences) without re-asking the question of what conditions would make the federalism actually federate.

The referendum

The 1987 Constitution was ratified by a referendum on 1 February 1987, in which the government reported 81 percent affirmative vote on a turnout of 95 percent.¹⁴ Independent verification of these figures was not possible; the regime did not permit it. Outside observers consistently described the referendum as managed rather than free. The constitution was promulgated on the basis of the reported result.

The referendum is a useful example of a particular form of constitutional theatre: a vote whose conduct ensures the desired outcome but whose conduct is then cited as the source of democratic legitimacy for the document. This pattern would recur in 1994 with the constituent assembly that ratified the 1995 Constitution (the assembly was elected under conditions in which the EPRDF controlled almost all the seats, and the opposition partly boycotted) and arguably in the 2020 House of Federation extension (the constitutional interpretation was issued by a body whose members were elected by regional councils dominated by the ruling party).

The form of popular ratification was deployed in each case. The political conditions under which that ratification was conducted were not the conditions of free democratic choice. The pattern is one of the strongest evidences of the Schmittian character of Ethiopian constitutional practice: the sovereign decides the constitution, then arranges the formal ratification under conditions the sovereign has set.

Steelman of the opposing reading

Two opposing readings of the 1987 Constitution deserve engagement.

The first is the developmental-socialist reading: that the 1987 Constitution was a serious attempt to build “developed socialism” in Ethiopia along the model of the Soviet-bloc states, that its provisions for autonomous regions reflected genuine engagement with the nationality question, and that its failure was a failure of timing — the document came into force just as the regime that produced it was collapsing for unrelated reasons.¹⁵ This reading is not without merit. The document is not gibberish; it has internal coherence and reflects a particular vision of socialist legality. The reply is that the timing argument cuts the other way: a regime that had governed for thirteen years without producing a constitution, and produced one only when its survival required external legitimation, cannot claim its constitutional commitments were urgent. The document came late because it had not been needed earlier.

The second is the institutional-continuity reading: that the 1987 Constitution provided structures (the Shengo, the autonomous regions, the recognition of nationalities) that the 1995 framers inherited and built on, and that some of the most consequential features of the 1995 order (especially ethnic-territorial federalism) actually originated in 1987.¹⁶ This is correct and important. The 1995 federation did not appear from nowhere; it built on PDRE precedents. The criticism is not that the 1987 Constitution accomplished nothing institutionally. The criticism is that what it accomplished was the formalisation of executive will, not its constraint, and that the institutional inheritance the 1995 framers picked up included this defect along with the formal structures.

Multi-causal accounting

The 1987 Constitution’s failure to constrain is not attributable solely to its design. The collapsing economic situation, the unfinished wars, the Soviet bloc’s own crisis between 1985 and 1991, the international isolation of the regime, the absence of any developed civil society in Ethiopia capable of demanding constitutional enforcement, the demonstrated pattern of thirteen years of unconstrained executive practice — all of these worked against the document becoming binding. The constitutional design itself, with party leadership written in and judicial review written out, made constraint impossible in any case. The structural and contingent factors compound.

What the article establishes

The 1987 Constitution is the formalisation of the constitutionless decade, not its reform. It produced a text with the structural vocabulary of a constitutional order while preserving the substantive reality of the preceding period: one-party authority, executive supremacy, no institutional constraint on Mengistu personally. Its four-year operational life produced no significant constraint on executive decision-making. Its abrogation in May 1991 was unopposed by any constitutional body. The case demonstrates, more clearly than any other in Ethiopian constitutional history, the proposition this series exists to argue: a constitution can be drafted by expert commissions, ratified by referendum, and entered into force as the supreme law of the land, and produce no constitutional substance, when the political-economy conditions for substance are absent.

The next article takes up the document that replaced it: the Transitional Period Charter of 1991, drafted in three weeks by a victorious insurgent coalition and operating without serious public dissent for four years.

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References

Footnotes

1. Constitution of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Negarit Gazeta, Proclamation No. 1 of 1987, entered into force 22 February 1987. See Fasil Nahum, Constitution for a Nation of Nations, 35–64. ↩

2. Articles 1, 2, 6 of the 1987 Constitution. ↩

3. Fasil Nahum, Constitution for a Nation of Nations, 35–43, on the drafting process. ↩

4. Fasil Nahum was a member of the constitutional commission and his subsequent account is the most detailed insider source. ↩

5. 1987 Constitution, Articles 1, 2, 6. ↩

6. 1987 Constitution, Articles 86–90; Mengistu’s election: Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, 65–67. ↩

7. 1987 Constitution, Articles 62–83 (National Shengo and Council of State). ↩

8. 1987 Constitution, Articles 35–61. ↩

9. 1987 Constitution, Articles 2, 59; Proclamation No. 14/1987, establishing the autonomous regions and administrative regions. ↩

10. On the operation of the Shengo and Council of State, see Clapham, Transformation and Continuity, ch. 4, and the contemporary observations in Amnesty International, Ethiopia: Concerns Regarding the Constitution and Other Legal Matters (London: Amnesty, 1989). ↩

11. On the late-Derg economic crisis and the constitutional contradiction, see Eshetu Chole, Underdevelopment in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: OSSREA, 2004), and the discussion in Christopher Clapham, “The Political Economy of Conflict in the Horn of Africa,” Survival 32, no. 5 (1990). ↩

12. Marina Ottaway and David Ottaway, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (New York: Africana, 1978), and for the collapse, Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (London: Hurst, 2000), 313–319. ↩

13. On the autonomous regions, see Fasil Nahum, Constitution for a Nation of Nations, 55–60, and Aalen, “Institutionalising the Politics of Ethnicity: Actors, Power and Mobilisation in Southern Ethiopia under Ethnic Federalism,” PhD dissertation, University of Oslo, 2008. ↩

14. Reported referendum results, 1 February 1987, Ethiopian Herald, 2 February 1987. Outside verification not available. ↩

15. Versions of this defence appear in Donham, Marxist Modern, and in some Soviet-bloc accounts of the period. ↩

16. This is the position taken by Fasil Nahum, Constitution for a Nation of Nations, and by some scholars of Ethiopian federalism who emphasize continuity, e.g. Lovise Aalen. ↩