Construction, Not Restoration: Why the Comparators Built Rather Than Recovered

Thesis

The Ethiopian identity question, as it is discussed in 2026, is frequently framed as a choice between restoration and reconstruction. The restorationist argument holds that Ethiopia possesses an authentic historical identity — the Solomonic-Christian-Amharic-imperial inheritance that structured the country from Aksumite antiquity through the fall of Haile Selassie — and that the identity crisis of the post-1974 period reflects the political community’s alienation from that inheritance. Recovery of the inheritance would restore the identity, and with the restored identity would come the political cohesion that has been lost. The counter-argument, most explicitly articulated by defenders of the 1995 ethnic-federal framework, holds that the imperial identity was itself an imposition on the country’s genuine diversity, that recovery would reproduce the injustices of the imperial period, and that the correct path is the continued institutionalisation of separate identities within a federal constitutional structure.

Both framings are wrong in the same way. Both treat identity as something Ethiopia already has, in a specific historical form, that political decision then either recovers or repudiates. The Asian comparators show that this is not what functioning national identities are. Every successful Asian identity was constructed by state action over generations from a mixture of pre-existing inheritance, imported elements, and outright invention. Meiji Japan did not restore Tokugawa-era identity; it constructed a modern Japanese national identity that used selected fragments of the pre-modern inheritance (the imperial line, Shinto, samurai virtue) alongside imported elements (Prussian military organisation, German constitutional forms, British navy models, French legal code) and outright invention (State Shinto as a modern political religion, universal conscription, standardised Japanese as national language). Post-war Japan did not restore Meiji identity; it constructed a democratic-pacifist Japanese identity that repurposed some of the pre-war inheritance while replacing much of it. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore did not restore anything; there was no Singaporean national identity to restore, because Singapore before 1965 had been a colonial port, not a nation.

The correct frame for Ethiopian identity work is construction. Not restoration of the pre-1974 imperial identity, because that identity did not include Oromo, Somali, southern-nationality, or Muslim Ethiopian consent, and could not survive the political conditions of the modern world. Not maintenance of the post-1995 ethnic-federal architecture as a permanent constitutional resting place, because that architecture has produced the centrifugal pressure the country is presently absorbing. Construction of something new, drawing from all Ethiopian inheritances, developed under state direction, sustained across generations. This is what the Asian comparators did. This is what Ethiopia has not done. This is the argument this series exists to make, and this article is where the argument’s central move — from restoration to construction — is stated in detail.

What construction means

To construct a national identity is not to invent it from nothing. It is to select from the available raw materials — historical inheritance, cultural practice, religious tradition, linguistic community, geographical situation, contemporary experience — the elements that will constitute the shared political community, to standardise those elements across the population through state institutions (education, ceremony, media, military service, administrative practice), and to sustain the standardisation across generations. The construction is deliberate, selective, and directed by state action. It is not the recovery of something already present. It is the making of something that will be present because the state has made it.

The key theoretical text is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), which argues that modern nations are imagined into being by print capitalism, standardised education, and shared public ritual. Anderson’s point is not that nations are illusory (they are, once constructed, very real in their political effects) but that they are constructed rather than natural. Populations do not spontaneously imagine themselves as nations; they imagine themselves as nations because the political-institutional infrastructure to support the imagination has been built.¹

Applied to the Asian cases, Anderson’s framework is descriptive. Meiji Japan built the infrastructure — the standardised newspapers, the universal schools, the national ceremonial calendar, the mass army — that let a previously fragmented population of daimyō domains, regional identities, and estate-based hierarchies imagine itself as one Japanese nation. Post-war Japan rebuilt the infrastructure with different content. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore constructed the infrastructure from scratch. In each case, the imagined community became real because the imagination was politically supported.

Applied to Ethiopia, the framework is diagnostic. Ethiopia’s imperial-era infrastructure of imagined community was thin. The Orthodox Church’s national reach was real but not universal (Muslim, animist, and Catholic populations were outside the framework). The Amharic-language print culture was small (literacy rates before 1974 were under 10 percent). The imperial ceremonial and ritual life was concentrated in the capital and did not penetrate most of the countryside. Universal military conscription did not exist. Universal education did not exist. The imperial identity, in Anderson’s terms, was imagined by a small elite; the mass population was not incorporated into the imagination.

The Derg period built some infrastructure (the literacy campaign, mass mobilisation for the wars, revolutionary ceremonial life) but destroyed more than it built and did not sustain what it built past 1991. The EPRDF period built more (universal primary education, regional media in regional languages, elections and mass political engagement) but the infrastructure supported multiple regional imagined communities rather than one pan-Ethiopian imagined community. The Prosperity Party period since 2018 has attempted to redirect the infrastructure toward pan-Ethiopian imagined community but has not built it out at scale.

The construction of Ethiopian national identity requires the building of infrastructure comparable to what the Asian comparators built. This is not primarily a rhetorical or cultural project. It is an institutional project: schools with a standardised curriculum in a shared language, media that speaks to the whole country in shared terms, ceremony and ritual that all Ethiopian populations can participate in as their own, military service that integrates across regions, administrative practice that treats Ethiopians as fungible citizens regardless of region.

Why restoration will not work

The restorationist argument for Ethiopian identity is that the country possesses a genuine historical identity — the Solomonic-Christian-Amharic imperial inheritance — and that the identity crisis reflects alienation from that inheritance. The argument has serious advocates within contemporary Ethiopian political discourse, particularly in the Amhara nationalist tradition, in significant parts of the Orthodox Church leadership, and in the diaspora unionist opinion.

The argument’s substantive claims are partially correct. Ethiopia does possess a distinctive historical inheritance. The Aksumite kingdom of the fourth through seventh centuries CE was one of the world’s great early polities. The Zagwe and subsequent Solomonic dynasties produced medieval and early-modern states of substantial sophistication. The Orthodox Christian tradition has produced a distinctive theological, liturgical, artistic, and architectural culture that has no equivalent elsewhere in Africa. The Amharic literary tradition, from the seventeenth-century royal chronicles through the twentieth-century novels of Haddis Alemayehu and others, is a substantial body of work. Ethiopia’s preservation of political independence through the colonial period, its role in the League of Nations, its hosting of the OAU/AU in Addis Ababa — these are real elements of a distinctive national inheritance.

What the restorationist argument does not address is who this inheritance belonged to and who it excluded. The Solomonic-Christian-Amharic inheritance was, in operational terms, the tradition of specific populations within the Ethiopian territory: primarily the Amhara, secondarily the Tigrayans, and to varying degrees the Christian populations of what are now the southern regions. It was not the tradition of the Oromo populations who were, from the sixteenth century onward, the largest single ethnic group in the territory and whose incorporation into the imperial state came through Menelik II’s late-nineteenth-century conquests. It was not the tradition of the Muslim populations — the Somali, the Afar, large parts of the Oromo, the Silte, the Argobba, the Harari — who by the twentieth century constituted approximately a third of the Ethiopian population. It was not the tradition of the pastoralist populations of the peripheries, the agriculturalist southern nationalities, or the various smaller ethnic and religious communities.

For these populations, the imperial inheritance was not their inheritance. It was the inheritance of the state that incorporated them, often by force, into a political framework that did not recognise their own traditions as part of Ethiopian-ness. The imperial framework treated Amharic-Christian identity as Ethiopian identity as such, with everything else as regional or peripheral. When the framework attempted to extend itself into the incorporated populations — through the imposition of Amharic language in administration and education, through the discouragement of Islamic religious authority, through the removal of Oromo political traditions from public recognition — it produced the resistance and resentment that ultimately powered the 1974 revolution’s success and the 1991 post-imperial political settlement.

Restoration of this identity, in 2026, would reproduce these exclusions. The Oromo, Somali, southern-nationality, and Muslim Ethiopian populations would face, in the restored framework, the same choice they faced in the imperial framework: assimilate to the Amharic-Christian identity as the price of Ethiopian citizenship, or accept second-class political status within the country whose identity was defined against them. Neither option would be accepted, because the political conditions that made those options acceptable in earlier centuries do not exist in 2026. The Oromo, Somali, and other populations have developed their own modern political consciousness, their own organised political movements, their own linguistic and cultural infrastructure. Attempts to override these developments in favour of imperial restoration would produce resistance more organised and more effective than the resistance the imperial state faced in its own period.

The Asian comparators show what happens when a modernising state attempts to restore a narrow pre-modern identity as the framework for the modern nation. Meiji Japan’s imperial-Shintō framework, while operationally effective during the Meiji period itself, produced the militarist ideology of the 1930s that led to the Pacific War and to Japan’s catastrophic defeat in 1945. The post-war reconstruction was, in significant part, the abandonment of the imperial-Shintō framework in favour of a constitutional-democratic framework that could hold Japan together without the exclusive elements the pre-war framework had contained. If Meiji Japan’s restoration of pre-modern imperial identity produced 1945, restoration of an equivalently narrow identity in 2026 Ethiopia would not produce a more benign outcome.

Why ethnic-federal maintenance will not work either

The alternative to restoration is not maintenance of the 1995 ethnic-federal framework as a permanent constitutional resting place. The framework, as “The Hollow Pillar” argued at length, has produced the centrifugal pressure the country is presently absorbing. Article 39’s constitutional right of secession, Article 8’s identification of the “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” as constitutional sovereigns, Article 47’s ethnic-territorial regional structure, and the House of Federation’s political character have together produced a constitutional order that institutionalises division rather than constructing unity.

The ethnic-federal defenders’ counter-argument is that the framework recognises the empirical reality of Ethiopian diversity, that the alternative (unitary imposition) is what has failed historically, and that the framework’s problems are problems of implementation rather than of design. “The Hollow Pillar” engaged this argument at length and will not re-engage it here. What matters for the present article is that the framework does not, and by design cannot, produce the pan-national identity construction that a functioning modern state requires. The framework’s foundational commitment — sovereignty in nations, nationalities, and peoples rather than in individual citizens or in the shared political community — precludes the identity work.

A framework that recognised diversity without institutionalising it as constitutional sovereignty is possible. India, Indonesia, and Malaysia all recognise substantial linguistic and cultural diversity within federal or quasi-federal structures without granting constitutional secession rights to their diverse populations. Ethiopia could adopt a comparable framework. What it cannot adopt, if it wishes to construct pan-national identity, is a framework in which the diverse populations are the constitutional sovereigns and the pan-national identity is their aspirational federation.

What construction would require

The construction of Ethiopian national identity, if undertaken, would require infrastructure comparable to what the Asian comparators built. The specific content is the subject of Part VII of this series (Articles 25–28), but the general categories can be stated here.

A standardised national curriculum in a shared language for all Ethiopian primary and secondary schools. The curriculum would recognise regional linguistic traditions but would deliver its core content in a language that all Ethiopian children learned to functional proficiency. The candidate for the shared language is Amharic, which has the longest tradition of use as a lingua franca and the largest body of existing educational material. The candidate is contested: Oromo nationalist opinion has advocated Afaan Oromo as the shared language given the demographic weight of the Oromo population; some have proposed English as a neutral alternative that avoids the ethnic-political question. Whatever the specific choice, the standardisation is essential. Regional-language variants are appropriate for early primary education and for cultural preservation, but they are not sufficient as the framework for pan-national identity.

A shared national historical narrative that all Ethiopian populations can recognise as their own. The narrative would draw on the Aksumite inheritance, the medieval Solomonic tradition, the Oromo gada institutions, the Islamic sultanates of the eastern lowlands, the southern-nationality political traditions, the anti-fascist resistance of 1935–1941, the modernisation efforts of Haile Selassie, the revolutionary transformations of 1974, and the constitutional experiments of the post-1991 period. It would not privilege any single tradition as the Ethiopian tradition; it would recognise the multiple traditions as parts of a shared historical experience. The narrative would be delivered through the standardised curriculum, through public media, through national ceremonial life, and through the pattern of monument, museum, and civic space that the state builds and sustains.

A national ceremonial calendar and set of public rituals that all Ethiopian populations can participate in. The current Ethiopian calendar of national and religious observances (the Ethiopian New Year, Timkat, Meskel, Ashenda in Tigray, Irrecha in Oromia, Eid observances, Christmas) contains substantial material for a shared ceremonial life. What is needed is the deliberate construction of pan-national ceremonial that draws from multiple traditions and produces shared participation. The Asian comparators (Japan’s Golden Week, Korea’s post-war holiday complex, Singapore’s National Day parade, China’s National Day observances) show how such construction operates.

Universal national service (military or civilian) that integrates Ethiopians across regions and ethnic lines. National service in Singapore, Israel, Switzerland, and (historically) many other successful nation-building states has been a primary infrastructure of identity construction. Young men (and increasingly women) spend two or three years in the company of fellow citizens from other regions, learn the shared language of the service, and emerge with personal networks that cross the identity lines the pre-service society had contained. Ethiopia does not currently have universal national service; the Ethiopian National Defence Force is a professional recruitment force. The introduction of some form of universal service, whether military or civilian, would be one of the highest-impact identity-construction moves the state could undertake.

Administrative practice that treats Ethiopians as fungible citizens regardless of region. This means, in operational terms, that federal appointments are made across regional and ethnic lines without proportionality quotas, that civil-service career progression does not depend on regional political networks, that federal budget allocation is based on need and performance rather than on regional-political bargaining. This is the hardest of the construction moves because it would require the abandonment of the post-1991 political-economic infrastructure that has organised the federation. But it is also, in the long run, one of the essential moves.

What construction would produce

If Ethiopia undertook this construction, sustained it across two or three generations, and delivered on the developmental complementary moves this series has outlined, the outcome would be a pan-Ethiopian identity comparable in political function to Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Singaporean, or Chinese identity in their respective states. This is not idealism. It is what the Asian comparators actually achieved. The identity would not be uniform in cultural content; the Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayan, Somali, southern-nationality, and other Ethiopian populations would continue to have distinct cultural traditions, languages of family life, and regional identities. What they would share is the operational recognition of each other as members of one political community, expressed through the shared language of national administration, the shared historical narrative, the shared ceremonial life, the shared experience of national service, and the shared framework of citizenship.

The identity would take generations to construct. The Asian comparators required forty to sixty years to construct their identities, and the construction was subject to constant contestation, backsliding, and adjustment. Ethiopia would not accomplish the construction in ten years or twenty. The construction would have to be initiated by one political generation, sustained by the next, and consolidated by the third. This is exactly what did not happen under the Derg, the EPRDF, or (so far) the Prosperity Party. Each has initiated some elements of the construction and then abandoned them within a single political generation. The identity construction requires the political will that has been intermittent rather than sustained.

The Eritrean case as construction failure

The Eritrean separation, examined in Article 20 in detail, is the most consequential single case of Ethiopian identity construction failure. The imperial state had, between 1952 and 1962, the opportunity to construct an identity that could include Eritrean populations as one component of a pan-Ethiopian community. What it did instead was to attempt the imposition of the imperial-Amharic-Christian identity on Eritrean populations who did not accept it. The imposition produced the war; the war produced the separation; the separation produced the current strategic geography (landlocked Ethiopia, hostile Eritrean neighbour, ongoing Assab question).

The construction that could have been undertaken between 1952 and 1962 was: federal recognition of Eritrean political culture; official status for Tigrinya and Arabic alongside Amharic; recognition of the Italian-colonial administrative inheritance as a legitimate component of the Eritrean regional experience; Eritrean representation in the imperial parliament proportional to Eritrean population; investment in Eritrean-specific infrastructure (the ports, the industrial base at Asmara, the road network) as investment in the pan-Ethiopian territorial community. This is what Malaysia does with Sabah and Sarawak, what China does with the autonomous regions (imperfectly), what post-war Japan did with Okinawa, what Indonesia does with Aceh and Papua (imperfectly). It is not what Ethiopia did.

The construction did not happen. The separation was the result. This is the argument for construction as opposed to restoration or maintenance: the construction the Asian comparators undertook is what produced their political stability, and the construction Ethiopia did not undertake is what produced the strategic and political costs Ethiopia continues to pay.

What comes next

Part II of the series takes up Japan as the original case of Asian identity construction. Article 5 examines the Meiji Restoration and the invention of modern Japanese identity from 1868 through 1912. Article 6 examines the post-war reconstruction of Japanese identity under American occupation and its aftermath. The Japanese case is the foundation because it is both the earliest of the Asian transformations and the one that provided the template the others adapted.

The move from restoration to construction is what this article has argued. The specific content of what would be constructed in Ethiopia is the subject of Part VII. Between Article 4 and Article 25, the series examines the comparators in detail and applies their lessons to Ethiopia’s specific historical turns. The construction argument, once made, informs the reading of every subsequent article.

---

References

Footnotes

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]), ch. 1–3. ↩