Proclamation No. 1 of 1974: Constitutional Suspension as Founding Act

Thesis

The first formal act of the regime that replaced the imperial monarchy was the suspension of the 1955 Constitution. Proclamation No. 1 of 1974, issued on 12 September 1974 by the Provisional Military Administrative Council — the body that within months would call itself the Derg — abolished the Imperial Parliament, deposed Emperor Haile Selassie, suspended the constitution, and vested supreme authority in the council itself.¹ It was a single page of text. It contained no statement of constitutional principle, no enumeration of rights, no provision for review of executive action, no timetable for the restoration of constitutional government, no recognition of any source of authority other than the council’s own. It was, in Schmittian terms, a pure act of sovereign decision: the new sovereign declaring its sovereignty by deciding what would and would not be law.

This is the founding moment of post-imperial Ethiopia, and it is essential to read it not as an aberration but as a fully ordinary act of state in the Ethiopian constitutional tradition. The 1931 Constitution had been promulgated by a sovereign asserting sovereignty. The 1955 Constitution had been promulgated by the same sovereign re-asserting it. Proclamation No. 1 of 1974 was promulgated by a new sovereign asserting its sovereignty in the only way Ethiopian constitutional practice had taught was meaningful: by act of will, against the previous constitutional order, with no institutional resistance from any constitutional body. The act was unopposed because the institutions that might have opposed it had never been constituted to oppose anything.

The proclamation

Proclamation No. 1 was issued on the morning of 12 September 1974, the date in the Ethiopian calendar that marks the start of the new year (Meskerem 2, 1967 EC).² The choice of date was deliberate and almost certainly symbolic. The proclamation declared:

That Emperor Haile Selassie I was deposed. That the Imperial Parliament was abolished. That the 1955 Revised Constitution was suspended. That all authority of government was vested in the Provisional Military Administrative Council. That the council would exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers until a new political order was established. That the empire would remain “one Ethiopia.”³

That is the text. What it does not contain is more important than what it does.

It contains no provision for the eventual restoration of constitutional government. It contains no statement of the principles by which the council would govern. It contains no enumerated limit on the council’s authority. It contains no provision for citizen participation in the decisions to come. It contains no guarantee of any individual right. It contains no recognition of regional, ethnic, or religious diversity as constitutionally significant. It is a pure assertion of sovereign authority over a defined territory by a self-constituted body.

In the years that followed, the Derg would issue many more proclamations, including substantive declarations of socialist policy, nationalization of land and industry, the proclamation of a National Democratic Revolution Programme, and eventually the 1987 Constitution itself. Proclamation No. 1 set the constitutional terms within which all of these later acts would be issued. The council would decide. There was no institution above the council. There was no rule above the council’s will.

What “constitutional” means here

The defenders of the 1974 transition, then and now, have argued that the proclamation was not unconstitutional because the constitution it suspended was an illegitimate imperial document, and that the act of suspension was the founding moment of a new and legitimate political order grounded in popular sovereignty rather than dynastic right.⁴ This argument has a certain Marxist-revolutionary logic but, examined as a constitutional argument, it begs the question. The 1955 Constitution, however flawed in operation, was the constitution then in force. To declare it suspended is to make a decision about which legal framework will apply. The decision was made by the Provisional Military Administrative Council. Nobody elected the council. Nobody had authorized the council to make constitutional decisions. The council’s authority to make this decision was not legal — there was no law that authorized it — but factual: the council had the army, and the previous regime did not.

This is exactly Carl Schmitt’s account of constituent power. The sovereign is not the body that the existing constitution names as sovereign; the sovereign is the body that decides, in the exceptional moment, what the new constitution will be.⁵ Schmitt’s theory is the most accurate description of what happened on 12 September 1974. The Derg was the body that decided. The 1955 Constitution had named the emperor as sovereign; the Derg’s proclamation declared, by decision, that the emperor was no longer sovereign. The decision became effective because there was no other body with the power to overturn it.

For the purposes of this series, what matters is that this Schmittian moment became the founding act of post-imperial Ethiopian constitutional practice — and that subsequent regimes have repeated it, in varying degrees and forms, at every constitutional inflection point since. The EPRDF’s 1991 transitional charter was a constitutional decision by the body that had the means to make it. The 2018 transition to Abiy was a constitutional decision by the Prosperity Party Central Committee, ratified pro forma by an EPRDF and then by parliament that had no real choice. The June 2020 extension of all legislative mandates was a constitutional decision by the House of Federation that found in the constitution what was not there. In each case, the institution with the power to decide decided. The institutions that might have constrained the decision did not.

What happened next

The constitutional vacuum opened by Proclamation No. 1 was not filled by any new constitutional document until 1987 — thirteen years later. In the interim, Ethiopia was governed by a sequence of proclamations from the council. The 1975 nationalisation of rural land (Proclamation No. 31/1975) abolished private rural land ownership without any constitutional process.⁶ The 1975 nationalisation of urban land and extra houses (Proclamation No. 47/1975) did the same for urban property.⁷ The 1976 National Democratic Revolution Programme established the political framework of the regime; the 1977 Red Terror, in which the Derg ordered the systematic killing of urban political opponents, was conducted under proclamation authority with no constitutional review.⁸ The 1980 establishment of the Commission for Organizing the Party of the Workers of Ethiopia, the 1984 founding of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia itself, and the 1987 promulgation of the new constitution were all undertaken by sovereign decision.

This decade — the subject of the next article — is the longest period in modern Ethiopian history in which the state operated with no written constitutional document in force. It produced more state violence per year than any other period of modern Ethiopian history, including the Tigray war. The connection between constitutional vacuum and political violence is not a coincidence; it is one of the central propositions of this series. A state that operates by proclamation, with no institution authorized to constrain the executive, is a state in which official violence has no domestic legal limit.

The pattern set

Proclamation No. 1 of 1974 set three precedents that would recur in every subsequent Ethiopian constitutional inflection.

First, that the constitution in force can be replaced by the unilateral act of whatever body holds effective power. The 1991 transitional charter was issued by the EPRDF after it had taken Addis Ababa. The 1995 Constitution was drafted by the constitutional commission appointed by the EPRDF and ratified by a constituent assembly elected under EPRDF-controlled conditions.⁹ The House of Federation’s 2020 interpretation extended legislative mandates by the Prosperity Party’s reading of what the constitution allowed. Each step was a sovereign decision by the body with effective power.

Second, that the suspension of constitutional protections is a permissible response to “crisis,” with crisis defined by the executive of the day. Proclamation No. 1 cited the crisis of imperial rule; the 1976 National Democratic Revolution Programme cited the crisis of counter-revolution; the 1995 transition cited the crisis of post-civil-war reconstruction; the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation cited the crisis of “terrorism”; the 2018 transition cited the crisis of mass protest; the 2020 election postponement cited the crisis of COVID-19. In every case, the institution making the crisis assessment was the same institution that benefited from constitutional suspension.

Third, that no institution will resist the suspension. The 1955 Imperial Parliament did not resist Proclamation No. 1. The 1991 transitional bodies did not resist the constitutional commission’s drafting choices. The federal courts did not resist the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation. The House of Federation did not resist the executive’s request for “interpretation” in 2020. The federal Council of Constitutional Inquiry recommended what the executive needed it to recommend. Each constitutional body in turn behaved as the institution that depended on the executive’s tolerance for its existence, because each was. The Madisonian condition — that ambition counteract ambition — has never been institutionally realized in Ethiopian constitutional practice.

Steelman of the opposing reading

Two opposing readings of Proclamation No. 1 deserve engagement.

The first is the revolutionary-democratic reading: that the imperial constitution was illegitimate, that its suspension was justified by the popular character of the 1974 revolution, and that the Derg’s failures were not failures of constitutional suspension but failures of the revolution’s subsequent capture by an authoritarian faction.¹⁰ This reading is sympathetic to the early Derg and harsh on Mengistu. It is partly right in the sense that the late imperial state was not legitimate in any modern democratic sense and that something had to replace it. It is partly wrong in that the alternative offered — sovereign decision by an unelected military council — was not democratic in any meaningful sense, and that the absence of constitutional constraint within the post-imperial order is precisely what enabled the revolution’s authoritarian capture. The Red Terror was not a deviation from the constitutional logic of Proclamation No. 1. It was the logic of Proclamation No. 1 taken to its conclusion.

The second is the realist reading: that constitutional suspension was the only way to manage the transition from a collapsing imperial state, that the alternative was state collapse and civil war on a Yugoslav scale, and that the Derg’s suspension of the constitution should be understood as the lesser of available evils.¹¹ This is partly right. State collapse was a real possibility in 1974, and the Derg’s consolidation of power did prevent it in the short term. But the longer-term consequence — a decade of governance with no constitutional framework, followed by a Soviet-modelled constitution that no one believed, followed by a civil war that did kill hundreds of thousands — does not look obviously better than the alternatives. And the realist argument has a worrying structural feature: it justifies constitutional suspension at every moment of state stress, which is to say at every moment when constitutional protection would actually matter.

Multi-causal accounting

The constitutional vacuum opened by Proclamation No. 1 was not the only cause of the violence that followed. The Derg’s ideological commitments — Soviet-bloc Marxism-Leninism, the politics of urban-based revolutionary vanguardism — produced policy choices independent of constitutional structure. The international Cold War context provided arms, advisors, and intellectual frameworks for both the Derg and its opponents. Drought, famine, and the inherited weaknesses of the imperial agricultural economy produced material crises that the Derg could not have managed regardless of its constitutional posture. Wars with Somalia, with the EPLF and TPLF, and with internal counter-insurgencies imposed costs that any government would have struggled with. None of these excuses the constitutional choice; they explain why constitutional choice alone does not predict the outcome. But the constitutional choice is real, and naming it is not optional.

What the article establishes

Proclamation No. 1 of 1974 is the constitutional founding act of post-imperial Ethiopia. It established that the state will operate, in the absence of an explicit constitution, by decree of whichever body holds effective power; that constitutional protections can be suspended by act of will; and that the institutions that would have constrained such acts will not, in practice, constrain them. Every subsequent constitutional moment in Ethiopia — the 1987 Constitution, the 1991 Charter, the 1995 Constitution, the 2020 extension, the 2024 reforms — has operated within the framework that Proclamation No. 1 established. The fall of the king did not produce the Ethiopian constitutional pathology; it produced its most explicit and unembarrassed expression.

The next article takes up the thirteen-year constitutionless decade that Proclamation No. 1 inaugurated, and what it did to the country.

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References

Footnotes

1. “Proclamation No. 1 of 1974,” Negarit Gazeta, 12 September 1974. See Andargachew Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution 1974–1987: A Transformation from an Aristocratic to a Totalitarian Autocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 56–62. ↩

2. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, 184–187, on the symbolism of the date and the choreography of the deposition. ↩

3. Text of Proclamation No. 1, Negarit Gazeta, 12 September 1974. See also Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991, 234–238. ↩

4. This is broadly the position of pro-Derg apologists and of some sympathetic foreign observers of the early revolutionary period. See, e.g., the discussion in Donald L. Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ↩

5. Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008 [1928]), Part I; Political Theology, ch. 1. ↩

6. “A Proclamation to Provide for the Public Ownership of Rural Lands,” Proclamation No. 31/1975, Negarit Gazeta. See John M. Cohen and Dov Weintraub, Land and Peasants in Imperial Ethiopia (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975). ↩

7. “A Proclamation to Provide for Government Ownership of Urban Lands and Extra Houses,” Proclamation No. 47/1975, Negarit Gazeta. ↩

8. On the Red Terror, see Babile Tola, To Kill a Generation: The Red Terror in Ethiopia (Washington, DC: Free Ethiopia Press, 1989); René Lefort, Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution? (London: Zed Books, 1983). ↩

9. On the drafting and ratification of the 1995 Constitution, see Marina Ottaway, “The Ethiopian Transition: Democratization or New Authoritarianism?,” Northeast African Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 67–84. ↩

10. A version of this argument appears in Donham, Marxist Modern, and in sympathetic memoirs of early revolutionary participants. The harsh-on-Mengistu version is more common. ↩

11. The realist defence of the Derg’s consolidation appears in various forms in the security-studies literature on civil-war prevention. See, broadly, the comparative discussion in Edmond J. Keller, Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People’s Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). ↩