Sovereignty is not Conditional: Obsessed Potemkin Party Elites and the Abuse of History
Red Sea Beacon By David Yeh (Abridged)
Few ideas in the politics of the Horn of Africa are as reckless and as dangerous as the claim that a people’s right to exist can be nullified by another state’s geography and illusion to get sovereign access to the sea. Yet this is precisely what is asserted when Eritrea’s independence is framed as a mere tactic to deny Ethiopia a port, and Eritrean legitimacy is treated as something that would evaporate the moment Ethiopia acquires maritime access. This argument does more than distort history. It reduces sovereignty to a bargaining chip, converts geography into a moral hierarchy, and reintroduces a doctrine of conditional nationhood that international law was designed to abolish.
The historical record offers no support for such a claim. Ethiopia’s relationship to the Red Sea was never based on an assumed right to coastal sovereignty, nor was Eritrea created as an instrument of maritime exclusion.
Indeed, Eritrea emerged through a distinct colonial trajectory, shaped by Italian rule, separate legal and administrative institutions, and an evolving political identity that developed independently of Ethiopian sovereignty. Its subsequent struggle for independence was not a project engineered by Ethiopia’s adversaries, but a prolonged, mass-based movement grounded in a quest for decolonization, law, and popular consent.
To treat Eritrean nationhood as contingent on Ethiopia’s port access is therefore not only historically false, but normatively dangerous. It revives a logic in which borders are negotiable only when they constrain power, peoples exist only at the pleasure of delusional neighbors, and sovereignty becomes a revocable privilege rather than a legal right. Such thinking does not clarify the past. It destabilizes the present and risks reopening conflicts that international law exists to prevent.
The assertion that Eritrean independence exists primarily to deprive Ethiopia of a seaport, and that Eritrea’s national legitimacy would collapse if Ethiopia obtained sovereign maritime access, is both historically inaccurate and analytically unsound. In the same vein, at no point did Ethiopia assert sovereign ownership over the Red Sea coastline, even in minimal form. Maritime access was treated as a matter of treaty, and transit, not as an inherent territorial entitlement. To suggest otherwise is to project contemporary grievances onto a historical record that consistently points in the opposite direction and to misuse history to retroactively deny another people’s nationhood.
The creation of the Italian colony of Eritrea did not arise from a deliberate strategy to deny Ethiopia maritime access. It emerged from the broader context of nineteenth-century European imperial expansion along the Red Sea, driven by the opening of the Suez Canal, the logistical demands of steamship trade, and rivalry among European powers. Italy’s initial foothold was commercial, not military.
This pattern reflects the standard sequence of the Scramble for Africa: private commercial entry followed by formal imperial annexation. There is no evidence that the colony was conceived as a device to punish or contain Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s landlocked condition was the consequence of imperial competition and strategic bargaining, not the outcome of a project aimed at negating Ethiopian sovereignty through Eritrean identity.
Alongside Abiy Ahmed’s rhetoric about Ethiopia’s supposed entitlement to “two waters” the Nile and the Red Sea has emerged an equally misleading claim: that European powers once sought to annex western Ethiopian provinces in order to sever Ethiopia from the Nile. No credible historical record supports such a design. What does exist is well-documented postwar British advocacy for the Bevin–Sforza plan, which proposed partitioning Eritrea and attaching its western lowlands to Sudan, a proposal Ethiopia itself supported at the time.
Eritrea’s independence rests on a distinct colonial experience, a separate administrative and legal trajectory, and a prolonged, mass-based struggle for independence. The formal proclamation of the Italian Colony of Eritrea in 1890 merely consolidated territories acquired incrementally through these processes.
Contrary to the narrative advanced by Ethiopian leaders, the European powers so often labeled “Ethiopia’s enemies” did not midwife Eritrean independence; they resisted it. Until the final defeat of their Ethiopian client state in May 1991, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and their regional allies aligned consistently against Eritrean liberation. Eritrea prevailed not because of external sponsorship, but in spite of it. Its legitimacy was forged through the sacrifice of its people and anchored in internationally recognized principles of decolonization, law, and popular consent.
Final Note
The current Ethiopian fixation on sovereign access to the sea has no foundation in history or law. It reflects instead the political desperation of a leadership seeking to compensate for domestic failure with external ambition. As living standards collapse, inflation soars, and public trust erodes, maritime fantasies are deployed as distraction, not strategy. Eritrea’s independence, however, is not contingent on Ethiopia’s internal crises or geopolitical aspirations. It is a settled historical and legal fact.
To conflate Ethiopia’s desire for access with Eritrean nationhood is to weaponize geography and invert sovereignty, transforming access into entitlement and power into permission over another people’s existence. Such reasoning does not illuminate the past; it falsifies it. Claims that Eritrean legitimacy dissolves once Ethiopia secures a port amount to a doctrine of conditional sovereignty that finds no support in international law, the UN Charter, or the founding principles of the African Union. They selectively challenge borders only where they constrain power and reduce entire peoples to expendable variables in strategic calculations.
History offers no evidence for this logic, and law provides it no shelter. Persisting in such narratives risks reviving old injustices, eroding hard-won legal norms, and reopening conflicts whose costs the Horn of Africa cannot afford. Eritrea’s independence is not a bargaining chip. It is an accomplished fact, secured by struggle, recognized by law, and beyond revision by political frustration or historical distortion.