The United States And The Horn Of Africa

An Analytical Study Of Pattern And Process

Okbazghi Yohannes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000306798
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The recent collapse of the bipolar world order has been accompanied by momentous changes, dynamically setting the international system in motion toward an uncertain future. Such a profound transformation of the international system mandates an evaluation of American foreign policy and the role of the United States in this radically changed world order. In this insightful new book, Okbazghi Yohannes examines the role of U.S. foreign policy with regard to the four countries that make up the Horn of Africa: Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia. The book begins by analyzing the historical patterns and processes of American policy in relation to the African Horn during and after the Cold War, offering a comprehensive description of the fundamental policy choices of the United States and the means chosen to achieve American objectives in the region. Finally, Yohannes considers the extent to which the American role in the African Horn aided or impeded the emergence of political democracy and the promotion of economic development within the region. By juxtaposing this new method of examination with traditional approaches, the book reveals a greater coherence in the structural relationship between U.S. policy and the politics of the African Horn. Skillfully incorporating informative background material regarding the history, politics, and diplomacy of the countries covered by the study, Yohannes addresses the interests of both the specialist and the general reader.

Part One
The United States and Ethiopia

The Horn of Africa

Adapted from: John Sorenson ed., Disaster and Development in the Horn of Africa (London/New York: McMillan/St. Martins, 1996) p. xvii.

1
The Quest for a New Paradigm of Diplomacy

For reasons of geography, demography, and relative endowment, Ethiopia had traditionally been the epicenter of regional politics within the African Horn. The rise of Ethiopia to international prominence was mediated as much by its decisive victory over the Italians at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 as by its subsequent emergence as a regional hegemon by incorporating into its empire some fifty ethnic formations thereby doubling its size and natural resources.

In the wake of Adowa, the United States began to pay more attention to developments in the African Horn. Unlike European powers, however, which were more interested in the currency of Ethiopian diplomacy, the United States was more influenced in its orientation toward the region by the logic of American capitalism which had by this time begun outward expansion. By the early twentieth century, American economic interests appeared to have made substantial gains in the Horn. In 1902, for example, the U.S. imported over $820,000 worth of Ethiopian coffee while exporting around $1,400,000 worth of goods in return.¹ Apparently, this development was sufficient to induce the U.S. to seal a commercial treaty with Ethiopia in December 1903.² The terms of the treaty defined the commercial relations between the two countries for the duration of ten years.

Oddly, rather than increasing, American commercial activities in Ethiopia actually began to decline, due to stiff competition from European and Asian interests. Consequently, initial optimism regarding prospects for developing and defending an economic sphere for private American companies in Ethiopia gave way to ambivalence; eventually, Ethiopia was virtually abandoned until 1928 when the U.S. reopened its Legation. From the Ethiopian perspective, the formal establishment of this Legation was crucial, as it prompted the U.S. Department of State to permit Ethiopia’s acquisition of John Spencer, a lawyer who served Ethiopia for the next thirty years in the capacity of legal and foreign affairs advisor.³

The evolution of American-Ethiopian relations was thwarted by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Much to the chagrin of the Ethiopians, the U.S. response to this development was virtually nonexistent, reflecting the ideological introversion of the New Dealers and the isolationist mood of Congress. In fact, in August of 1935, anticipating the outbreak of armed hostilities between Ethiopia and Italy, Congress had passed the Neutrality Act, which amounted to the complete prohibition of the sale of arms and ammunition to either side, irrespective of the nature of the aggression. “Neither the halting of aggression nor the protection of an African state against being overwhelmed by a colonial power was a major factor in American policy.”⁴

The indifferent attitude of the Roosevelt Administration toward the act of belligerency that existed between Ethiopia and Italy must be put in its proper context. By the mid-thirties, American commercial interests in Africa generally and in Ethiopia particularly had become of such trifling significance as to be unworthy of active American engagement in the African Horn. For instance, on the eve of the hostilities, the commercial transactions between U.S. and Ethiopia amounted to a paltry half-million dollars.⁵ Of the $3.2 billion the United States exported in 1936, economic interactions with Africa accounted for only $132,000,000 of the total. By the same token, of the $2.5 billion the U.S. imported in that same year, only a little over $81,000,000 was accounted for by Africa.⁶ Broadly speaking, there was nothing inconsistent in American foreign policy regarding tensions within the African Horn, to the extent that its major economic interests would not be adversely affected by the outbreak of war. The effects of the promulgation of this Neutrality Act were therefore indicative of the prevalent American mood.

Although the presumption was that the U.S. arms embargo already in place would affect Ethiopia and Italy to the same degree, it was in effect imposed only on the former, since Italy could capitalize on its industrial superiority to transform the raw materials it imported—including oil, which was not subject to the embargo—into instruments of war. In fact, American exports to Italy substantially increased during the early months of the war.⁷ Even if the League of Nations had successfully imposed a universal embargo on Italy, the latter could have procured all the raw materials it needed from the United States in order to keep its war machine running.⁸

The intense desire of the Roosevelt administration to push the Italo-Ethiopian belligerency to the backwoods of international relations notwithstanding, the United States soon found itself in a quandary, since the Ethiopian case represented far more than the fate of a single nation. The administration felt strongly that the entire conception of an international treaty system, founded on the Wilsonian vision of collective security and the renunciation of force as a means of settling disputes among states, was at stake. This broad concern for the treaty system was compounded by another factor which had more to do with domestic politics. A loose coalition of African-Americans, Jews, peace activists and others emerged, calling the U.S. government to take an active diplomatic role in the matter; the administration could not afford to ignore popular sentiment at this time.⁹

This coalition provided the Roosevelt Administration with a pretext for limited action which would avoid the hostility of isolationists. In June 1936, the Department of State unilaterally terminated the 1871 U.S.-Italian Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, although the practical effect of this action was only symbolic. It also declined to accept the credentials of the Italian ambassadors who represented the King of Italy and of Ethiopia.¹⁰

Despite the retreat of the United States from the international system following the Versailles treaty, internationalist elements in the Roosevelt Administration were deeply perturbed by the Anglo-French decision to give Mussolini permission to go ahead with his plans to annex Ethiopia. The Anglo-French agreement obtained its logic from the oversimplified calculation that their acquiescence in the Italian acquisition of Ethiopia would be sufficient to entice Mussolini away from Germany, thereby preserving the European balance of power system. From the American point of view, though, Italian aggression represented larger implications for the international treaty system. At the time, Great Britain was tinkering on the edge of abandoning the principle of non-recognition—which in effect would have meant the extension of de jure recognition to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia—so if Mussolini repudiated any territorial ambitions in North Africa and Spain, the collapse of the entire international treaty system might become reality.¹¹

Much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, in April 1938 London and Rome formally entered into a quid pro quo relationship in which the latter pledged to repudiate publicly all claims to Spain and not to threaten vital British interests in the Mediterranean region.¹² Thus the American attempts to drive home to the British the importance of upholding the principle of non-recognition, relative to the Italo-Ethiopian situation, failed to produced anything of diplomatic substance. What was particularly upsetting to the American president was the fact that such overt vitiation of the international treaty system, together with the value of international law, morality, and negotiations as appropriate means of settling international disputes, when combined with the fact that such explicit legitimation of aggression by abandoning the principle of nonrecognition, might encourage Japan to seek similar advantages from China through coercion and war.¹³

For the reasons stated above, the U.S. withheld all forms of recognition from the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and actually maintained its de jure recognition of Ethiopia as a sovereign state under Axis occupation. Although the American efforts did not have any discernible impact on the political predicaments of the Ethiopians during the occupation period, the fact that the administration withheld recognition of the Italian gains was interpreted by the Ethiopian emperor and his courtiers as a concrete expression of American goodwill. Indeed, the Ethiopian perception of the United States as the champion of international law, international morality and the right of nations to self-determination provided a context through which the emperor could look to Washington for patronage. In fact, Emperor Haile Selassie had sufficient reasons to contemplate the indispensability of obtaining American diplomatic protection.

First, following the liberation of Ethiopia in 1941 by Commonwealth troops, the British had superciliously imposed a quasi-protectorate status on the country. This was seen by Haile Selassie as representing not only the diminution of his sovereignty, but also as an affront to Ethiopian national pride. As a consequence, the emperor needed another patron to counterbalance British hegemony, and the United States was the ideal candidate for this role. Second, restoration of Ethiopias past glory, both regionally and globally, was perceived as a cardinal condition for the emergence of modern Ethiopia as an active player in international affairs. In addition to the imperative of maintaining the empire inherited from Menelik, the aggrandizement of this empire through the acquisition of Eritrea and Somalia had become one of Haile Selassie’s major preoccupations. Although these ambitions were rationalized in terms of the country’s need to have access to the sea, as well as a panoply of security considerations, these reasons in themselves were not sufficient to obtain international acquiescence in the territorial integration of Eritrea and Somalia into the empire without having a committed external patron capable of forcefully supporting such claims. The strategic indispensability of the United States to Ethiopia was seen in the light of such astute assessment of the prevailing international power configuration.

Third, the emperor understood well that neither the maintenance of internal security nor the acquisition of additional territory could be possible without the rapid modernization of the instruments of coercion. As René Lefort rightly noted, the gigantic task of modernizing the means necessary to maintain and aggrandize the empire required the importation of technology and capital from the West.¹⁴ In this regard, the emperor became preoccupied with the imperative of achieving the demolition of the horizontally-structured, traditional centers of power in favor of imperial centralization; the modernization of the means of economic extraction; the rearticulation of the hegemonic status of the Amhara along with their language, religion and culture; the construction of imperial institutions compatible with the requirements of modernity (as defined and controlled by the emperor); and the establishment of a modern military structure.¹⁵ In sum, these were the major perceptions that prompted Haile Selassie to re-evaluate his foreign policy so as to ingratiate himself with the United States. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall analyze the beginnings of U.S.-Ethiopian postwar relations by focusing on the first two Ethiopian desiderata outlined above and American responses to them. The questions surrounding Eritrea and Somalia will be treated separately in later chapters.

Toward a New Paradigm of Relations

In March 1942, the U.S. legation in Cairo received background information from a British officer regarding the nature and scope of British presence in Ethiopia. It appeared that there was a fundamental opposition between the plans of the U.K. War Department and those of the Foreign Office in London regarding the future status of Ethiopia. Citing the chaotic conditions then prevailing in Ethiopia and assuming that the Ethiopians themselves were incapable of self-government, the War Department had proposed that Great Britain retain its hold over the territory. However, the Foreign Office was fully cognizant of the political fallouts which would result from such action and indicated three points in favor of nominal Ethiopian independence. First, since Ethiopia was the first country to be freed from Axis occupation, the overt denial of that state’s right to self-determination would send a troubling message to other occupied lands. Second, the enforcement of pacification in Ethiopia would require the deployment of numerous British troops; Britain lacked the resources to maintain such a visible presence during wartime. Finally, the costs associated with the maintenance of law and order and the administration of justice were similarly beyond British capabilities.¹⁶

What finally emerged from the debate was this: Ethiopia would be granted nominal independence, but would be subject to defacto British control. The 1942 Anglo-Ethiopian treaty placed the security of Ethiopia under British military authority and bestowed extraterritorial rights on foreigners to the extent to which they could seek trials before courts where British judges sat.¹⁷ The United States showed little or no interest in either the stipulations of the treaty or their impact on Ethiopian sovereignty; instead, the U.S. was only concerned with certain of the treaty’s provisions that appeared to have infringed upon its own capitulatory rights in Ethiopia. The terms of the treaty had the effect of placing Ethiopia under British tutelage, which meant that other states c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE THE UNITED STATES AND ETHIOPIA
• PART TWO THE UNITED STATES AND ERITREA
• PART THREE THE UNITED STATES AND SOMALIA
• PART FOUR THE UNITED STATES AND THE SUDAN
• Epilogue
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index