A Review of Three Approaches to the Eritrean Nation as a Case for Nation before Identity.

• Author: Krijestorac, Mirsad
• Position: "The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Dominance, Resistance, Nationalism 1941-1993," "Identity Jilted or Re-Imaging Identity: The Divergent Paths of Eritrean and Tigrayan Nationalist Struggles," "Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora"

The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Dominance, Resistance, Nationalism 1941-1993

By Ruth Iyob

Cambridge University Press, 1997, 216 pages, $29.99, ISBN: 9780521595919

Identity Jilted or Re-Imaging Identity: The Divergent Paths of Eritrean and Tigrayan Nationalist Struggles

By Alemseged Abbay

The Red Sea Press, 1998, 250 pages, $60, ISBN: 9781569020715

Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora

By Tricia Redeker Hepner

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 272 pages, $26, ISBN: 9780812221510

Observers of African political developments are puzzled by the strange absence of strong and effective secession movements on the continent. The case of multi-ethnic Eritrea's nationalism and its successful struggle to gain full independence from Ethiopia still represents an exception to the general trend of no separations from post-colonial states. The Eritrean exceptionality warrants a closer look at the peculiarities of this East African country particularly the maturation of a separate political identity that has been able to support its thirty-year-long struggle for independence, despite the fact of the common main ethnies on both sides of the conflict and of what is now the border between those two countries.

This review article examines three approaches to Eritrean nationalism. Ruth Iyob (1995) looks at the imagined Eritrean citizenry that has developed a sense of itself over a span of fifty years. Alemseged Abbay (1998) points to the importance of the ethno-symbolic factors that were instrumental in building the identity and subsequent diversionary paths of ethnonationalism among the Tigrayans, the main Eritrean ethnic Finally Tricia Hepner (2009) sees the Eritrean diaspora as the instrumental component of the community that spawned and nurtured Eritrean nationalism, as well as a possible place where this nationalism matured through the diaspora's interactions with the homeland, seen by them as the party-state. Since Eritrea is completely inaccessible due to the nature of its oppressive political regime, these books are very valuable in their attempt to explain the exceptional case of Eritrea.

Historical Approach

Iyob's book is an authoritative historical account of Eritrea's political history. The Eritrean Struggle for Independence begins with her observation of "the 'conglomerate of different communities' that had been strangers to each other" in the occupied Ethiopian territory that became Italy's "first-born colony" (p. 1). Iyob situates the birth of the dream of an independent Eritrean state between the interactions of the Eritrean population among itself in reaction to three factors: Italian colonization, the international state system, and Ethiopian hegemony.

The colonial construct was the first concept of Eritrean self-awareness as a separate group, with which all its later rulers had to grapple. The nine Eritrean ethnic groups developed a collective sense of separateness from their powerful hegemonic neighbor, Ethiopia. As a result of the Italian defeat in WWII, the territory of Eritrea came under temporary British rule between 1941 and 1952. In that decade, Eritreans began to think of themselves as a separate people, despite their history of being part of the ancient Empire of Ethiopia. Consequently, during the British mandate, two streams developed among Eritreans: one that advocated for union with Ethiopia and the other, a regional nationalism that advocated for independence.

The propensity of the international structure to accept international and regional hegemonies caused the Eritrean struggle to persist while crystallizing distinguished Eritrean nationalism (pp. 23-26). Ethiopian regional hegemony was based on domination and consensus developed by invocation of Hedley Bull's "overriding principles" and legitimized through effective Ethiopian diplomacy while opposition to it was effectively contained by military means (p. 27). Because of that, and despite the "manifestly Pan-African" Eritrean orientation (pp. 47-54), Eritrean nationalists faced an uphill battle in their quest for self-determination against the geopolitical arrangements of the international systems structured around Cold War politics and Africa's own perceptions and romantic notions of Pan-Ethiopian-ness. Eritrean elites claimed the right to "national self-determination on the basis of their identity as a former Italian colony whose decolonization was thwarted by Ethiopian intervention" (p. 53). During that time, ordinary Eritreans were not only developing a sense of their distinctiveness but also being 'habituated' to the idea of being a distinct polity capable of articulating and acting upon its own demands.

However, these early signals of Eritrean regional nationalism during the initial stage of the Federation were met with Ethiopian annexation in 1952 and the fleeing of Eritrean political leaders to Egypt and Sudan (p. 91). At this juncture, Eritreans developed a consensus about their common experience through coherent discourse and meaningful symbols during the incubation period (pp. 95-96)...