EU Policy towards Ethiopia amidst the Tigray War: The Limits of Mitigating Fragmentation

ABSTRACT

The Tigray war illustrates how the European Union (EU) often fails to act effectively and consistently in a highly fragmented context. During the 2020-22 conflict, the EU failed to address a number of challenges emanating from the internal fragmentation of Ethiopia. These pertained to the EU’s lack of contextual knowledge about local conflict dynamics and actors and, relatedly, the legacy of its relations with Tigray’s leadership; the inconsistent approach of EU institutions and member states that initially led to an normative outlook, which later evolved into a more balanced and pragmatic one when it was arguably too late; and the inability to mitigate competition with other external powers who backed the Ethiopian federal government. As a result, the EU adopted an inconsistent and ineffective approach toward the conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• Ethiopia
• Tigray War
• Fragmentation

Located between the Red Sea and the Sahel, the Horn of Africa (HoA) is a strategic region in terms of trade, migration and security for many regional and global actors, including the European Union (EU). As other countries of the Horn, Ethiopia experiences deep internal fragmentation, which makes it a breeding ground for multiple centres of violence or power that can eventually erode, challenge or collapse state authority. The EU has traditionally considered Ethiopia its strategic partner in the HoA to help control migration, ensure regional stability and strengthen its partnership with the African Union (AU). However, as demonstrated by the brutal war fought between the federal government and Tigray’s rebels in 2020-22, this relationship has not led the EU to develop an effective and consistent approach to mitigate Ethiopia’s fragmentation.

Scholarship on EU foreign and security policy (EUFSP) in the Horn has mainly focused on analysing measures the EU has put in place to fight piracy and terrorism and address state failure. The EU’s approach has been compared with those of other external actors like the United States (US), Turkey and Gulf countries, as well as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia. However, further analysis is needed to understand the EU’s inability to address and mitigate regional, national and subnational divides, as well as limited statehood – what in this article is referred to as ‘fragmentation’.

Based on official documents, in-depth interviews¹ and existing literature on the subject matter combined with a wide-ranging overview of the scholarly debate, this article analyses why the EU, during the Tigray war, failed to address a number of challenges emanating from the internal fragmentation of Ethiopia – that is, its limited ability to develop contextual knowledge as well as to integrate the various policies into a single, consistent conflict management approach. As will be discussed, this occurred for several reasons: the EU’s lack of contextual knowledge about local conflict dynamics and actors and, relatedly, the legacy of its previous relations with Tigray’s leadership; the inconsistent approach of EU institutions and member states that initially led to a normative outlook, which then evolved into a more balanced and pragmatic one when it was arguably too late; and the inability to mitigate competition with other external powers who backed the Ethiopian federal government. All this resulted in the EU adopting an inconsistent and ineffective approach toward the conflict.

The EUFSP toward Ethiopia: a brief literature review

In the literature, the relationship between Europe and Africa has been approached from different perspectives, ranging from its colonial past to current relations. Studies have taken account of how Europe has historically exploited the continent but also how Africa has played a role in the history of European integration. In 1972, Walter Rodney’s seminal book addressed the question of why Africa remained so underdeveloped despite the continent’s enormous resources, focusing on the impact of human trade, as well as colonialism and the division of the continent into several nation-states (Rodney 2018). More recently, Adekeye Adebajo and Kaye Whiteman (2012) looked at the political, socio-economic and cultural interactions between the EU and Africa, starting from the idea of ‘Eurafrique’ to the African Union’s recent emulation of EU institutions.² Giuliano Garavini (2012) has discussed how EU integration was deeply linked to the colonial past of its member states (Garavini 2012. See also Hansen and Jonsson 2014), while Maurizio Carbone (2015) has examined how EU interests in Africa differ from other external actors such as the US and the PRC. According to Carbone, Africa is the geographical area where the EU can best test its potential as a global actor. However, the EU’s policy impact in Africa (especially in development and security) has been substantially constrained by inter-institutional rivalries between the Council and diplomatic missions, between the Council and the Commission, as well as between the EU as a whole and the particular interests of individual member states, limiting the EU’s ability to act consistently and coherently (Ibid; see also Henokl and Webersik 2014). To be sure, as highlighted by Carmen Gebhard (2017) these problems inform the EU's international relations not just in Africa, but more broadly. This is due to the fact that the current EU architecture of external relations limits synergies between member states, EU institutions and other actors.

Against this backdrop, although the EU considers Addis Ababa a “strategic” partner (European Council 2023), the academic literature has often neglected EU-Ethiopia relations (Public Affairs Bruxelles 2021). Ethiopia is often used as an example among many to describe the EU’s interests in the African continent and how these interests often cause a shift from a normative to a pragmatic approach in EUFSP. From this perspective, as highlighted by Gorm Rye Olsen (2009), Ethiopia attests to the EU’s inconsistent application of its human rights conditionality in Africa. Karen del Biondo (2014) has also highlighted examples from five countries – including Ethiopia – where the human rights clause has not been invoked for security interests.

The Ethiopian case has also been used to illustrate EU-HoA relations at large, especially how the EU has addressed the threats of piracy, terrorism and state failure in the Horn through a combination of civilian and military missions (Winn and Lewis 2019; Melvin 2019; Tardy 2016. See also Ursu and van den Berg 2018; Meester and Lanfranchi 2021). However, as Nicoletta Pirozzi (2014) points out, the EU Strategy for the HoA has often been less the result of a genuine effort to develop a consistent policy in the region than a “reverse engineering” exercise, where a conceptual hat was developed ex-post to provide consistency to a number of different and often uncoordinated activities.

Thus, while analysis of EU interests and actions in the HoA exists, further analysis is needed to understand how the EU has acted to manage and mitigate fragmentation in Ethiopia. The high level of fragmentation in the Horn is widely addressed by the literature. As observed by Alex de Waal (2015), the Horn offers a “cornucopia” of violence – interstate and civil wars, international military interventions, maritime piracy, jihadism and non-violent popular uprisings. Historically, the degree of fragmentation of the region has reflected the degree to which state sovereignty, territorial integrity and regime legitimacy have been challenged (Markakis 1987).

Relatedly, the regional HoA context lacks the degree of cohesion required to forge a regional political identity. As Endalcachew Bayeh's (2019) study discussing sub-regional organisations shows, the absence of a common regional identity and a common perception of security in the Horn hampers multilateralism and reduces the prospects for integration (See also Ingo and Soren 2020). This explains why multiple centres of (often violent) power have emerged, eroding state authority and regional rules of engagement. These ‘cracks in the wall’ leave space for the penetration of external actors as discussed by Christopher Clapham (2017), although the agency of local governments (especially Ethiopia’s) to influence external actors’ policies by bringing them in line with their own national interests must not be discounted.

A further factor discussed in the literature pertains to the incapacity – not only of the EU, but of liberal peacebuilders in general – to analyse and comprehend local conflicts in the African context. As highlighted by Severine Autesserre’s (2010) study of the failed transition of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from war to democracy, the dominant international peacebuilding culture has often neglected the importance of local dimension of violence and conflict, thus constraining the overall ability of international actors to address regional fragmentation. As will be discussed in the following, this was also a major constraint which limited the EU’s ability to develop a consistent and effective mitigation strategy towards fragmentation in Ethiopia.

The conceptual framework

In the following, EUFSP toward Ethiopia and its constraints are discussed through the concepts of fragmentation and multipolar competition, in line with the overall framework of this Special Issue (Alcaro and Dijkstra 2024). Fragmentation can occur at various levels: states, regions and communities. In this article, we refer to state fragmentation with specific reference to the single-country case of Ethiopia. It is used to describe the phenomenon whereby the state competes with other centres of power (for example, subnational authorities) or non-state actors. States affected by fragmentation are often targeted by external powers which intervene in the country according to their interests. This is analytically encapsulated by the notion of multipolar competition, which relates to the interaction between multiple powers (relative to the analysed context) espousing contrasting views of global and regional orders.³ Due to its high level of fragmentation, the HoA provides a salient example of how EUFSP must develop strategies to mitigate these two external challenges. Indeed, the Tigray war in Ethiopia offers a useful vantage point to dissect how exactly they constrained the EU’s foreign policy toward the region and the extent to which the EU has managed, or failed, to mitigate them.

According to our framework, the measures through which the EU mitigates the effect of fragmentation, multipolar competition and intra-EU contestation can be classified into three types: institutional, functional and diplomatic-coalitional. As defined in the Introduction to this Special Issue, institutional mitigation measures relate to which EUFSP actors (institutions, member states or a combination of the two) take the lead in the formulation and implementation of conflict and crisis management; functional measures relate to which issues the EUFSP prioritises and consequently which instruments are used with respect to managing conflict; diplomatic/coalitional measures refer to the steps taken by the EU to involve like-minded actors – in the case of Ethiopia, particularly the US – to increase its leverage over other external powers. In the following, we argue that the EU, during the Tigray war, did not develop an institutional, functional or (to a lesser extent) diplomatic-coalitional mitigation strategy capable of preventing or solving the conflict.

The challenges for EUFSP toward Ethiopia

The internal fragmentation of Ethiopia

Ethiopia has the largest population (about 127 million people) and GDP in the HoA. The country is plagued by identity-driven conflict dynamics, both internally and with its neighbours. The ethno-federalist nature of the country’s political landscape, enshrined in its constitution, reflects the existence of multiple centres of power that undermine the legitimate monopoly of the use of force and the ability of the federal state to set and enforce norms and rules. The main factors behind this identity-induced fragmentation in Ethiopia include internal power struggles between the elites representing the three most influential ethnic groups, namely the Amhara, Oromo and Tigrayans; competition for resources (or, as bluntly put to us by an Ethiopian expert, pure and simple “greed”);⁴ and generations-old grievances. The power struggle is rooted in the historical allocation of power which originated from the conquest and annexation of territories by Ethiopia’s various groups at each other’s expense.⁵ Legitimate grievances have been instrumentalised by the elites to drum up support for their continued rule through the use of ethno-nationalist rhetoric that threatens incumbent centres of power, leading to the creation of political narratives that stir violent confrontation and thus fragmentation.

A related, major component of Ethiopia's identity-driven fragmentation is the ethno-ideological debate between ethno-nationalism and pan-Ethiopianism. The former refers to continuity of the status quo shaped by identity politics; while supporters of the latter, who envision themselves as anti-inequality progressives, take a revisionist approach to the Ethiopian conception of statehood.⁶ The nature of the Ethiopian constitution itself puts a spotlight on the structural dimension of identity-induced fragmentation.⁷ The Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia accords such a level of autonomy to the (identity-based) constituent parts of the country that it can be argued there is no such a thing as sovereignty of Ethiopia as a whole (Mengie 2015). Ethnic groups like the Tigrayans have attempted to use this argument as a justification for secession claims (Hamza 2021). The Constitution explicitly recognises the sovereign power that resides in the “Nations, Nationalities and Peoples of Ethiopia”, creating the conditions where each member state of the federation can challenge the central government (Ethiopia 1994). The different regions even have the legal right to own their military. Although this arrangement has had some positive effects,⁸ it has provided a legal basis to contest, including with armed force, the authority of the federal state.⁹

The combination of these elements has morphed into several crises within Ethiopia, especially in recent years. Indeed, between 1991 and 2018, the federal government, led by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), managed to maintain a relatively stable institutional setup by tailoring special privileges to different political actors. The TPLF's rule was based on relations of personal clientele between the federal and local governments, and the creation of subordinate power centres that provided some sort of authoritarian stability (Chanie 2007). The picture changed following Abiy Ahmed’s election as Prime Minister in 2018, which ended the TPLF’s rule, leading to the outbreak of violent conflict in the Benishangul Gumuz and especially the Tigray region in subsequent years.

Alarming signs of potential conflict in Tigray were becoming increasingly visible by 2019. Ethnic clashes and assassinations of prominent individuals aggravated ethnic tensions. The decision by Abiy Ahmed to disband the historical ruling coalition of regional political parties and establish in its place a single organisation, the Prosperity Party, created a major rift between the national and regional government. In March 2020, frictions between the government and TPLF increased after the electoral board said it could not run national polls set for August because of the Covid-19 pandemic (Al Jazeera 2020). In defiance of the federal government, the TPLF held regional elections for its state council, which the government dismissed as illegal. In parallel, tensions around the control of federal military units stationed in Tigray mounted. This culminated when regional militias loyal to the TPLF attacked the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) on 4 November (Embassy of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia London 2020). Two days later, Abiy Ahmed sent troops to Tigray, which was immediately cut off from the rest of the country in terms of aid assistance, electricity, communication and bank account services (Center for Preventive Action 2022). Armed violence in Tigray escalated rapidly, with hundreds of thousands of combatants involved and violence spreading through the Tigray and Afar regions. There are conflicting figures on the number of deaths. However, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project database shows that thousands were killed.¹⁰ Also, the displacement figures reported by the UNHCR run into millions (UNHCR 2023). Several other human rights abuses and violations, as well as sexual and gender-based violence, were also reported. In its report, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (2023) found that perpetrators include the Eritrean forces, ENDF soldiers and, at times, Amhara Special Forces, Afar Special Forces and Fano militia.

The war was immediately shaped by three issues: the ethnicisation of the conflict; Abiy Ahmed's desire to centralise power at the expense of his early reformist agenda; and the internationalisation of the conflict with the almost immediate involvement of Eritrean troops alongside the federal government. After months of denying their involvement, Abiy Ahmed admitted that Eritreans were fighting in support of federal troops in the spring of 2021. Eritrean forces were very soon accused of targeting civilians and cruelty.

In the first phase of the conflict, the federal troops took control of major cities in Tigray, including the regional capital Mekelle. Although most of the fighting in this phase occurred in Tigray, the conflict immediately assumed a national dimension. In April 2021, the government declared a state of emergency in the Amhara region after violent attacks against Oromo residents (Al Jazeera 2021b). Oromia’s regional army allied with the TPLF while the Amhara and Afar militias reportedly supported federal troops.

In June 2021, the federal government decided to withdraw its forces from Tigray after announcing a unilateral cease-fire. The TPLF, unsatisfied with the government’s cease-fire conditions, launched a counteroffensive which resulted in Tigray forces taking control of towns just 160 miles from Addis Ababa (Walsh and Marks 2021). Yet, the federal government managed to fight back thanks to drones provided by Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran, and strong popular mobilisation (Walsh 2021).

Defeated, the TPLF forces returned to their home region in December 2021. Subsequently, the federal government indicated that it would no longer advance towards Mekelle (Devermont 2020). Yet, fighting continued on the borders of Tigray, Afar and Amhara until the Addis Ababa government declared another unilateral cease-fire in March 2022. The TPLF-controlled Tigray regional government agreed on the cessation of hostilities to allow humanitarian assistance (Ethiopia Peace Observatory 2022).

Between March and August 2022, no major clashes between the federal troops and the TPLF occurred. However, Tigray remained isolated and only limited amounts of humanitarian aid entered the region. Meanwhile, the international community, and in particular the US, the EU and the AU, pushed for a peace process led by the latter. But the unmet TPLF pre-conditions – such as the restoration of basic needs and unconditional humanitarian assistance – sparked a fourth phase of the conflict in August 2022, when TPLF forces clashed with Amhara regional forces and some regional special forces in the Amhara and Tigray regions. However, the TPLF made no progress and found itself increasingly short of resources and options. In November 2022, AU-led talks produced an Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities which was signed between the federal government and TPLF leaders. The latter agreed to disarm and re-instate federal authority over Tigray by the establishment of a transitional regional government, while Addis Ababa promised the restoration of access to the regions of Tigray and Afar and basic needs to Tigrayans. According to the EU and UN, the Tigray blockade had affected the lives of thousands of civilians who were prevented from accessing food and medical assistance during the conflict (El Pais 2023).

Even if the deal has for the time being brought mass violence to an end, doubts persist over its full implementation (Concerned Pan-African Scholars 2022). In February 2023, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – which today represents almost half of the population and has been key to building the unity of Ethiopia (Prunier and Ficquet 2015) – risked splitting, suggesting that the internal fragmentation had shifted to the religious level. Since April 2023 there have been strong protests in the Amhara region after Abiy Ahmed's attempt to dismantle the local military forces (African Union 2023). Overall, the peace agreement seems not to have addressed the root causes of the sheer internal fragmentation that has plagued Ethiopia in recent years.

Multipolar competition over Ethiopia

In the HoA, where deadly and long-decade conflicts have consistently disrupted peace, Ethiopia has been widely regarded by external actors not just as key to the eventual stabilisation of the region, but as a powerful ally to pursue foreign policy goals.

For instance, when the US revamped its engagement in the HoA following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Ethiopia became its major partner in counter-terrorism operations against al-Shabaab, the Islamist group that in the late 2000s challenged the internationally recognised government of Somalia (Debisa and Simons 2021). Ethiopia, whose economy has been growing fast in the last fifteen years, is also one of the most successful examples of the PRC’s economic penetration of Africa (Fiala 2021). The Gulf countries and Turkey have also intensified their activism in the region. The UAE, which provided Addis Ababa with aid, investment and military supplies before and during the war, has looked at Ethiopia as a strategic country. Indeed, after the 2018 election of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who promised privatisation and development reforms, Ethiopian-Emirati relations experienced a boost (International Crisis Group 2018). Ethiopia has also become a main importer of Turkish weapon systems, which Ankara provides not just for commercial reasons but because it fears that instability in Ethiopia could spill over into Somalia, where it has established a permanent military presence (Abdolgader 2022). In recent years, Iran has also increased its presence in Ethiopia to counter-balance the influence of its Arab rivals and the US (Keynoush 2022). Finally, Ethiopia is at the centre of Russia’s Africa policy to limit Western influence in the continent (Paravicini 2022). Moscow’s move to replace French naval training support to Ethiopia is also relevant (Africa Intelligence 2022). In 2021, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov started his African tour in Ethiopia in order to highlight that Russia’s interests in the continent extend beyond military cooperation to diplomatic and economic partnerships. Moscow’s re-engagement in the continent paid off after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. When the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution to condemn Russia in March 2022, 17 out of 54 African countries – including Ethiopia – abstained, while Eritrea voted against (The Africa Report 2022).

Ethiopia was therefore considered by all external actors as a strategic country where their presence could be asserted, not only in the region, but also in Africa at large. Notably, the objectives of each of these actors differed – including, partially, from those of the EU. For the PRC, Ethiopia was an important economic partner as well as – at a more symbolic level – a country where Beijing could present itself as a successful model of development. For the US, Ethiopia was key to counter-terrorism strategies. Turkey and Gulf countries considered Ethiopia as fertile ground to export arms and exert their influence on the continent, just as Russia did. For the EU, however, Ethiopia was a strategic country from both a normative perspective – to relaunch its partnership with the AU and to test its capacity to be a global normative power – as well as from a pragmatic one – to protect its interest in migration control, trade and anti-piracy.

EUFSP towards Ethiopia before and during the Tigray war

Historically, EU countries have been quite reluctant to single out Addis Ababa for alleged violations of human rights and international law, due to the perceived need to keep strong security ties with the Horn's largest country. This was demonstrated, for example, during the Ethiopian intervention in support of Somalia's weak government against the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a radical Islamist group that had taken control of Mogadishu in 2006 (Gettleman 2006). In this circumstance, the EU was even accused of potential complicity due to the financial and technical assistance provided to Addis Ababa (Rice 2007).

When Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018 promising to ease restrictions on civil and political freedoms and tensions with the neighbours, the EU's leniency toward Ethiopia's government was further consolidated. To an extent, the Europeans could be excused for their early enthusiasm for Abiy Ahmed. Shortly after being appointed, the new prime minister released thousands of political prisoners, lifted restrictions on independent media, backed a woman to become president, created a gender parity cabinet and established a ministry of peace. The positive attitude toward Abiy Ahmed strengthened when he promoted an Ethiopia-Eritrea peace deal in July 2018, which ended a two-decades-long on-and-off war over border issues. In 2019, Abiy Ahmed earned the Nobel Peace Prize and was hailed not only as a reformist, but as a regional unifier and a peacemaker in most of European capitals and international fora (BBC News 2021). Furthermore, the European Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen identified Abiy Ahmed as the primary interlocutor to relaunch the EU's engagement with Africa (Caruso and Akamo 2023).

But as soon as the Tigray war broke out, the EU abruptly changed its attitude towards Abiy Ahmed, highlighting the inconsistency of its foreign policy. Initially, the EU prioritised the protection of civilians and humanitarian access to Tigray (Murphy 2020), hoping to convince the federal government to end a weeks-old blockade of international aid to Tigray (Council of the European Union 2020). The EU also allocated 4 million euros to accommodate the most urgent humanitarian needs of the over 40,000 Ethiopians who had fled to Sudan (UN News 2020).

Once it realised that its attempts at diplomatic persuasion of the Ethiopian government would not have the desired effect, the EU tried to leverage its financial influence to de-escalate the conflict. In December 2020, the Commission suspended nearly 90 million euros in development aid to Ethiopia from its 2021-28 budget (Reuters 2021). Since the EU had provided Ethiopia with 815 million euros in aid during the 2014-20 budgetary period (EEAS 2020), the suspension of the aid for potentially the next 7-year cycle had little impact.

The EU tied the withholding of aid to three conditions: i) a ceasefire; ii) humanitarian access not only to Tigray but also to Afar and Amhara regions, where most of the displaced population could not receive aid; iii) accountability for the crimes occurred during the conflict (Marks 2020). The Ethiopian government responded with a commitment to ease restrictions on access for humanitarian aid agencies and bring all perpetrators of crime to justice, as well as to accept international technical assistance to undertake the investigations but took few steps to implement such commitments (UN News 2021).

In response to Eritrea's support of the Ethiopian federal government,¹¹ the EU introduced sanctions against the Asmara government for alleged human rights violations, including extra-judicial killings, torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests (Calvin-Smith and Di Biasio 2021). Despite EU sanctions, Eritrea continued its support for the Addis Ababa government throughout the entire conflict. Notably, the EU never imposed sanctions on the Ethiopian government, despite High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Commission Vice-President (HRVP) Josep Borrell's call to do so throughout the whole of 2021 (Borrell 2021).

The TPLF offensive of mid-2021 prompted the EU to adopt a more balanced stance towards the warring parties as there was increasing awareness that the TPLF shared responsibility for the escalation of tensions into open conflict.¹² The publication of a UN report on the atrocities in Ethiopia published in November 2021 played a role in changing the EU’s approach. Based on a joint investigation between the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the report highlighted the deep complexity of the conflict, underlining the involvement of a plurality of local actors responsible for abuses on civilians (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2021). According to the findings, the ENDF, Eritrean Defence Forces and Tigray Special Forces, as well as allied militias, all committed serious abuses and violations of human rights and of humanitarian and refugee law – such as attacks on civilians, unlawful killings, acts of torture and ill-treatment, arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances. Moreover, albeit to a different extent, all parties were accused of restricting humanitarian access, particularly food assistance, in Tigray. While the report's impartiality has been questioned, it did contribute to changing European perceptions (Odinkalu et al. 2021). In early summer 2022, the EU announced a package of around 80 million euros to finance programmes in the area of health and education, with a special focus on areas affected by the conflict (Borrell 2022). Following the resumption of hostilities in August 2022, this decision was perceived as too rash by some European officials.¹³

Rushed or not, it was a late shift. The EU's initial repositioning against the federal government had an impact on EU-Ethiopia relations. This was evident during the AU-led peace process. While the Tigrayans demanded that the US and the EU lead the process, the Ethiopian government not only succeeded in keeping the negotiation in the AU's hands but also refused to grant the EU or any of its member states observer status, unlike the US, the UN and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the only regional organisation in the HoA (Ethiopia Observer 2022). Despite a willingness to re-engage with Addis, the EU continued to condition its financial support to Ethiopia on the implementation of the November 2022 peace deal until October 2023 when it pledged assistance worth 650 million euros to the African country (Associated Press 2023). This was the first aid package announced by the EU since the war in Tigray.

EU mitigation and its failure

Managing Ethiopia’s fragmentation

The EU was caught unprepared by the outbreak of the Tigray war and never managed to develop a consistent strategy to address it, being forced to make late adjustments to developments on the ground. As a result, its conflict management role was modest, and its policy switched from being initially normative to a more pragmatic outlook at a later stage. Neither approach, however, seems to have been successful in mitigating the conflict: the first failed to really take the internal fragmentation of Ethiopia into account, whereas the second occurred in a context where other external actors were already providing military and diplomatic support to Abiy Ahmed, thus reducing the EU's negotiating power vis-à-vis the Ethiopian government.

Ethiopia's fragmentation was such that officials from the EU and its member states struggled to build a comprehensive picture of events on the ground and the role of local actors. The Tigray war made clear the EU’s inability to understand the country's context due to insufficient conflict analysis. This happened despite the presence of 22 embassies of EU member states in Addis Ababa, along with the EU delegation. This is not the first time in the history of the EU's involvement in African conflicts that a significant diplomatic presence fails to anticipate major events. Some EU missions in Africa – such as the one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – have failed to achieve the expected results primarily because of inadequate exchange of information between the EU and national delegations (Carbone 2015). The problems caused by a lack of contextualised knowledge and information exchanges between EU and national delegations were amplified by the fact that the EU does not have its own foreign intelligence (Brzozowski and Fortuny 2022). The EU’s inability to develop adequate local knowledge about fragmentation dynamics was arguably a major constraining factor on its mitigation strategy in the case of the Tigray war.

This lack of in-depth local knowledge partly explains why, when the conflict erupted, the EU relied on its strong ties with the TPLF leadership that had developed during the latter's long spell (1991-2018) at the helm of the federal government.¹⁴ This relationship with the TPLF, on the one hand, resulted in the EU having a biased view of the conflict; on the other hand, it led the EU to overestimate its capacity to influence not just Abiy Ahmed but also the TPLF. The EU's initially highly critical approach to the way the government handled the conflict and the humanitarian crisis in Tigray was severely criticised by Ethiopian diplomats, who described the European narrative of the war as not reflecting reality.¹⁵

There is quite a substantial literature on how Western observers have historically failed to accurately interpret African conflicts due to a simplistic and stereotyped application of categories related, for example, to ‘ethnic violence’. In Rwanda, for example, as explained by Vincent Duclert (2021), the French refusal to characterise the conflict in anything but ethnic terms was among the reasons that undermined decisive political action to prevent the genocide. For this reason, Duclert proposed to reform the hiring and training of high-ranking officials by requiring research experience in history and social sciences (Ibid). As mentioned, this inability to properly interpret local conflict dynamics, especially at the subnational level, is far from limited to the EU or the case of Ethiopia – it has arguably been one of the major flaws of international peacebuilding culture as such.

That said, the Ethiopian government certainly bear substantial responsibility for major violations of international law during the conflict, as the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia report (2023) shows. However, the same report and other investigations, including one by Amnesty International (2022), have also highlighted the responsibility of the Tigrayans in the blockade of the region and in the violence towards civilians. Most importantly, investigations on the ground shed light on the role of a multitude of actors in the Tigray war, thus underlining the fallacy of the initial binary view of the conflict on the European side.

Another reason that explains the inconsistent EUFSP toward the Tigray crisis has been the failure of inter-institutional coordination between the Commission, the Council, the HRVP and the EU Special Representative for the HoA (EUSR) – a problem that regularly besets the EU's Africa policy (Carbone 2015). The EU's initial response to the crisis in Tigray was mainly the result of decisions by Commissioner for International Partnerships Jutta Urpilainen, HRVP Borrell and then EUSR Alexander Rondos (in office until July 2021), who all promoted a markedly normative approach highlighting the Abiy Ahmed government’s responsibilities to end the war promptly and supported the withholding of financial support for Ethiopia. Until late winter 2021, the Council – which is the body responsible for EU foreign policy – was not involved. The first time Ethiopia featured in the provisional agenda of the Africa Working Group (comprising all member states, the Commission, the Council and the European External Action Service) was February 2021, three months after the war had begun.¹⁶ The same happened within the Political and Security Committee (PSC), responsible for the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy. Even though the role of the PSC is to monitor the international situation, recommend strategic approaches and policy options to the Council and ensure political control and strategic direction of crisis management operations, for the whole of 2020 it never included the Ethiopia crisis in its provisional agenda.¹⁷

Once the member states became more involved in the issue, the EU started to strike a more balanced and pragmatic approach (Council of the EU 2021). In March 2021 the Council agreed on a set of broad and uncontroversial conclusions, which urged all parties to immediately end violence and respect international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international refugee law. While the document called on the Ethiopian government to guarantee access to humanitarian aid in the Tigray region, it also emphasised the EU's partnership with Ethiopia and welcomed the initial commitment by the Ethiopian government to address its main concerns (Ibid). In June 2021 the Council condemned the atrocities, sexual and ethnic violence and other human rights violations taking place in Tigray. It also called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, unhindered humanitarian access to all areas and the immediate withdrawal of Eritrean forces fighting alongside those of the government (European Council 2021).

The EU Council's approach was more balanced than that of the Commission and HRVP because member states held different interpretations of the conflict and the related policy response. The EU's northern countries preferred to follow the Commission's and the HRVP's normative approach and condemn the Ethiopian government for its human rights violations, while southern countries such as Italy, Spain and France advocated for more pragmatism, not least because they were concerned about potential migration flows.¹⁸ Even though Ethiopians migrate mostly to Southern Africa and the Middle East, Ethiopia remains a key transit route for migrants travelling from Eritrea and Somalia towards Europe (Troy-Donovan 2022. See also Council of the European Union 2023).

It is important to reiterate that intra-EU differences reduced the consistency and, consequently, the impact of EU policies. Germany continued to provide development and humanitarian aid to Ethiopia even after the Commission had withheld its financial support (Chadwick 2021) demonstrating incoherence between the positions of some EU member States and that of Brussels. This decision was criticised in Brussels where, at the time, officials were pushing to create a ‘Team Europe’ approach, meaning a set of coordinated actions by EU institutions and member states, to development policy (Ibid). A clear strategy of institutional delegation, then, failed to materialise. The EU's approach continued to oscillate between a normative outlook which led to confrontation with the federal government and limited efforts for pragmatic engagement, with neither option actually bearing any result. Eventually, individual member states resorted to transactional interactions, basically abandoning any significant hope of playing at least a post-conflict role (Caruso 2023; Barthelemet 2023). Overall, the EU’s lack of meaningful contextual knowledge and the unresolved tension between pragmatic and normative approaches to the crisis, prevented it from developing a proper mitigation strategy for the conflict. This failure was further amplified by growing multipolar competition, as will be highlighted in the next section.

Managing multipolar competition

In the first phase of the conflict, there was limited coordination between the EU and other international actors, most notably the US. This happened not so much because of a political decision but because of the sharp change in the foreign policy of the US's leadership. When the Tigray crisis erupted, the US was in the middle of the turbulent presidential transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.¹⁹ Some have even speculated that it was no coincidence that the war broke out on the day after the US election (3 November 2020), though there is no evidence to support this claim. After Biden was inaugurated and leading foreign policy positions in his cabinet confirmed, the US followed the European approach and in April 2021 suspended assistance to Ethiopia (Ching 2021). In line with European demands, the conditions set by the US Administration to resume financial support included unfettered humanitarian access to Tigray and accountability for war crimes (EEAS 2022). Later, the Biden Administration also imposed sanctions on Eritrea's senior military staff, the Eritrean Defence Force and Eritrea's sole political party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (Bedard 2021). Finally, in January 2022, the US cut off Ethiopia (together with Mali and Guinea) from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the trade legislation providing sub-Saharan African nations with duty-free access to the US (Reuters 2022).

Overall, after a difficult start, the EU and the US were somehow able to forge a transatlantic coalition vis-à-vis the Tigray war. Their sanctioning approach towards the federal government, however, fuelled anti-Western protests in the country. In 2021, for instance, a self-styled ‘No More’ movement demonstrated against the supposed neo-colonialist interference of the US and its Western allies, who were accused of undermining the government's attempts at enforcing law and order against the TPLF (Merdasa 2022).

More importantly, joint EU-US criticism of the Abyi government led the latter to tighten its relations with other external powers such as Russia and the PRC. Russia supported Ethiopia throughout the whole Tigray crisis by delaying, for instance, UN Security Council meetings to discuss a declaration of famine in Tigray (Worley 2022). This declaration would have added pressure on Addis Ababa to allow humanitarian aid to reach Tigray. Also, together with the PRC, Russia insisted that the conflict was exclusively an internal affair (Nichols 2021a). The PRC’s and Russia's diplomatic support helped Addis defy international condemnation of the blockade of humanitarian aid to Tigray (Nichols 2021b). This process continued even after the EU and US started to re-engage with Addis Ababa. In July 2022 Russia pledged support for Ethiopia's efforts to stabilise its internal political situation and accused Western powers of retaining a colonial mindset in the region (Paravicini 2022). Russia's use of an anti-colonial rhetoric was a deliberate attempt to exacerbate anti-Western sentiments in Ethiopia. Ethiopia's subsequent critical position toward the West was evident during the UN General Assembly votes on Russia's war against Ukraine. As mentioned, in March 2022 Ethiopia was among the countries that did not submit a vote and in October 2022 it abstained from condemning Russia's annexation of four Ukrainian regions (White and Holtz 2022; Club of Mozambique News 2022).

Probably more important for Ethiopia than the diplomatic protection of the PRC and Russia was military support from Turkey, the UAE and Iran (Walsh 2021). Turkey was arguably the external player that had the greatest influence over the conflict. Its military export to Ethiopia expanded significantly between 2020 and 2021, from barely USD 234,000 to nearly USD 95 million. Arguably, the federal government was only able to stop and reverse the TPLF's counter-offensive in late 2021 thanks to Turkey-provided armed drones. Turkey identified Ethiopia not just as a primary African destination market for its defence products but also secured Addis’ support for its companies to be involved in post-conflict reconstruction. In addition, as recalled above, Turkey’s interests required that Somalia remained as stable as possible and clearly believed that a defeat of the federal government in Addis would spread chaos across the region (Abdolgader 2022).

The UAE had similar motivations, as its considerable political, economic and military investments in the region – the UAE was a main sponsor of the Eritrea-Ethiopia peace deal of 2018 – could be upended by a TPLF victory (Ibid). Consequently, Abu Dhabi provided Abiy Ahmed with support – including military support – from the start of the conflict (Al Jazeera 2021a). As for Iran, support for the Abiy Ahmed government – provided both diplomatically and with drone transfers – was a means to create a wedge between Western countries and their traditional ally in the Horn, as well as to expand its strategic ‘depth’ into a region where its rivals (especially the UAE) were gaining sway (Keynoush 2022).

The resolve with which Russia and the PRC, but especially Turkey, the UAE and Iran, strongly supported the Abiy Ahmed government contrasts with the inconsistency of EUFSP. The EU may have had solid reasons for putting pressure on Addis. Yet the fact that its policy was followed only (and belatedly) by a distracted US, without any relevant attempts at strategic partnering with the other external powers, greatly reduced the impact of EUFSP on the evolution of the conflict and its mitigating impact. While external powers such as Russia, the PRC, Turkey, the UAE and Iran were leveraging their position by supporting the federal government diplomatically and militarily, the EU sought to strengthen its position through conditionality. This strategy was not necessarily doomed to failure; the problem, however, is that it was pursued in an inconsistent way and without building a solid international coalition behind it. As a result, the EU eventually failed to gain any leverage from its initial normative approach, in a context where other external powers were implementing their own policies much more decisively. When a more balanced and pragmatic outlook was adopted by the EU, it was already too late.

Conclusion

The war in Tigray shows how difficult it is for the EU to act effectively and consistently in a highly fragmented region. In Ethiopia’s case, the EU’s inability to develop meaningful contextual knowledge, especially about local conflict actors and dynamics, and a related over-reliance on pre-existing relations (with the TPLF), were among the causes for the EU's unpreparedness when tensions in Tigray escalated into open conflict.

As a consequence, the EU’s initial response was left to certain EUFSP actors, who insisted on a highly normative approach that revolved around confrontation with the federal government. Overall, this proved to be ineffective and was only moderated by a more balanced and pragmatic outlook when it was arguably too late. Furthermore, the EU was unable to integrate its various policy tools into a single approach that was promoted in a consistent and synergic way. As a result, the EU de facto did not implement any real mitigation measures.

In parallel, the more substantial support provided to Abiy Ahmed by other external actors reduced EU leverage. The EU did little to nothing to attenuate this mounting multipolar competition. True, it did belatedly coordinate with the US but not with other external actors if not, indirectly, with the AU. This was arguably linked to increasing competition between the two transatlantic partners and other key actors – first and foremost, Russia and Iran – that were gaining influence in Ethiopia, which limited the options for strategic partnering and the EU’s overall role in mitigating the Tigray crisis.

Acknowledgements

This article is a product of the EU-funded JOINT research project to which Gilang Kembara, Andrew Mantong and Steven Blockmans contributed. JOINT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 959143 (www.jointproject.eu). This publication reflects only the view of the authors, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Caruso

Francesca Caruso is Senior Analyst at the International Relations Office of the Community of Sant’Egidio, Rome, Italy. From 2017 to 2023, she worked as a Researcher in the Africa, Middle East and Mediterranean Programme of the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome, Italy.

Jesutimilehin O. Akamo

Jesutimilehin O. Akamo is Coordinator, Research and Policy Analysis Unit at the Africa Peace and Security Programme (APSP) of the Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Notes

1 All interviews were conducted with informed consent.

2 ‘Eurafrique’ is a term coined in the 1920s that has over the decades become associated with the colonial past and the fact that the Euro-African relations have been marked by dependence and inequality.

3 For a lengthier discussion of the three concepts of multipolar competition, regional fragmentation and internal contestation, and the ways in which they affect the governance structures of EUFSP, see the Introduction to this Special Issue (Alcaro and Dijkstra 2024).

4 Interview with Ethiopian political scientist, August 2022; interview with a European diplomat based in Ethiopia, November 2022.

5 Interview with Ethiopian political scientist, August 2022. See also Reid (2021); Kene and Feyissa (2020a).

6 Interview with a European diplomat based in Ethiopia, November 2022. See also Kene and Feyissa (2020b).

7 Interview with a peace and security expert, September 2022.

8 Interview with a peace and security expert, September 2022.

9 Interview with a European diplomat based in Ethiopia, November 2022.

10 See ACLED Dashboard on Ethiopia here: https://acleddata.com/dashboard/#/dashboard (accessed 22 December 2023).

11 This support was mainly due to the fact that the TPLF had ruled Ethiopia during the Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute between 1998-2018. See Mersie et al. (2021).

12 Interview with an EU official, October 2022.

13 Interview with three European officials, December 2022.

14 Interview with a peace and security analyst specialising in Ethiopia, July 2022. See also European Commission (2022).

15 Fox (2021); Interview with an Ethiopian diplomat, August 2022.

16 COAFR (Africa Working Party) (2021). The authors have consulted all the 2020 provisional agendas of the COAFR.

17 The authors have consulted all the 2020 provisional agendas of the Political and Security Committee (PSC). The latter is responsible for the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).

18 Interview with an EU official, October 2022; Interview with a European diplomat based in Ethiopia, November 2022. See also Grindneff (2022); Gallardo (2021); ENA (2023); Strangis (2022).

19 Interview 1 with a Horn of Africa Expert, June 2022.

 

List of interviews

Interview 1 with a Horn of Africa Expert, June 2022.

Interview 2 with a peace and security analyst specialising in Ethiopia, July 2022.

Interview 3 with an Ethiopian political scientist, August 2022.

Interview 4 with a peace and security expert, September 2022.

Interview 5 with an EU official, October 2022.

Interview 6 with a European diplomat based in Ethiopia, November 2022.

Interview 7 with three European officials, December 2022.

Interview 8 with an Ethiopian diplomat, August 2022.