By GIUSEPPE FINALDI
Thus because a few askaris [Italian colonial troops] had died by brackish water-holes in an African waste, was taken the first step to the second German holocaust. The pretext was more trivial than the murder of Franz Ferdinand. (Sir Robert Vansittart, head of the British Foreign Office, 1930–8)1
The Significance of the Italo-Ethiopian War: An Overview
On July 28, 1935, a Florentine weekly carried a particularly grotesque caricature of the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. In it he is being told by the League of Nations doorman that he should take his grievances not to the League but to the next building along the Geneva Street, the headquarters of the “Society for the Protection of Animals.”2 Crude and racist jokes such as this one abounded in Italy during the Ethiopian war, although they reflected attitudes that were certainly not confined to Italians or fascists. That Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations was by no means universally accepted, even among Europe’s liberals. In the 1930s Ethiopia was an anomaly in the international arena and it had been one ever since it rebuffed Italy’s first attempt at making it a protectorate in 1896. The “survival of Ethiopian independence” (to mention the title of one important book3 on the subject) is on the face of it a historical abnormality of the greatest importance. It was inspirational for the development of anticolonialism in Africa, and more generally it was a sign to black populations throughout the world that it was possible that they would one day stand up without the tutelage of white masters. In the 1920s the black activist Marcus Garvey took the Ethiopian experience as living proof that blacks could make it alone. Some African Americans traveled to Ethiopia before 1935 and assigned to that kingdom the mythical capacity of liberating blacks and reuniting them after the long and bitter Diaspora imposed by whites.4 Rastafarianism originated out of a sacralization of the figure of the Ethiopian emperor, biblical exegesis, and the desire for political and personal freedom among blacks in Jamaica.5 Even in Britain, Sylvia Pankhurst’s passage from suffragettism to socialist feminism and eventually to being the most vociferous supporter of Ethiopia’s right to exist speaks volumes about the struggle for liberation of subordinate groups through the twentieth century.
In some ways the long-term consequences of the Italian invasion and eventual conquest of Ethiopia and the international uproar surrounding it tell us as much about the origins of the Second World War as they do about what shape the world would take at that conflict’s end. By 1974, when Haile Selassie was removed from power by a younger generation of army officers, Ethiopia was just one independent African country among many. In 1936 he had stood up in front of the fifty-two representatives of the League of Nations and proclaimed the rights of an independent black African country to exist. That colonialism became rapidly unjustifiable after 1945 was, among other things, because of the vicissitudes of Ethiopian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular the Italian conquest of 1935–6. If Italy had been wrong, and the League of Nations said that it had, then why were France and Britain right just because their empires had a somewhat longer history?
The Ethiopian war has in general been granted a place of importance in international history because it skewed the European balance of power at a very delicate moment. Hitler had been in control for two years but Germany was still too weak to pose a serious challenge to the order established at Versailles. He needed allies to forestall an early French or British nipping of Nazism in the bud, and that Italy ended up on the German side was only partly because of congruencies in fascist and Nazi ideology. Rather, it was the Ethiopian war that confirmed Mussolini’s decision (always one fraught with danger for a country with thousands of miles of coastline in British dominated waters) to ally with Germany and to tie Italy’s fate to that of the Third Reich. In retrospect and on the basis of Italy’s performance in the Second World War, this was not as beneficial to Germany as might have been expected, but in 1935–6 it was critical. Although the effective strength of fascist Italy was still to be proven, many had been taken in by the Duce’s bluster and believed that Italy would be a crucial player in any future European conflict.
The upholders of Versailles and the guarantors of the League of Nations, Britain and France, ended up having to ditch the possibility of keeping Mussolini’s friendship (for a variety of reasons that will be looked at below), and all for the sake of an African country that was strategically, economically, and politically of no consequence in Europe. In the eyes of many contemporaries, and then many historians, there is something as tragic in this as there is in poor Chamberlain’s guarantee of “peace in our time” after Munich. The events of 1940–1 (when Italy quickly lost Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea to the British) showed that Italy’s hold on East Africa depended on free access through the Suez Canal and a Mediterranean fleet that remained unchallenged by the British: this was the case throughout the 1935–6 war.
In Italy itself, though, the conquest of Ethiopia boosted the fascist regime and strengthened Mussolini’s position vis-à-vis the monarchy, the army, and the Italian people in general. Challenging the Versailles settlement and making war paid dividends, and it appeared that fascism’s promise to transform Italy and Italians was finally being fulfilled. An empire of magnitude had been created at last and appeared to confirm the superiority of the fascist over the liberal way of doing things. Adowa, where liberal Italy had been defeated in Ethiopia in 1896, had hung over Italian self-esteem like a nightmare, was no more, or so it was proclaimed up and down the country, and the massive collective effort that had warded off sanctions imposed by the League of Nations suggested that never before had the Duce and his people acted in such unequivocal harmony. In 1936, fascism appeared to be working nicely and its pledges were being honored.
The implications throughout Europe were great. For those who did not want, as so many did in these years, to see the Soviet Union as a “new civilization”6 in a period where the latter appeared to be the only alternative to a capitalism that was failing to deliver (the 1930s depression was reaching its peak when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia), fascism seemed to have the answers. The audacity with which, for example, Franco, soon to be dictator of Spain, decided to plunge his country into civil war rather than accept a government of the left was connected to the aura of victory that clung to Mussolini after the Ethiopian campaign. For many on the European right, the time for action, whatever it entailed, had arrived.
In one recent overview the 1930s have, echoing Churchill, been referred to as the “Dark Valley.” “The depression cast its pall over the world,” writes Piers Brendon, “it was the worst peacetime crisis to affect humanity since the Black Death . . . It was a time of systematic obfuscation, of darkness at noon.”7 This valley of shadow was a place from which the world emerged only in 1945. It was the decade when the seed sown in 1914–18 began to give forth its bitter harvest. Auschwitz, the Gulag, the horrors of the Nazi war against Poland and the Soviet Union and the massive aerial bombings of the Allies, the war crimes of Japan in China, and so much more were all in one way or another the product of the political developments of the 1930s. In 1937 the destruction of Guernica in Spain by German bombers foreshadowed the greater horror to come. Yet notwithstanding the fact that it was soon to be beggared by a Dresden or a Hiroshima, the name of the Basque town has remained a supreme symbol of the unacceptable. The use of nerve gas by Italy in Ethiopia, however, presaged Guernica itself and set the scene for the barbarism that was to be one of the most appalling characteristics of the following decade. In Ethiopia victory was to be had at any cost, and the erasing of any distinction between military and civilian targets (and, notwithstanding the enormous casualties of the First World War, this had not occurred in that conflict) was well and truly under way. That this was justified in Italy by the fact that it brought death only to those deemed racially inferior foreshadowed the horrors of the Second World War.
The origins of Nazi violence are a hotly debated issue but their relationship with what was unquestioningly normal practice in Europe’s colonies needs restating. Haile Selassie standing up in Geneva and denouncing Mussolini’s gas bombings in Africa suddenly brought these two universes together in one place. The era of clean wars that involved uniformed armies battling it out in Europe and dirty ones pitting machine guns (or bombers) against civilians in the colonies was over. Normal Europeans were about to experience the contempt with which their lives were held in a way that was all too familiar to the indigenous populations of their colonies.
The Survival of Ethiopian Independence
As has been suggested, the fact that Ethiopia remained an independent kingdom in the era of the European colonization of Africa is remarkable. There have been many attempts at explaining this fact: to some contemporaries it was the peculiarity of Ethiopia being Christian that made the difference; others rested their case on racial grounds, suggesting that the Ethiopians were biologically separate from other African blacks and had enough Semitic or even Portuguese blood to make them something of a cut above their sub-Saharan neighbors. To others, such as the Rastafarians, it was divine intervention that made Ethiopian history unique.
In reality the failure of Europe to colonize Ethiopia before 1935 was because the Ethiopians could field a large and powerful army in the critical years of the “Scramble for Africa.” If the Impis of South Africa were considered to be superlative warriors and the British had been pressed to the limit to deal with them, the number of troops Ethiopia could deploy was on a scale that the Zulu could only have dreamt about.
The Ethiopian kingdom was organized much like a feudal state of the European Middle Ages. A Christian aristocratic class held land as a fiefdom from the emperor and in exchange provided troops conscripted from the peasantry. Often (as in feudal Europe) the aristocrats were powers unto themselves and loyalty to the emperor was only nominal, but there were occasions, particularly when Ethiopia was assailed from the outside, that the military feudal kingdom worked very effectively. The Christianity of the ruling class and of a large proportion of the peasantry in a sea of Islam provided a cohesion that can be almost equated to national identity. Amharic, the language of Church and state, had developed its own alphabet and a political and religious literature had come into being particularly through the work of monks in the monasteries dotted through the Ethiopian highlands. Court officials were literate and formed a rudimentary, but real, bureaucracy. Although divided among different princedoms and linguistic ethnic groups, this was material enough on which to construct a plausible “imagined community.”
Hence, any attempt at reducing Ethiopia to a colony necessitated surmounting a series of powerful resisting factors that were absent in most other areas of sub-Saharan Africa. In 1868, it is true, the British had deposed the then emperor Tewodros and had successfully brought a (mostly Indian) army deep into the heart of the African highland kingdom. But the easy success of the British on this occasion did not entail the transformation of Ethiopia into a colony. The expedition had been sent in order to uphold British prestige after the Ethiopian emperor had imprisoned a British legate. Because Tewodros’s barons abandoned him at the last minute, Sir Robert Napier’s expedition was able to fulfill its mission and return almost unmolested to the coast. But 1868 had hardly been a real test of Ethiopian power, as unified resistance never materialized behind the emperor. Tewodros had alienated most of his Rases (Ethiopian nobles) and effectively had no army to pit against the British; if the latter had been intent on staying, things would probably have been very different.
It took the establishment of permanent Italian power in the area (as well as Islamic incursions through the Sudan), instead of the ineffectual and distant suzerainty of the languid Ottomans, to mold Ethiopia into a formidable military machine. The emperor Menelik, who had acceded to the throne in 1889, was fully conscious of the fact that he needed a loyal aristocracy at home and as many European weapons as he could lay his hands on if his empire was not to fall prey, like the rest of Africa, to Europe’s lust for territory. He was a master at playing one European country off against the other and maintained Italian, British, Russian, and French delegations at his court.
It eventually became clearer that the main enemy was likely to be Italy. When the conflict came to a head in 1896, Menelik secured the allegiance of the Rases and the people at large, and, with the blessing of the Coptic Church, was able to put to good use the arms accumulated via French and Italian dealers over the last decade. At Adowa his army of more than 100,000 routed Italy’s 20,000. Crispi, the Italian prime minister, fell from power and tumults greeted the news in Italy’s piazzas. It would have been difficult to mount yet another expedition to the Horn. Menelik, unlike Tewodros and Crispi, conserved the loyalty of his people. As Sven Rubenson put it: “Though it might have been difficult for European statesmen to think in those terms, it was Crispi’s power base that was narrow and shaky, not Menelik’s. Italy was overextending herself in Africa, rather than [the Ethiopian emperor].”8
Adowa was not just unique because of its scale (almost 2,000 Italians were taken to Addis Ababa as POWs and held there for more than a year) but because the defeated European power came to terms almost immediately and accepted a treaty guaranteeing the integrity of Ethiopia. The implications were not immediately apparent (although some felt that after Adowa the world would never be the same again), but it was to prove a turning point in history. That Ethiopia remained independent and an anomaly in the world system of states between the Scramble for Africa and the eve of the Second World War – precisely when the internecine conflict between the upholders of that system became most acute – was to transform conceptions of both Africa’s and the world’s long-term future.
Although at Menelik’s death in 1913 Ethiopia descended once more into civil warfare between rival claimants to the throne, by the 1920s Ras Tafari Maconnen (who would become Emperor Haile Selassie) had triumphed over all competition. Throughout the 1920s he was effectively ruling from behind Empress Zawditu’s throne and there was little doubt that he would take over at her death.
His coronation in 1930 marked very much the triumph of the progressives and modernizers amongst the Ethiopian nobility. Haile Selassie had traveled extensively in Europe and his aim had always been to seek full recognition for his country at the international level. No matter that no Europeans had yet vanquished the country, Ethiopia remained an anomaly that fitted uncomfortably in the international system of European states and empires. Its independence was always on the verge of being undermined in a whimsical plan of aggrandizement of one European power or another. For example, to the chagrin of the winners of Adowa, in 1906 an agreement was reached among Italy, France, and Britain not to tread on each other’s toes in assigned “spheres of influence” marked out for each of them in Ethiopia. Emperor Menelik was not consulted and naturally felt humiliated, but he could do little in a diplomatic world where there was no platform other than for Europeans, who considered only each other as peers. It was the First World War in Europe that transformed this situation. The enormity of what had happened by 1918, the feeling that there had been no real winners, the alternative on offer in Russia and the arrival in Europe of American power meant that there was a widespread determination that the old pre-1914 world dominated by a handful of European Great Powers had breathed its last. Small nations were to be granted a full right to exist, the traditional secret treaties of the Great Powers paying each other off with territory that they did not own was now illicit; the world was to be made safe for democracy and war abolished.
Ras Tafari knew that it was only through the international diplomatic recognition of Ethiopian independence that the unique African non-colony would survive without the constant need of defensive war or the risk of falling under the unwanted tutelage of a European power. Like Cavour, the maker of Italian unity who had sent Piedmontese troops to fight in the Crimea in order to get his small country noticed and listened to by France and Britain in the 1850s, during the First World War Tafari had planned to send Ethiopian troops to fight in the trenches of Europe so that Ethiopia would be present at the peace treaty. This idea came to nothing but it was in the creation of the League of Nations immediately after the conflict that he saw his (and his country’s) chance. The prolonged negotiations with the League took place through 1922 and 1923 and the discussion centered on the appropriateness of admitting a country that, according to many of its members (including Britain, Australia, and Switzerland), had not yet reached an acceptable grade of civilization. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant stated that not all peoples of the world were ready to be given the status of “nation,” and colonialism, which seemed most obviously to contradict what the League stood for, could proceed. Ras Tafari understood fully that Ethiopia might be considered one of those areas, as Article 22 stated, “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” and would be barred from entry. Ethiopia’s independence still hung in the balance. In Britain, for example, it was considered that Ethiopia would benefit from a period of tutelage under a League mandate and be made essentially a protectorate of a European power, voiding therefore Menelik’s life work. It was the unique and anomalous situation of Ethiopia that meant, notwithstanding everything, that its independence was permanently open to debate.
However, hard negotiations, the support of France and later Italy, as well as promises to abolish slavery and the slave trade at home, led eventually to the acceptance of Ethiopia’s application to become a member of the League. On September 28, 1923, Ras Tafari’s plan came to a happy conclusion. Ethiopia was recognized by the international community to be a fully independent national state and the specter of succumbing to colonialism appeared to have vanished for good. In Addis Ababa (the then dethroned emperor recollected much later), “there was great joy. The rejoicing was for no reason other than that we thought that the Covenant of the League would protect us from the sort of attack which Italy has now launched against us.” Still, this was a problem for the future and in the summer of 1924 Ras Tafari (as regent of his country) embarked on a triumphant tour of Europe. He was feted in all its capitals and partook in the general optimism of the moment. Europe was a magnanimous continent in the 1920s that sought to impress this mysterious but colorful monarch from the heart of Africa with the grandeur of its achievements. There, apart from seeing the “wonders of European civilization . . . about which I had read in books,” Ras Tafari wrote, “when returning to my country after my visit, I thought it would be possible to initiate some aspects of civilization I had observed with my own eyes.”9 This was a Europe as it should have been, a patchwork of discrete and fraternal nations, each with its own special qualities to show off and a serene consciousness that there were many benefits to be bestowed on a receptive African ruler. The League convention made sense, it seemed a new dawn, and Ras Tafari was bathed in its splendor. His second trip to Europe, however, in 1936 was to be altogether different.
The Dynamics of Fascist Colonialism
From the Italian point of view Ethiopian independence represented an anomaly that besmirched the nation’s military reputation and seemed to suggest that its achievements since unification (which had only happened in the 1860s) were very circumscribed. To the majority this may not have been all that important, but to some it mattered very much indeed. By 1914 Italy had three small colonies (Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya) plus a scattering of not very vital islands in the Mediterranean. Somalia had so far attracted fewer than a few hundred settlers, Eritrea had one of the hottest and most arid climates in the world, and Libya too was famous for being unimaginably torrid (in 1922 Italians measured the highest ever recorded temperature on earth, 58°C at Al’ Aziziyah, just south of Tripoli). The Italian dependencies had low populations and few easily accessible resources. They were not of great strategic importance and lacked the means to make them economically viable without investments which Italy could not afford. No minerals of note were ever found during Italy’s occupation and, even in Libya, oil was only discovered after the Italians left. The new Roman Empire would have to be composed of the scraps left over after the real imperial powers had gorged themselves with the choice pickings.
But even the securing of this meager loot had required of Italy a considerable investment of men and resources that often pushed it to the verge of financial collapse. In the 1880s and 1890s Eritrea was all that Italy kept after mounting one of the largest and most expensive colonial campaigns during the Scramble for Africa. As has been said, having picked a fi ght with Ethiopia goes a long way to explaining Italy’s woeful record, but in Libya too once the cities of the north had been taken, resistance was so widespread that, during the First World War, Italy had almost had to give up the colony altogether.
Many Italians considered Adowa to be a humiliation that it was absolutely vital should be put right. Immediately after the battle, Italy’s prime minister had warned the king that suing Menelik for peace would mean “the death in us of all heroism and virtue and you would have under your command flocks of sheep, beasts that let themselves be slaughtered and not legions of soldiers. Our external enemies, who do not want a strong and respected Italy, would profit from our inaction and so too would internal enemies who would like to see the end of the Monarchy.”10 Rekindling the war with Ethiopia meant, according to Crispi, a saving of Italy’s military reputation, a stabilization of the Italian nation-state under authoritarian auspices, and a powerful message to the Great Powers of Europe that Italy would never accept a military setback as final and was no international lightweight. A more virile colonial policy was an agenda that remained attractive to many liberals but also to nationalists, futurists, and a whole host of patriotic organizations and pressure groups throughout the early twentieth century. Also much had been added, in particular the idea that Italy had a right to colonies because of its excess population. Millions of Italians departed for the New World and northern Europe to find a livelihood, and it was hard not to dream that they would be better employed in the opening up of Italian territory instead of American or Brazilian or Argentinean. If Italy lacked capital, it did not lack labor, and it should rise up as the “proletarian nation” and go it alone. Fascism absorbed and developed many of these views from its inception.
Overall Italy’s decision to attack Ethiopia once again after a gap of forty years can be put down to a picking up where Crispi had left off. But very significant factors had emerged since 1918 that made 1935 something different than merely a belated event in a prolonged Scramble for Africa. Most obviously one was fascism, and another was the fact that Ethiopia belonged to the League of Nations and had had half a century of independence since the Scramble got under way. But many other things had changed too: the gap between European weaponry and what a state such as Ethiopia had access to had broadened considerably (airplanes, for example, were completely beyond Haile Selassie’s realm in the 1930s in a way that machine guns had not been in the 1880s); Italy had undergone its first industrial revolution and, in firms such as Fiat and Ansaldo, now vaunted its own heavy industry; it had a fairly efficient schooling system, which had only been in its infancy in the late nineteenth century; literacy was at a completely different level and cinema and radio were in the process of transforming the dispatch of information. The list could go on, but it is sufficient to say that since the turn of the century Italy had been undergoing relatively rapid economic development.
Also there had been a regime change in both Ethiopia and Italy, which transformed the relationship between the organization of the state and the people of the two countries. In Ethiopia the army was undergoing radical reorganization. Effectively it was moving from the feudal militia of Menelik’s day to a modern army commanded by an officer class, trained in the European manner. When the Italians attacked in 1935 it was still neither one thing nor the other. For example, its generals tended to be the old Rases and military grades were dished out to the feudal barons of the past, but a permanent national officer corps had yet to materialize and conscription had significantly changed since the old calls to arms played on the massive Negarit war drum that would boom through the Ethiopian mountains calling the peasantry to the aid of their lords. Militarily, Ethiopia suffered the disadvantages of the old system having been undermined by Haile Selassie without a new one yet being in place. In fact, at home, on the strength of the foreign policy successes described above, the emperor was attempting to implement a wide-ranging set of reforms aimed at consolidating his power vis-à-vis that of the traditional feudal nobility. The conflicts that had ensued were very far from being resolved, and as Bahru Zewde cogently puts it: “Menelik’s Ethiopia had the blessing of feudal harmony. Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia was in the throes of nascent absolutism. Expressed in another way, Menelik led a more united Ethiopia than Haile Selassie.”11
The regime change in Italy also transformed relationships between institutions, the people, and the state. Most importantly, by 1935 Mussolini had benefited from a decade of political experimentation. Opposition, which had plagued Crispi during his colonial campaigns, had been outlawed in the 1920s and control of the means of communication, from newspapers to school textbooks to cinema and radio, was firmly under the direction of the state. Clearly, a Mussolini at the height of his power and popularity was in a much different situation than that of the 1890s, when Crispi had enjoyed only limited support.
This is not a point that is made lightly. When one historian of fascism, Renzo De Felice, called the Ethiopian war Mussolini’s “masterpiece”12 and argued that it marked the zenith of the regime’s support, he ignited a debate that has yet to be settled. It is, however, now generally agreed that the Ethiopian war fired the imagination of the Italian people and stilled – temporarily, at least – Italy’s many social, political, and cultural upheavals in a way that nothing (including being on the winning side of the First World War) had been able to do before. It may have been a brief moment of collective happiness, chipped away by difficulties over Italian involvement in Spain, and completely destroyed by the catastrophe of the Second World War, but it was a genuine one. On the other hand, as Nicola Labanca has suggested, it may well be “inappropriate to talk about consensus in a dictatorship,”13 and we might also add that it was only the massive propaganda invested by the regime in and around the conquest of empire14 that is being mistaken for genuine enthusiasm among the Italian people. Did Italians agree with Mussolini when he said that “the new Italian, an abyss from the stereotypes of the past, would be born on the African frontier, the gymnasium of boldness, sacrifice and discipline”?15 The point is that in order to fight the war, and then to win it, the Italian people had to be mobilized and the resources of the country channeled accordingly. In constructing the machinery of conquest there is little doubt that Mussolini was extraordinarily successful. Del Boca, certainly no apologist of fascism, admits as much: “in Italy the African undertaking was met with an enthusiasm that one can define as virtually total.”16
The invasion of Ethiopia was a colonial war of unprecedented magnitude. More than half a million troops were sent to the Horn and the campaign’s cost was so huge that Italian finances had still to recover when the Second World War broke out. But draining the country’s resources was less important than the fact that right in the middle of the Great Depression, when enthusiasm for fascism may have been waning due to the regime’s loss of impetus, Mussolini was suddenly able to lift its prestige into the stratosphere. The dividends paid by the Ethiopian victory were high. Del Boca lists them succinctly: “Italians were satisfied. Satisfied in having won a war more easily than was expected. Satisfied that it had only cost the lives of a few thousand men. Satisfied for the acquisition of new territory that the Regime’s propaganda machine continued to portray as having enormous potential and wealth . . . Satisfied in having resisted economic sanctions. Satisfied in occupying a new and different place in the world order. Satisfied in having placed their destiny in the hands of a man who had been victorious on all fronts, challenging and defying the whole world in a way that no Italian had been able to do for hundreds of years.”17
Mussolini’s determination after the Ethiopian war to drag Italy into a partnership with the Third Reich was none other than the fruit of this impregnable position of prestige at home. The shift from what can be termed the traditional Italian foreign policy of friendship with Britain (and holding the menace of a strong Germanic predator just over the Alps as axiomatic) to one that saw Britain as the main constraint on Italian aspirations was very much the result of Mussolini’s self-confidence after 1936. It had now become possible for the Duce to do as he wanted, even to act against the wishes of the armed forces, the monarchy, the Church, in other words the Italian establishment, which had always been wary of fascism’s vociferous calls to revise the international order. As has been said, challenging Britain meant that Italy might be subjected to the hostility of the Royal Navy (and Air Force) that controlled Gibraltar, Suez, and Malta and, as fascist propaganda now began to lament, effectively contained Italy within the Mediterranean. But raising Britannia’s wrath was not as vital to Mussolini as keeping the momentum, ensuring his regime stayed on the boil. The great difference between fascist Italy and the liberal state it replaced was that the legitimizing pillars of democracy, of political plurality, and of the international appropriateness of being one more “liberal” country in western Europe were no longer available. The regime had to justify itself by other, more radical means. By 1936 Mussolini had the choice of becoming like Franco after the success of his side in the Spanish Civil War, a dictator who rocked no boats in the international system (and who lingered into the 1970s), but whose rule stagnated with compromise and tradition. Mussolini was not, like Franco, an army general, nor was he Catholic. Like most fascists who came to prominence between 1922 and 1943, he was a parvenu who based his right to power on the revolutionary credentials of his regime. Without them he was entirely replaceable. Thus it was likely that he would eventually choose the side that offered the most potential for change and it is in the dynamics of their relationship to the established order in their countries that the fates of Hitler and Mussolini became intertwined. Being on the side of the status quo (that is, the world order of Versailles, the League, of Britain and France) would have made Mussolini expendable.
Martin Kitchen expresses surprise at this great Italian policy shift: “Mussolini’s change of sides in 1936,” he says, “is still something of a mystery . . . Once the war was over . . . Abyssinia [Ethiopia] need not have caused a fundamental realignment of Italian foreign policy. It would seem therefore that Mussolini acted largely out of pique.”18 A sulky and snubbed Duce emerging from the distasteful League experience was not what brought the “fascist” dictators together, as the reconstitution of a Great Power just over the Brenner pass – effectively the reemergence of the enemy that Italy had defeated at such a tremendous cost in 1918 – was not an easy pill to swallow. Hitler was fully aware of the magnitude of what he was asking Mussolini to accept. Immediately before the Anschluss, on receiving Mussolini’s go-ahead, the Führer therefore prostrated himself with gratitude: “I will never forget him for it,” he is reported to have said, “never, never, come what may. If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be sure that do or die I shall stick by him . . . even if the whole world rises against him.”19 However he may have regarded the Italian people, Hitler fulfilled this promise to the letter. The two dictators were now bound up in a personal relationship of reciprocal gratitude: Hitler had made Mussolini’s triumph in Ethiopia possible, and Mussolini was to reply by condoning the annexation of Austria. They had leaned on each other to the point that two parvenus from the provinces flattened Versailles and completely transformed the balance of power in Europe.
The Reaction of the Status Quo
The dynamics at work in the Italian fascist state were of no particular concern to Britain and France. What has been called Mussolini’s “period of good behavior” through the 1920s earned him the respect of many across the Alps who felt, like Churchill did, that he had saved Italy from red revolution. Mussolini and Italy became more important, and potentially worrying, after Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933. The rationale behind British and French strategy toward Italy and Ethiopia in the 1930s was really all about Germany. For a while alarm on the part of Mussolini with the raucous pronouncements of Hitler concerning Austria (which was very much under Italy’s protection) kept the western liberal states and Italy on the same side. The assassination of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna in July 1934 (just when Mrs. Mussolini was entertaining his family in the Italian seaside resort of Riccione) and an attempted Nazi coup there prompted Italian troop deployments in the Alps. Hitler, who still lacked a substantial army, had overreached himself on this occasion, and hastily backtracked. The Stresa agreements in April 1935 were the high point of Mussolini’s stance as defender of the Versailles status quo. In this pretty setting on the Italian Alpine lakes, Britain, France, and Italy agreed never to allow Austria to fall into the hands of Germany and to work together should Germany rearm to the point of being a threat (in March 1935 Germany had officially denounced its adherence to the disarmament clauses of Versailles). Until the Ethiopian crisis Italy was a reliable member of the League and apart from some distaste for Mussolinian posturing, France and Britain had not been averse to doing business with a man who had, after all, come to power through castor oil and the cosh. There was no principled anti-fascism in French and British policy toward Italy.
On Italy’s part, the creation of an empire that Italians could be proud of was implicit in fascism from the start, but realistic planning for it only began after the onset of the depression, the consolidation of the regime, and the “pacification” of the colonies that Italy already possessed. Italy’s support of Ethiopia’s joining of the League of Nations in 1923 needs to be seen in this light. Mussolini had been Italy’s prime minister (rather than its dictator) for a year and his initial concern was to allay the fears of those in Italy who had entrusted him with the rudder of the nation. If at first there was some vacillation toward Ethiopia’s entry, once it became clear that all the Great Powers were in favor, in order to preserve Italian influence there, Italy also reluctantly agreed. Italian ambitions for the East African country were put to one side for the rest of the 1920s and, in 1928, they signed a “treaty of friendship” with Ethiopia.
But the catastrophe of the depression and Hitler’s rise to power made Mussolini a freer agent than he had been. His friendship was now more valuable, to France in particular, and the possibility of a more forward policy in Africa (even if it was against another League member) was not an occasion to be missed. Mussolini’s original idea (in between the lines at Stresa) was that he would support the status quo in Europe and in return be granted a free hand in Africa. On the face of it, such a deal was not unreasonable. As has been said, Ethiopia was not of much significance to Britain and France and without mentioning the problem out loud, which would have embarrassed the proceedings of the League, assent looked like it could easily be had. France was quickly won over: French Prime Minister Pierre Laval consented in January 1935 and an accord was reached with Mussolini, although here too not much was stated explicitly. Britain was prepared to accept Italian economic hegemony in Ethiopia, and even Italian territorial concessions there, but stopped short at total annexation (and this remained policy throughout the Ethiopian crisis) because the swallowing of one League member by another would have had an adverse effect on the League’s prestige as Ethiopia had appealed to it for arbitration after the Wal Wal incident in December 1934. In June 1935 Anthony Eden traveled to Rome and said as much, and even when the war had already begun (Italian troops entered Ethiopian territory in October 1935), the Hoare–Laval proposals of December that year offered more or less the same terms. What intervened to stop agreement between Italy and Britain in particular was another factor: public opinion.
In fascist Italy and liberal Britain public opinion was hardly the same thing but the mechanisms at work in both were similar. Mussolini needed Ethiopia to be a triumph for the regime (which he symbolized) and an agreement that conceded rights, hegemony, or bits of territory without actually giving Italy Haile Selassie’s crown would pay only limited dividends. The British, on the other hand, were quite happy for Italy effectively to rule Ethiopia but Haile Selassie had to remain at his post. Perhaps the event that best summed up the two positions unfolded in September 1935. Earlier a committee had been set up by the League (that included Britain and France) which attempted to find a solution to the dispute between Italy and Ethiopia before war broke out. Ethiopia was to be administered by the League, and Italy would hold the predominant position in whatever organization was set up to carry out this task. In the future, Mussolini was informed privately, there would be nothing in the way of transforming this nominal League mandate into a formal colony, but to do so in 1935 would have weakened the League in the face of a resurgent Germany. When this proposal reached the Italian foreign office from a happy Italian delegate at Geneva, the response of a fascist who understood the situation more keenly was: “Yes the frame is right but there is no picture of the man inside.” The surprised Genevan delegate responded with, “we are in Geneva to look after the interests of Italy not to collect family pictures.”20 The latter’s misjudgment of what the Ethiopian campaign was about rightly cost him his job. A slow and piecemeal diplomatic takeover of Ethiopia by Italy was not what Mussolini was after. The British hoped precisely that Ethiopia could be handed over without having to look at a load of irksome family pictures parading a triumphant Mussolini. For both Italy and Britain the whole affair was prestige politics where the media and public opinion were paramount.
In Britain and to a lesser extent in France (where things were mitigated by a greater concern over German rearmament), what could be offered to Mussolini was severely hampered by a sudden upswing in what the League had come to mean. The “peace ballot” held in Britain in the first half of 1935 was only the most obvious symbol of the groundswell of opinion that placed its trust in the League to maintain the order established at Versailles and to ensure that the calamity of 1914 would not happen again. Eleven million people filled in the ballot distributed by the League of Nations Union, stating that they would be in favor of the members of the League using force in order to stop one member’s aggression on another. The majority were in favor of both military intervention and economic sanctions. But the “peace ballot” was only the tip of an iceberg in the debate sparked by Hitler’s coming to power and German rearmament that had been raging for months. The results of the ballot, however, were announced in June 1935 – precisely at the moment when negotiations with Mussolini were most tense.
There was little any British policymaker could do in these circumstances except to try and keep Mussolini as happy as possible and the British public satisfied that the League was fulfilling its obligations against an aggressor. When the League voted that Italy was in the wrong (on October 7, 1935) it was decided that economic sanctions would be imposed on it. How serious the consequences for Italy such sanctions should be caused friction between France and Britain. The former wanted them to be purely symbolic but Britain would, on the prompting of popular feeling, have liked them to hurt more. An oil embargo (Italy had no oil of its own) could have hampered Mussolini’s war effort very significantly but as the United States (under no obligation to the League) happily cashed in on Italy’s increased demands it would probably have made no difference. Mussolini himself had threatened war with France and Britain over the issue. In any case France would not have tolerated an oil embargo or pushed the matter to the point of a complete falling-out with Italy – and Britain’s attempt to institute the embargo came to nothing. The disagreement damaged Anglo-French relations. Even the Hoare–Laval proposal of December, which saw Mussolini relatively open to compromise as the war in Africa was not going particularly well, foundered on the upsurge of opinion in Britain that would not tolerate the “rewarding of aggression.”
In France the whole thing seemed mad. One influential newspaper article put it thus: “What are one hundred thousand Italians threatening Ethiopia next to ten million soldiers who are being drilled between the Rhine and the Niemen, and to what end? To defend themselves? Who is threatening them?”21 Why were the British so worked up about Ethiopia when they did not seem to care about Hitler? In June 1935 an Anglo-German naval treaty had been signed that completely bypassed France!
In the end sanctions were applied halfheartedly. The British fleet moved into the Mediterranean but did little except watch the Italians send hundreds of thousands of troops through the Suez Canal – which the British had left open. But, in the newspapers, the League was portrayed applying sanctions rigidly, making them real and effective. Italy, as a result, appeared to be suffering agonizingly.
Both the British and the fascist regime in Italy milked the issue for all it was worth. Symbolic of what sanctions came to mean in Italy was a kind of popular answer to the British “peace ballot.” The wedding ring ceremonies in the winter of 1935 marked a call by the regime for women to donate their gold wedding rings to the war effort in response to the League’s sanctions. It was a remarkably successful campaign in which tens of thousands of women pledged themselves to the regime with, in theory at least – and certainly in the eyes of Italian men – the donation of their most treasured possession. However ambiguous this marriage to the regime may have been,22 it nevertheless attested to the way in which sanctions did little to weaken Italy’s war effort but rather had the effect of creating a kind of Italian “finest hour.” A war of aggression was transformed into a defensive struggle in which Italy stood alone against the world. Germany continued to trade with Italy and Hitler made sure the provenance of German goods crossing the Alps was clearly labeled (indeed, by 1938 Germany was by far Italy’s best trading partner). Italy fought and won the war unhindered; fascism was strengthened immeasurably. The face of the Italian dictator grinned firmly out of a collection of family photographs that Hitler, if not the British and the French, must have been very happy indeed to pore over. Stresa (and Versailles) were dead and the way was now open for the total remilitarization of Germany, for the Anschluss and the Axis. Like Japan and Germany before, Italy departed from the League of Nations, although was still present in time to heckle Haile Selassie when he came personally to Geneva to appeal for help. The mountain kingdom of Ethiopia benefited not a jot from all the talk, the alliances, and the fulminations in Europe except that a platform, on which the world’s attention was focused, made the League’s promises (arbitration, the elimination of war through reason and discussion, and the rest) all the more hollow.
There was no consensus for the status quo. The US observed from a distance, the Soviet Union did not fit in, Japan threatened, Germany schemed, and Italy took its opportunities. Even France and Britain who, if one looked at a map of the world in the 1930s, appeared to have the most reason to be satisfied, regarded each other with some circumspection. As for Ethiopia, the survival of its independence in a world in which there was no room for the anomaly that it represented had been due solely to its own efforts. In 1935–6 these were no longer enough. By 1938 Italy’s possession was quietly recognized by Britain and France and Haile Selassie was mothballed in Bath. What sums up the whole story most eloquently is Baldwin, British prime minister, who, on seeing the (ex) Ethiopian emperor enter the same venue at which he too was dining, rather than confront him, hid under the table.
Conclusion
To what extent Italy’s war against Ethiopia was the real starting point of the Second World War is a matter of debate. Certainly Vansittart, who was deeply involved, seemed to think so, as does, for example, the Ethiopian historian Zaude Hailemariam. 23 Haile Selassie at his appeal to the League in June 1936 pointed out that what had happened was not just about Ethiopia. A harrowing description of Italian gas attacks on Ethiopian villages, on defenseless women and children, was a sign of things to come: “It is my duty,” the emperor asserted, “to inform the Governments assembled at Geneva, responsible as they are for the lives of millions of men, women and children, of the deadly peril which threatens them by describing to them the fate which has been suffered by Ethiopia. It is not only upon warriors that the Italian Government has made war. It has above all attacked populations far removed from hostilities in order to terrorize and exterminate them.” After a lengthy description of Italian “refinement in barbarism,” he came to the most salient parts of his address: “I assert that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one. It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression. It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations . . . it is the principle of the equality of states on the one hand, or otherwise the obligation laid upon small powers to accept the bonds of vassalship. In a word it is international morality that is at stake . . . Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on earth any nation that is superior to any other.”24 These words were prophetic and agonizingly true. The world was now turned upside down: the ruler of a black African nation was lecturing Europeans on the meaning of barbarism and teaching them what the respect of international law entailed. Vansittart saw the war in Ethiopia as the “trivial pretext” for another “German holocaust,” but such a view is a gross over-simplification. The forces at work in the invasion, the reaction of the different parties involved, the way in which politicians manipulated but kowtowed to misconceived notions of what public opinion represented, the skewed moral postures adopted by all, the all embracing fear and distrust, and the overarching arrogance of Europe vis-à-vis a nation that had mistakenly placed its hopes in what it had to offer were all signs of deep-seated crisis that was coming to a head.
NOTES
1 Quoted in F. Hardie, The Abyssinian Crisis
(London: Batsford, 1974), p. 3.
2 This vignette is reproduced in Centro Furio Jesi,
La menzogna della razza (Bologna: Grafi s, 1994),
p. 155.
3 Sven Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence
(London: Heinemann, 1976).
4 See for example Alberto Sbacchi, “Marcus Garvey,
the United Negro Improvement Association and
Ethiopia, 1920–1940,” in Legacy of Bitterness,
Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, ed. Alberto Sbacchi
(Asmara: Red Sea Press, 1997), pp. 1–34.
5 B. Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
6 The fi rst edition (1935) of Beatrice and Sidney
Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?
dropped the question mark in its 1937 edition. For
this reference see Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory:
Britain 1900–1990 (London: Penguin, 1996),
p. 172.
7 Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, a Panorama of the
1930s (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 690.
8 Rubenson, Ethiopian Independence, p. 404.
9 Haile Selassie I, My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress
1892–1937 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), pp. 77, 85.
10 Quoted in Emilio Bellavita, La battaglia di Adua
(Genoa: Flli. Melita, 1988), pp. 404–5.
11 Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia
(London: James Currey, 1991), p. 159.
12 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce: I. Gli anni del
consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974).
13 Nicola Labanca, Il colonialismo italiano (Milan:
Fenice 2000, 1994), p. 58.
14 For the truly huge scale of this enterprise see
Adolfo Mignemi, ed., Immagine coordinata per
un impero Etiopia 1935–1936 (Turin: Forma,
1984).
15 Angelo Del Boca, “L’impero,” in I luoghi della
memoria, simboli e miti dell’Italia unita, ed. Mario
Isnenghi (Rome: Laterza, 1996), pp. 421–2.
16 Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa orientale,
II. La conquista dell’Impero (Milan: Mondadori,
1992), p. 334.
17 Ibid., p. 714.
18 Martin Kitchen, Europe Between the Wars (London:
Longman, 1988), p. 287.
19 Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 78.
20 See Richard Lamb, Mussolini and the British
(London: John Murray, 1997), p. 128.
21 Quoted in ibid., p. 130.
22 See Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women,
Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1992), pp. 77–9.
23 Zaude Hailemariam, “La vera data d’inizio della
seconda Guerra mondiale,” in Le guerre coloniali
del fascismo, ed. Angelo Del Boca (Rome: Laterza,
1991), pp. 288–313.
24 This version of the speech is taken from www.
mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/selassie.htm but it can
also be found in Haile Selassie I, My Life and
Ethiopia’s Progress, pp. 299–312.
