Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

than on faith: a genuinely transnational officialdom, and not visionaries or even statesmen, was its beating heart.”¹⁶ That the League was ultimately unable to contain or overcome the conflicts between rival blocs should not diminish attention to what it represented during the contentious years of its existence. By specifying a convergence point of governmental claims and a variety of forms of mobilized public opinion (disarmament lobbies, nascent anticolonial formations, anti-trafficking and labor societies), the League presents a cross-section of the dilemmas faced in these decades. As a forum of “enacted” internationalism in the interwar years, the League at least has the virtue of marking a failed promise, rather than the habitually repeated false promise of a technologically determined global village.

      Both the Irish Free State and Ethiopia had been admitted to the League during its Fourth Assembly, which sat in session between September 1923 and August 1924. While each country ultimately received unanimous votes, neither case was without contention, for they embodied distinct forms of uneven development. The Irish faced questions about the size of the Free State Army, which was considered to be large relative to the state’s population and therefore to pose a threat to stability. The Irish government responded that the Civil War had ended only months earlier and that mass demobilization without adequate employment represented a greater threat to stability.¹⁷ Like the Irish, who saw the League as a forum in which to exercise national autonomy and a guarantor of small nations’ rights, the Ethiopians believed that “in the League of Nations there existed a body that could throw a cloak of protection over the smaller states, and might therefore be a useful aid to Ethiopia against her three powerful neighbors, who had already given evidence that they would not be averse to absorbing Ethiopia into their own territories, or at least into their spheres of influence when the time was ripe.”¹⁸ They were met with far stronger opposition, particularly from the British, than were the Irish. The most serious objection raised to Ethiopia’s candidacy involved the issue of slavery, as F. P. Walters, the former deputy secretary general, noted: “For the last two years a League Committee had been engaged in accumulating information concerning the survival of slavery, in various forms and in various countries. The reports on Ethiopia were appalling, in regard not only to the institution of domestic slavery but also to slave-raiding and the slave-trade.”¹⁹ This matter was hotly debated both in the Assembly and in the western European press, where vocal anti-slavery activists advocated that the nation become a mandated territory overseen by an imperial power. In response, the Ethiopian government declared that it was in no position immediately to free every domestic slave without an adequate employment infrastructure in place, but that League membership would foster these structural changes. It further noted that slave trading was an international problem: the largest markets for slaves were on the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Africa; yet Italian, French, and British colonial territories denied Ethiopia access to the sea. Only international cooperation, it concluded, would eradicate the practice.²⁰ Ethiopia pledged to abolish slavery and eliminate slave trading within its borders, and the government created a department—with the man who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Amharic as its head—to administer its efforts.²¹ Domestic slavery remained a contentious issue at the League throughout the twenties and into the thirties, when it was increasingly handled within the ambit of labor commissions. For the great European powers, skepticism and self-interest dominated perceptions of Ethiopia and its sovereignty.

      As it was, slavery offered the pretense for Italian aggression in late 1934. Decrying slave-raiding incursions across the indistinct border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, the Italians mounted an all-out propaganda campaign to justify its territorial ambitions in East Africa. Citing the Ethiopians’ slow progress in confronting slavery, the fascist regime labeled Ethiopia an anachronism, a feudal leftover in the modern world. It presented its own imperial designs as a crusade to liberate the Ethiopian people from the barbarism of their rulers, drawing on antislavery discourses to argue that occupation was a necessary and progressive step toward modernization.²² That Ethiopia was a member of the League due the rights and obligations afforded by the Covenant only highlighted its inability to function as a civilized nation, as one Italian pamphlet explained:

      Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations was a political act, inspired by confidence that the country could be led to make the efforts required gradually to attain the level of civilisation of other nations belonging to the League, by participating in the system of international cooperation established by the Covenant. The assumption that the League of Nations in itself is a system for the promotion of progress of member nations, does not correspond with reality, unless the essential [capacity] for admission to the League be the capacity of a country to develop its own civilisation.

      All countries do not possess this capacity in equal degree. The League of Nations should take this into due consideration. Ethiopia has shown that she is unable to find in her membership the impulse to make a voluntary effort to raise herself to the level of other civilised countries.²³

      In another pamphlet, the Italians portrayed the League as abetting Ethiopian backwardness in the name of misguided idealism. Juxtaposing photographs of Ethiopia and the Italian East African colonies, the images create a narrative of brutality opposed by humanitarianism: slaves, lepers, wastelands, and desolate villages stand opposite smiling natives, caring medical workers, cultivated fields, and planned cities. This disparity is, in the words of the pamphlet’s title, “what Geneva does not want to see.” Each photograph is accompanied by a caption printed in six languages (Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese), as though the photographic arrangement were not plain enough.²⁴ A third pamphlet branded Ethiopia “the last stronghold of slavery,” a corrupt, premodern vestige whose reform was a moral duty of civilized nations. Even its ancient Christianity was identified as ludicrously archaic: “But who can take seriously the Christianity of the Abyssinians? It is a coarse mixture of primitive superstitions, ritual Judaic [giudaiche] practices, and superficial and beggared Christian assimilations.”²⁵ Whereas the Ethiopians have been pandered to even while continuing to squander their land’s natural richness, the Italians have made the most of “a country which is naturally poor”: “The Italian people, who have given such a formidable contribution to western civilisation and progress, have a general standard of living unworthy of their past and of the position they have gradually acquired in the modern world through science, art, culture and social reform.”²⁶ By insisting on Italy’s unequivocal right to colonial expansion as a vital matter of national self-determination, Mussolini’s regime announces itself without apology:

      Those who oppose Italian expansion are hardly loyal to the cause of peace nor do they favour political balance of Europe [sic]. There can be no peace or political balance without justice. Economic penetration, concessions, spheres of influence, are inadequate means to solve such far reaching problems as those entailing the whole future of a people. No enterprise, especially colonial, is either lasting or safe, unless it is protected by the national flag.

      New Italy refuses to submit to impositions such as mortified and humiliated the Italy of old, which had not acquired full consciousness of its value and position among independent and united nations.²⁷

      In this imperial guise, the fascist was cast in the role of modernizer.

      This propaganda campaign met with mixed success. More candidly than others, one European delegate at Geneva stated, “The Italians want us to eat shit. All right. We will eat it. But they also want us to declare it is rose jam. That is a bit much.”²⁸ More characteristic of diplomatic opinion was John Maffey’s report for the British Foreign Office on British interests in Ethiopia, which in June 1935 saw Italian conquest as inevitable (a year before it was accomplished), but reasoned that Ethiopian independence offered little that Italian control took away.²⁹ The Last Stronghold of Slavery shrewdly quoted Maffey’s report to support its claims, and the pamphlet had an especially large distribution in Britain. In addition to copies printed in Rome, at least fifty thousand were printed in London at the height of the crisis, and the text was highly influential among Mussolini’s admirers in the liberal democracies.³⁰ The most concerted resistance to Italian aggression came from the black diaspora, for whom Ethiopia’s ancient sovereignty, guarded for centuries against incursion, offered