Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

that the nation was only a “pawn in European diplomacy,” the implications of the crisis could no longer be sequestered as a peripheral affair, as Ernest Work, an African American educational adviser in Ethiopia, powerfully declared: “Evidently Ethiopia is to be sacrificed in an effort to maintain the peace of Europe. If such is the case the sacrifice is too great and instead of securing the peace of Europe this utterly unrighteous bartering of a weaker brother among the nations of Europe may easily prove to be the rock of offense upon which Europe herself shall be broken.”³¹ Work’s bitterly unambiguous reference to chattel slavery was in turn echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois in “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” a stinging and cautionary analysis published by Foreign Affairs in October 1935. Examining the “changes through which the color problem has passed” in the preceding two decades, Du Bois sees the crisis as a regression to prewar conditions of racial domination.³² Without qualification and with only the barest rhetorical finesse, Italy has announced its intention to subjugate Ethiopia because it has the power to do so. It is a lesson he knows will not go unnoticed: “The results on the minds and actions of great groups and nations of oppressed peoples, peoples with a grievance real or fancied, whose sorest spot, their most sensitive feelings, is brutally attacked, can only be awaited. The world, or any part of it, seems unable to do anything to prevent the impending blow, the only excuse for which is that other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing.”³³ For Du Bois, the aggression against Ethiopia and the seemingly inevitable assent of the white world to imperial domination are the latest, and gravest, manifestations of a long-standing relation of oppression to rationalization.

      Ensemble and Microphone

      Within the more delimited sphere of Irish foreign relations, “the spirit of Geneva” is almost exclusively associated with the figure of Eamon de Valera, whose highly visible participation in the League during the thirties marks a definitive turn in Irish politics between independence and the Second World War. While the validity of this association is unquestionable, the singularity of its focus misrecognizes not only the institutional character of the League, but the extent to which de Valera relied on the canny insight of the Irish delegation at Geneva. As Michael Kennedy argues, “[De Valera’s one-man-show] might not have been an ensemble piece on stage, but behind the scenes the solo performer was prepared, advised and initially supervised by the staff of the Department of External Affairs. De Valera was certainly not their mouthpiece, but neither was he performing all his own work. A solid base to work from, de Valera’s inspiration and the Department of External Affairs[’] perspiration and expertise, were the significant factors behind Ireland’s position in the League in the 1930s.”³⁴ As the foregoing section outlined, internationalism was at once encouraged and challenged by the vertiginous rise of competing forums of exchange during the interwar years: new voices in new media, old forms reinvented as new configurations, new articulations of old relations. Against this background, de Valera’s performance remains no less impressive, insofar as it records a specifically Irish variation on the decade’s themes. At the same time, however, this variation reveals dynamics within the larger context of international tensions that are otherwise inaudible.

      De Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932 coincided with the start of Ireland’s term in the rotating presidency of the League’s Council. This coincidence disquieted the great powers, which feared he would use the position to denounce Britain and thereby disturb the body’s procedural equilibrium. Regarding him as an intransigent revolutionary and anticolonial firebrand, the British worried that de Valera would be unwilling to cut off discussion of imperialism and instead be too inclined to favor pointed talk of historical grievance and present inequality. At some level, there was truth behind this worry, in that Ireland used its membership to articulate an independent foreign policy derived as much from its postcolonial identity as from its weak position within Europe; indeed, this conjunction was the essence of its anomalous place in the League. The worry was misplaced in its obsession with de Valera as demagogue, the fanatical strongman leading a phalanx of disciples. As Brian Farrell memorably characterized it, “De Valera’s style of chairmanship, in government and party alike, was provokingly patient with opposition, agonisingly tolerant of the irrelevant, overwhelmingly understanding of the stupid. He used exhaustion rather than coercion to secure maximum consent to, and preferably unanimity in, decision-making.”³⁵ In Geneva, where he could only sporadically be present, de Valera relied on the civil servants of the Irish delegation, whose reports from the city demonstrate an astute sense of the machinations and compromises driving outward shows of diplomacy and cooperation.³⁶ If de Valera’s strong speeches during the Ethiopian crisis display his own qualities of ethical appeal, they would have been impossible without the Irish delegation. Its skill made Geneva into “Dublin’s continent-wide European listening-post.”³⁷

      In the present context, this aural dimension to the leader’s skill and power is fundamental, even when it was clearly the product of tightly managed techniques of presentation. While most easily understood in relation to the figure of the dictator, this auditory quality could be readily personified in any charismatic authority. Hitler’s screaming and Mussolini’s verbal swagger, both counterpointed by fevered crowds, represent the extremes of this practice, new in its deployment and critically dependent on the broadcasting microphone. Some radio professionals recognized this relationship at the time, and their explanations are instructive. In Saerchinger’s Hello America! a book detailing his work in transatlantic radio during the thirties, personality is framed as “giv[ing] content to an otherwise soulless machine.”³⁸ As Saerchinger is quick to point out, however, radio does not always give back. In examining the “old-fashioned demagogue, the political rabble-rouser of pre-war days, whose technique is that of the stump,” he offers David Lloyd George as a prominent example of a speaker not served by the microphone: “Unsurrounded by his admirers, with nothing but his voice to convey the workings of his agile mind, Lloyd George’s eloquence simply does not come off.... On the ether, all his charm seems to evaporate: of all the speeches that woo the coy citizen sitting at his loud-speaker at election times, Lloyd George’s are the dullest and least effective, because the histrionics—the winning smile, the half-closed eyes, the clenched fist, and the hands toying with the golden spectacles—are simply of no use.”³⁹ In contrast, Saerchinger presents de Valera as both an intransigent and a democrat, a combination he discerns in the latter’s use of the microphone. Saerchinger had facilitated de Valera’s first broadcast to the United States in 1932, which was relayed by NBC from the Radio Éireann studio in Dublin’s General Post Office. Having walked in “as though he were going to buy a stamp,” de Valera faced “an incredibly primitive-looking microphone contraption” to address his foreign listeners: “His delivery, in his faint and attractive brogue, was quiet and matter of fact, almost casual, seeking to convince by the strength of argument alone.... He was fully aware of the value of talking to America... but he refused to make any emotional appeal, just as he refused to abandon that ‘obligatory’ opening paragraph in laboriously perfected Gaelic, no matter how many thousands of listeners, with American impatience, might tune out.”⁴⁰ If the dictator depends on mastery of the crowd, and the demagogue on “histrionic” intimacies, de Valera occupies neither of these positions. Hitler and Mussolini were rarely heard apart from a chorus of supporters, a relationship that was visualized in the leader’s commanding position over the masses. In the most common image of de Valera during these years, he is the public servant alone at his desk, soberly attending to the people’s business. While many domestic and foreign commentators, for a variety of reasons, had an interest in labeling him as a “unique dictator,” the mechanisms of his leadership ran contrary to this perception.⁴¹ Like his vocal delivery, his authority was formal and precise.

      This relationship was paramount in the Irish response to the Ethiopian crisis. At the beginning of tensions, a memo circulated within the Department of External Affairs diagnosed the growing influence of fascism at the League, but nonetheless discerned a potential brake on its progress: “Fascism as a rule of organization for international society is impossible for a very good reason. The element common, and indeed essential, to all the internal regimes based on Fascist principles is the confidence reposed in the leader, and the willing obedience accorded him in consequence. That essential element is conspicuously lacking, for very good reasons, as between the smaller states and the