Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

to the willingness among non-fascist states to appease fascist demands in the interest of maintaining the balance of power. As a weak state, Ireland recognized this problem as one inhering not with fascism per se, but with a more pervasive question of material inequality. The civil service memo argued therefore that judicial equality among states within the League represented more than simply an effective check on fascism’s spread, for the League Covenant provided a mechanism to redress the material conditions driving military escalation the world over:

      With all its defects, the Covenant has this virtue that it put an end to international feudalism, and initiated the era of international democracy and international government with the consent of the governed. The Saorstát, like all the other smaller members of the League, has a vote and a veto at Geneva. It may be hard to get the League to take positive action in cases in which it should do so; but at least the Covenant enables the smaller and weaker states, by using their veto, to prevent unjust action being clothed with the mantle of legality, and to put states which follow certain courses in the position of violators of the law and rebels against the international order.⁴³

      Sensing the drift toward a tiered League governed by a “might makes right” ethos, the memo is terse about the future: “Certainly the Saorstát would leave the League rather than pledge itself to abide by the decisions of a body composed exclusively of Great Powers.”⁴⁴ Written at some point in 1935, this document provides the blueprint, or score, for de Valera’s subsequent actions during the crisis.

      As they played out, events steadily eroded the ideals of international cooperation and arbitration that had given rise to the League. Already evident in the External Affairs memo, this loss of faith is the crescendoing note in de Valera’s speeches during the Ethiopian crisis, as developments slid from outrage to disgrace. In a broadcast to the United States on September 12, 1935, over Radio-Nations, the League’s shortwave station, de Valera stressed the danger of unchecked aggression by one member against another: “The theory of the absolute sovereignty of States, interpreted to mean that a State is above all law, must be abandoned. In a community, if the individual held himself free at every moment to act as his selfish interests might prompt, irrespective of the rights and interests of his neighbour, it is clear that order within such a community and peace would be impossible. So are peace and order impossible within the world community of States if States may hold that self-interest is for them the supreme law, and that they are subject to no other control.”⁴⁵ Arguing that the Covenant must become more flexible in order to address the increasing militarization of politics, he sees the League as an imperfect, but significant, effort to “order international affairs by reason and justice instead of by force.” To ignore reform is to abdicate the possibility of a collectively secured future: “To destroy [the League] now would be a crime against humanity. To maintain it we must live up to its obligations.... The alternative, so far as Europe is concerned, is a return to the law of the jungle. What philosophy of life can make us believe that man is necessarily condemned to such a fate?”⁴⁶ This statement is a stern rebuke not only to militarism but also to Italian fascism, a political ideology cloaked in the mantle of a “philosophy of life.” In turn, it upends Italian claims that Ethiopia must be liberated from barbarism, by denying the equation of technological superiority with the realization of justice.

      In that radio address, de Valera had called for “some means” by which the League’s principles could be enforced against states in violation of them.⁴⁷ When Ethiopia was invaded on October 2, it took a week for the League to impose economic sanctions on Italy. In the interim, de Valera broadcast the government’s reaction to the outbreak of war on Radio Éireann, explaining that, as a member state, the Irish Free State would fulfill its obligations if sanctions were to be mandated; should “more rigorous measures” become necessary, he continued, the matter would be brought to the Dáil. While wary of being drawn into armed conflict, he nevertheless states that the “difficulty with the League, then, is not that the obligations it imposes are too strict, but that they are not strict enough to be effective.”⁴⁸ In treading this delicate line between national self-determination and international commitment, de Valera adeptly used the radio to frame Ethiopia’s plight as linked to Ireland’s place in the world, as Cian McMahon has noted: “His speeches and radio addresses during the conflict in Abyssinia largely set the tone of discussion amongst the Irish population—a tone that was reflected in the newspapers. The tenor of these addresses was based very strongly on the context of membership in an international community founded on justice.”⁴⁹ By tracking the coverage garnered in a number of Irish newspapers, McMahon identifies this moment as an important point, when public discourse “transcended partisan political divisions and clerical influence during the crisis to envisage the Free State not as a passive or outside observer, but, rather, as an active player in the global community.” As articulated in de Valera’s addresses, the League served for the Irish public as “an alternative source of moral authority,” distinct from both the Catholic Church and traditional nationalism: “Far from insularity, the Abyssinian crisis highlights a surprising level of interest amongst the Irish reading public in the wider world.”⁵⁰ That radio broadcasting was central to the constitution of this reading public cannot be underestimated.

      Because of this worldliness, the termination of the crisis was especially bitter. When the Italians announced military victory in May 1936, it came after the League’s stance had been definitively undermined by the French and British, who were by now focused on German rearmament. In an address to the League Assembly on July 2, facing the prospect that sanctions were about to be dropped (as, indeed, they were), de Valera directly connected Irish self-determination to Ethiopia’s troubles: “Perhaps, as representatives of a small nation that has itself had experience of aggression and dismemberment, the members of the Irish delegation may be more sensitive than others to the plight of Ethiopia. But is there any small nation represented here which does not feel the truth of the warning that what is Ethiopia’s fate to-day may well be its own fate to-morrow, should the greed or the ambition of some powerful neighbour prompt its destruction?”⁵¹ This linkage is not simply a gesture of solidarity, nor is it an example of rhetorical overstatement; it instead articulates a correlation born of shared fear. Whereas Du Bois had been concerned with the interracial implications of the crisis, de Valera remains fixated on its international implications, which he finds similarly unwelcoming and unavoidable. When Haile Selassie had addressed the Assembly three days earlier, it was in part through de Valera’s intercession. Advocating for the emperor’s right to speak under the Covenant, de Valera listened to his appeal on behalf of his people:

      I ask the fifty nations who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor. What are they willing to do for Ethiopia?

      I ask the great Powers, who have promised the guarantee of collective security to small states—those small states over whom hangs the threat that they may one day suffer the fate of Ethiopia: What measures do they intend to take?

      Representatives of the world, I came to Geneva to discharge in your midst the most painful of the duties of the head of State. What answer am I to take back to my people?⁵²

      In its futile attempts to control aggression, the League answered by announcing its ineffectiveness as an institution. For de Valera, the conclusion to draw was that small nations, including Ethiopia, would never receive justice from the great powers and must instead act toward their own protection.

      What made this conclusion notably galling was the fact that such action would not be collectively and democratically achieved, but compelled by atomized, defensive, and increasingly acute necessity. What collective action that remained, de Valera pointedly observed, was an astringent one: “Over fifty nations, we have now to confess publicly that we must abandon the victim to his fate.”⁵³ This represented a decisive turn from mutual cooperation toward individual self-preservation, a shift de Valera specifies at the end of his address of July 2: “Despite our juridical equality here, in matters such as European peace the small States are powerless. As I have already said, peace is dependent upon the will of the great States. All the small States can do, if the statesmen of the greater States fail in their duty, is resolutely to determine that they will not become the tools of any great Power, and that they will resist with whatever means they may