Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

1

The Remediation of Waves

      In early August 1935, the government of the Irish Free State lodged an official protest with J. H. Thomas, the British secretary of state for the Dominions, over a detail included in an imperial report on conditions in the Horn of Africa. Signed by Eamon de Valera, who was acting in his capacity as the Irish minister for external affairs, the protest took the form of a short note. Although conveyed in the stilted niceties of procedural communications, it registers with particular force the dismay felt in the Irish diplomatic service at the appearance of an unfortunately familiar figure:

      I have the honour to refer to the Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the people of Somaliland, 1934, (Colonial Report No. 1707) printed and published by H.M. Stationery Office.

      2. On page 26 of this report, in the second paragraph, the following two sentences occur: “In this condition the Somali may be compared with the traditional Irishman when well primed with the liquor of his country. The latter brandishes his shillelagh and looks for heads to crack; the Somali sharpens his spear and begins to think of blood-feuds to settle and flocks to loot.”

      3. My Government feel obliged to protest that such an example of extreme bad taste and mean racial propaganda in relation to this country should have been allowed to appear in an official British report.

      4. The Government of Saorstát Éireann had believed that the attitude revealed by this quotation belonged to another age, and they hope that the Government of the United Kingdom will take steps to discourage the spirit of which the offending sentences are a manifestation.¹

      Possessing an administrative demeanor that was “lazy to the point of inertia,” Thomas was perhaps not the best mediator in this dispute, and it is unclear how, or even whether, he officially responded to the protest.² The invocation of this figure belonging to “another age” could not have failed to conjure for the Irish the repertory of Victorian anti-Irish caricature, from capering stage Irishmen to menacing simian grotesques, while unambiguously demonstrating the residual power of past relations still operative in the present.³ Even so, the offending item had an all-too-contemporary referent, one that inspired political misgivings in the Irish beyond any ethnic sensitivity. In a newly pressurized international context, the recrudescence of “mean racial propaganda” was not the idle residue of another age, but an exacerbating and intensified factor in reemergent antagonisms. Far from manifesting an exceptionalist sense of grievance, the Irish were protesting something more than the latest entry to the catalog of British “extreme bad taste.” At a moment when the great European powers were ready to return to outright military competition for colonial and strategic advantage, nowhere more dramatically than in East Africa, the force of the protest could not be fully registered within the strictly bilateral frame of Anglo-Irish relations. If racial or ethnic propaganda remained dangerously vibrant, the conditions animating its production and circulation outstripped the representational continuities of its images. In miniature, the Irish note marks the complex position of postindependence Ireland in a world of uneven development, rival ideological appeals, and renewed imperial antagonism.

      This chapter examines the political dynamics driving both the intensification of “mean racial propaganda” and the Irish response to its deployment by attending to how they became manifest during the crisis provoked by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. As the juncture at which a number of disparate forces coalesced, the Ethiopian crisis was a stark turning point during the interwar years, representing not only an early confrontation with fascist aggression but a truly global conflict conducted among various publics organized and mobilized through international media services. Although the Spanish Civil War attracted greater attention from European observers (a fact reflected in modernist scholarship), the Ethiopian crisis constituted on a much wider scale the confluence of political, ideological, and technological pressures that later swelled in the Second World War. As a war of colonial conquest, the Italian invasion was a belated and noxious finale to the “scramble for Africa” unleashed by the Berlin Conference in 1885, nominally orchestrated to advance civilization in every corner of the globe. Yet Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations, its sovereignty guaranteed by the collective security policy instituted in the League Covenant. Italian designs on the East African state were thus also an attack on the protocols of international arbitration fashioned in the wake of the First World War. With its unilateral resort to overwhelming military force (including the use of poison gas) to vanquish local resistance, the fascist state flouted international conventions and public opinion in a manner that was genuinely innovative. Whereas Italian belligerence could appear as the residue of “another age,” it was in retrospect the harbinger of a more recognizably modern phase of imperial aggression. For many at the time, these Janus-faced lineaments were simply the gauge of common sense, an attitude most famously articulated for English readers by Evelyn Waugh:

      It was evident, within six years of [the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928] having been made, that the Abyssinians had no intention of maintaining the spirit of that treaty. Italy had expected tangible commercial advantages. Her ambitions were clear and, judged by the international morality of America, Japan or any of the League Powers, legitimate. Abyssinia could not claim recognition on equal terms by the civilised nations and at the same time maintain her barbarous isolation; she must put her natural resources at the disposal of the world; since she was obviously unable to develop them herself, it must be done for her, to their mutual benefit, by a more advanced Power. By the 1928 Treaty, Italy believed that she had been chosen for this office.⁴

      In its conflicted mix of residual and emergent forces, then, the crisis was a signally modernist event.

      For the Irish Free State, the crisis marked a definitive shift in its orientation toward the world. Since admission to the League in 1924, it had used the forum to work and “align” with the bloc of small nations in advocating for international relations based on judicial equality among states and diplomatic negotiation in matters of communal disagreement. Particularly after de Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932, national self-determination was linked to international cooperation, a relationship most expressly practiced through firm support for the League’s (stated) policy of collective security, which was believed to offer a mechanism for protecting national independence. Spurred in part by mounting postcolonial disenchantment with the conditions of Irish life, a vocal collection of domestic critics castigated these democratic policies as outmoded and archaic, instead endorsing the image of the fascist state as the modernizing force that could fully and finally realize national freedom. Against this background of internal dissatisfaction, the growing confidence of fascist agitation and surging appeal of dictatorial leadership around the world could not be dismissed by the Irish government as “nonnational” affairs. Even as it became clearer that the League could not quash the ambitions of great powers bent at once on escalation and containment, Geneva nonetheless remained a post crucial to Irish autonomy. When the League proved unable to safeguard, by whatever means available, the integrity of one member state against attack by another, the Irish government lost what lingering faith it had in the ability of collective security to uphold national sovereignty, as Michael Kennedy notes: “Before the failure of sanctions on Italy, de Valera had decided that Ireland would de-prioritise Geneva if the League could not effectively solve the Abyssinian crisis. Abyssinia was not a turning point in itself[;] the decision had been reached sometime beforehand. It was a testing ground. The League’s failure in Africa turned de Valera away from the League as an institution that could provide for Ireland’s security.”⁵ With the acquiescence of Britain and France to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, the League ceased to represent in any real sense the political aspirations and practical stance of the Irish state. Only through the Ethiopian crisis did the Irish state come to base its foreign policy on absolute self-preservation, a bearing most acutely registered in the neutrality policy made legal in the 1937 Constitution and strictly enacted during the Second World War. If neutrality is still frequently regarded as the expression of an inward-looking, exceptionalist propensity characterizing Irish independence, it is important to appreciate how it was in fact a rational response to the state’s precarious