Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Italian aggression against Ethiopia began with an incursion into Ethiopian territory at Wal Wal in December 1934, and broke into full scale invasion in October 1935. That Italy had no real fear of British military sanctions against them was evident when they put a major part of their military forces, transports, and naval strength in the Red Sea, separated from home by the British-controlled Suez Canal and the massed British fleet at Alexandria. Their use of the Suez Canal to transport munitions and troops naturally revealed their aggressive intentions to Britain at an early stage. The British government’s position on Ethiopia was clearly stated in a secret report of an Interdepartmental Committee under Sir John Maffey. The report, presented to the foreign secretary on June 18, 1935, declared that Italian control of Ethiopia would be a “matter of indifference” to Britain. This report was mysteriously and surreptitiously conveyed to the Italians and undiplomatically published by them later. There can be no doubt that it represented the opinion of the British government and that this opinion was shared by the French government.

Unfortunately, public opinion in both countries and throughout most of the world was insisting on collective sanctions against the aggressor. To meet this demand, both governments engaged in a public policy of unenforced or partially enforced sanctions at wide variance with their real intentions. In consequence, they lost both Ethiopia and Italy, the former by their real policy, the latter by their public policy. In the process they gave the League of Nations, the collective-security system, and the political stability of central Europe their death wounds.

Taking advantage of the wave of public support for collective security, Samuel Hoare (now foreign secretary) went to the meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations in September 1935 and delivered a smashing speech to support of the League, collective security, and sanctions against Italy. The day previously he and Anthony Eden had secretly agreed with Pierre Laval to impose only partial economic sanctions, avoiding all actions, such as blockade or closure of the Suez Canal, which “might lead to war.” A number of governments, including Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, and Britain, had stopped all exports of munitions to Ethiopia as early as May and June 1935, although Ethiopia’s appeal to the League of Nations for help had been made on March 17th, while the Italian attack did not come until October 2, 1935. The net result was that Ethiopia was left defenseless in the face of an aggressor who was annoyed, without being sensibly hampered, by incomplete and late economic sanctions. Ethiopia’s appeal for neutral observers on June 19th was never acknowledged, and her appeal to the United States for support under the Kellogg-Briand Pact on July 3rd was at once rejected, but Eden found time to offer Mussolini a portion of Ethiopia as part of a deal which would avoid an open Italian aggression (June 24th). The Duce was determined, however, to commit an open aggression as the only method for achieving that modicum of Roman glory for which he thirsted.

Hoare’s speech in support of collective security at Geneva in September evoked such applause from the British public that Baldwin decided to hold a general election on that issue. Accordingly, with a ringing pledge to support collective action and collective security and to “take no action in isolation,” the National government offered itself at the polls on November 14, 1935, and won an amazing victory. The government’s margin of 431 seats out of 615 kept it in power until the next General Election ten years later (July 1945).

Although Article 16 of the League Covenant bound the signers to break off all trade and financial relations with an aggressor, France and Britain combined to keep their economic sanctions partial and ineffective. Imposed on November 18, 1935, and accepted by fifty-two nations, these sanctions established an embargo in arms and munitions, on loans and on credit, and on certain key commodities, and established a boycott on purchases of all Italian goods. The embargo did not cover iron ore, coal, or petroleum products, although the last item, of which Italy had less than a two-month supply in October 1935, would have stopped the Italian aggression quickly and completely. The imposition of oil sanctions was postponed time and again until, by the spring of 1936, the conquest of Ethiopia was completed. This was done in spite of the fact that as early as December 12th, ten states, which had been supplying three-quarters of Italy’s oil needs, volunteered to support the embargo. The refusal to establish this sanction resulted from a joint British-French refusal on the grounds that an oil sanction would be so effective that Italy would be compelled to break off its war with Ethiopia and would, in desperation, make war on Britain and France. This, at least, was the amazing logic offered by the British government later.

Instead of additional or effective sanctions, Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval worked out a secret deal which would have given Italy outright about one-sixth of Ethiopia and have yielded an additional third as a “zone of economic expansion and settlement reserved to Italy.” When news of this deal was broken to the public by a French journalist on December 10, 1935, there was a roar of protest from the supporters of collective security, especially in England, on the grounds that this violated the election pledge made but a month previously. To save his government, Baldwin had to sacrifice Hoare, who resigned on December 19th, but returned to the Cabinet on June 5, 1936, as soon as Ethiopia was decently buried. Laval, in France, survived the first parliamentary assault but fell from office in January 1936; he was succeeded at the Quai d’Orsay by Pierre Flandin, who pursued the same policy.

Ethiopia was conquered on May 2, 1936 and annexed to Italy a week later. Sanctions were removed by the various cooperating states and by the League itself in the next two months, just as they were beginning to take effect.

The consequences of the Ethiopian fiasco were of the greatest importance. Mussolini was much strengthened in Italy by his apparent success in acquiring an empire in the face of the economic barrage of fifty-two nations. The Conservative Party in England was entrenched in office for a decade, during which it carried out its policy of appeasement and waged the resulting war. The United States was driven by panic to pass a “Neutrality Act” which encouraged aggression by its provision that the outbreak of a war would cut off supplies of American munitions to both sides, to the aggressor who had armed at his leisure and to the victim yet unarmed. Above all, the Ethiopian crisis destroyed French efforts to encircle Germany. Britain had opposed these efforts from the beginning, and was able to block them with the aid of a number of other factors for which Britain was not primarily responsible. This point is sufficiently important to demand detailed analysis.

Circles and Countercircles, 1935-1939

Laval’s agreement of January 1935 with Mussolini had been intended to bring Italy to the side of France in the face of Germany, a goal which seemed perfectly possible in the light of Mussolini’s veto on Hitler’s coup in Austria in July 1934. This result would have been achieved if Ethiopia could have been taken by Italy without League action. In that case, Mussolini argued, Africa would have been removed from the sphere of League action as North America had been in 1919 (by the Monroe Doctrine amendment to the Covenant) and Asia had been in 1931 (by the failure to take action against Japan). This would have left the League as a purely European organization, according to Mussolini.

This view was regarded with favor in France where the chief, if not the sole, role of the League was to provide security against Germany. This view was completely unacceptable to Britain, which wanted no exclusively European political organization and could not join one herself because of her imperial obligations and her preference for an Atlantic organization (including the Dominions and the United States). Thus, Britain insisted on sanctions against Italy. But the British government never wanted collective security to be a success. As a result, the French desire for no sanctions combined with the British desire for ineffective sanctions to provide ineffective sanctions. Because there were sanctions, France lost Italian support against Germany; because they were ineffective, France lost the League system of collective security against Germany as well. Thus France had neither bread nor cake. Worse than that, the Italian involvement in Africa withdrew Italian political power from central Europe and thus removed the chief force ready to resist the German penetration of Austria. Still worse, the hubbub of the Ethiopian crisis gave Hitler an opportunity to declare the rearmament of Germany and the reestablishment of the German air force in March 1935 and to remilitarize the Rhineland on March 7, 1936.