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Italy's Invasion of Ethiopia Richard Bosworth | Published in History Today Volume 64 Issue 2 February 2014
Collision of Empires Italy’s Invasion of Ethiopia and its International Impact G. Bruce Strang (ed) Ashgate 385pp £63 In 1953 the Italian radical democrat and Anti-Fascist, Gaetano Salvemini, who found sanctuary from Mussolini’s dictatorship at Harvard, published Prelude to World War II. His focus was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia that began on October 3rd, 1935 and culminated in the fall of Addis Ababa on May 5th, 1936; the Emperor Haile Selassie had fled abroad three days earlier. This conflict was an imperial grab for Africa and a rude dismissal of the ambitions of the League of Nations to achieve permanent peace and justice through collective security. In retrospect it would seem – and Salvemini proclaimed it – that Ethiopia experienced the first Nazi-Fascist aggression in what became the bloody cascade into the Second World War. This selection of essays re-examines the conflict in broad frame. The editor introduces the foreign policies of Italy and of Mussolini and adds an account of President Roosevelt’s ineffectual approach to the invasion, which he viewed limply as ‘a sad commentary on world ethics’. Ian Spears traces the politics of Ethiopia. Other authors analyse the reactions of France, Germany, the USSR, Japan, some neutral powers, Canada, the other dominions and the Vatican. The essays with the greatest span are those by Martin Thomas on France, with his judicious reminder that the French empire in North Africa was a major determinant of the appeasement of Mussolini; and Geoffrey Waddington’s on Germany. Waddington is notably clear-sighted in demonstrating how hard it would have been before the Ethiopian war to predict the formation of the Axis and the concurrent blasting of Hitler’s deep ambition to ally globally with the British Empire. Events in London prompt two more chapters, one surveying in detail Philip Noel-Baker’s attempts to retrieve collective security from the apparent withering of the League of Nations, while another assesses the response to Italian aggression from British politicians and military chiefs. In his piece, Steven Morewood offers a ‘virtual history’ to argue that the British could have stopped the Italians in their tracks. However he does not assay what would have been the greater implications of a little war between conservative Britain and Fascist Italy. Rather, in implying that the exercise of power in 1935-36 could have eliminated its use in 1939, it could be argued that his argument contributes to the usual British over-estimation of the country’s eventual contribution to the actual Second World War. There is merit in each essay but one drastic omission: there is no investigation of the history of the Ethiopian empire from below or an exploration of what it meant to be perpetrator, bystander or victim in such a vicious battle, nor any attempt at the necessary task of tallying the Ethiopian dead. This reticence may have been patriotically coy when Renzo De Felice, the first major archival historian of Fascism, failed to explore the extent of Italian killing, but it’s a mandatory task in a contemporary work. Similarly questionable is the editor’s suggestion that Mussolini was motivated by Social Darwinism. Who in the 1930s, it might be asked in response, was not at least partially driven by the idea of doing well for their nation (or class) in an on-going global contest? Churchill surely was. Further, is not today’s neo-liberal hegemony also rooted in a belief that the market is a place of applied and virtuous eternal struggle? Rather than the Duce, of the elite figures who feature here, the most indicative is the Nobile Riccardo Astuto dei duchi di Lucchese, born 1882 and from 1930 to January 1935 the Governor of Eritrea. It was Astuto, trained before 1915 in nationalism and not after 1922 in Fascism, who urged: ‘Superior races have the right and the duty to impose themselves and to superimpose themselves and to substitute themselves for their inferiors.’ Astuto’s murderous racist philosophy suggests that Italy’s grab for African power, in its (few) lights and (many) shadows, was at least as much Italian as it was Fascist. Richard Bosworth’s next book will be Italian Venice: a History for Yale University Press. ITALY
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