plain fact, however, is that broadcasting, instead of developing into an agency for peace and better international understanding, serves often to incite hatred throughout the world, and is often used, for motives which obviously are not disinterested, and by men in conflict, to dominate, rather than to enlighten, the public mind. Science once again has made a gigantic stride forward, with the result that relations between nations are becoming more embittered.14
In a world of motivation, interest, and unashamed displays of power, here, in fact, was the dissolution of a “romance of engineering.” Rather than alleviate or counteract the connivances and brutalities of mundane political circumstances, technological advances in the field of communications had instead amplified them. As a potentially “open forum” of exchange, the international airwaves existed only insofar as they were produced in the interaction of grounded transmitters and receivers, a situation less of celestial intercession than embedded realization.
As an institution driven by the “particular blend of pragmatism and hope that became known as the ‘spirit of Geneva,’ ” the League of Nations embodied an entirely unique forum in which issues of national competition and international cooperation, remote disputes and disparate publics, could coalesce in “frank exchange.”15 While still now largely discredited as an idealist association prone to bureaucratic stalemate and appeasement, the League nevertheless offered a setting for national agency and international arbitration where none had previously existed. For small or powerless states in particular, it provided the opportunity to form alignments outside the orbit of powerful states, while participating as judicial equals in confronting issues of international concern. However compromised its power was by the entrenched national self-interest of its most powerful members, the League was a crucial site at which interwar crises of internationalism were registered and debated. Susan Pedersen gives a useful account of this “Geneva-centered world”: “Other cities between the wars were much more polyglot and cosmopolitan: it was in Geneva, however, that internationalism was enacted, institutionalized, and performed. That internationalism had its holy text (the [League] Covenant); it had its high priests and prophets.... There was an annual pilgrimage each September, when a polyglot collection of national delegates, claimants, lobbyists, and journalists descended on this once-placid bourgeois town. But for all its religious overtones, interwar internationalism depended more on structure than on faith: a genuinely transnational officialdom, and not visionaries or even statesmen, was its beating heart.”16 That the League was ultimately unable to contain or overcome the conflicts between rival blocs should not diminish attention to what it represented during the contentious years of its existence. By specifying a convergence point of governmental claims and a variety of forms of mobilized public opinion (disarmament lobbies, nascent anticolonial formations, anti-trafficking and labor societies), the League presents a cross-section of the dilemmas faced in these decades. As a forum of “enacted” internationalism in the interwar years, the League at least has the virtue of marking a failed promise, rather than the habitually repeated false promise of a technologically determined global village.
Both the Irish Free State and Ethiopia had been admitted to the League during its Fourth Assembly, which sat in session between September 1923 and August 1924. While each country ultimately received unanimous votes, neither case was without contention, for they embodied distinct forms of uneven development. The Irish faced questions about the size of the Free State Army, which was considered to be large relative to the state’s population and therefore to pose a threat to stability. The Irish government responded that the Civil War had ended only months earlier and that mass demobilization without adequate employment represented a greater threat to stability.17 Like the Irish, who saw the League as a forum in which to exercise national autonomy and a guarantor of small nations’ rights, the Ethiopians believed that “in the League of Nations there existed a body that could throw a cloak of protection over the smaller states, and might therefore be a useful aid to Ethiopia against her three powerful neighbors, who had already given evidence that they would not be averse to absorbing Ethiopia into their own territories, or at least into their spheres of influence when the time was ripe.”18 They were met with far stronger opposition, particularly from the British, than were the Irish. The most serious objection raised to Ethiopia’s candidacy involved the issue of slavery, as F. P. Walters, the former deputy secretary general, noted: “For the last two years a League Committee had been engaged in accumulating information concerning the survival of slavery, in various forms and in various countries. The reports on Ethiopia were appalling, in regard not only to the institution of domestic slavery but also to slave-raiding and the slave-trade.”19 This matter was hotly debated both in the Assembly and in the western European press, where vocal anti-slavery activists advocated that the nation become a mandated territory overseen by an imperial power. In response, the Ethiopian government declared that it was in no position immediately to free every domestic slave without an adequate employment infrastructure in place, but that League membership would foster these structural changes. It further noted that slave trading was an international problem: the largest markets for slaves were on the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Africa; yet Italian, French, and British colonial territories denied Ethiopia access to the sea. Only international cooperation, it concluded, would eradicate the practice.20 Ethiopia pledged to abolish slavery and eliminate slave trading within its borders, and the government created a department—with the man who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Amharic as its head—to administer its efforts.21 Domestic slavery remained a contentious issue at the League throughout the twenties and into the thirties, when it was increasingly handled within the ambit of labor commissions. For the great European powers, skepticism and self-interest dominated perceptions of Ethiopia and its sovereignty.
As it was, slavery offered the pretense for Italian aggression in late 1934. Decrying slave-raiding incursions across the indistinct border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, the Italians mounted an all-out propaganda campaign to justify its territorial ambitions in East Africa. Citing the Ethiopians’ slow progress in confronting slavery, the fascist regime labeled Ethiopia an anachronism, a feudal leftover in the modern world. It presented its own imperial designs as a crusade to liberate the Ethiopian people from the barbarism of their rulers, drawing on antislavery discourses to argue that occupation was a necessary and progressive step toward modernization.22 That Ethiopia was a member of the League due the rights and obligations afforded by the Covenant only highlighted its inability to function as a civilized nation, as one Italian pamphlet explained:
Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations was a political act, inspired by confidence that the country could be led to make the efforts required gradually to attain the level of civilisation of other nations belonging to the League, by participating in the system of international cooperation established by the Covenant. The assumption that the League of Nations in itself is a system for the promotion of progress of member nations, does not correspond with reality, unless the essential [capacity] for admission to the League be the capacity of a country to develop its own civilisation.
All countries do not possess this capacity in equal degree. The League of Nations should take this into due consideration. Ethiopia has shown that she is unable to find in her membership the impulse to make a voluntary effort to raise herself to the level of other civilised countries.23
In another pamphlet, the Italians portrayed the League as abetting Ethiopian backwardness in the name of misguided idealism. Juxtaposing photographs of Ethiopia and the Italian East African colonies, the images create a narrative of brutality opposed by humanitarianism: slaves, lepers, wastelands, and desolate villages stand opposite smiling natives, caring medical workers, cultivated fields, and planned cities. This disparity is, in the words of the pamphlet’s title, “what Geneva does not want to see.” Each photograph is accompanied by a caption printed in six languages (Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese), as though the photographic arrangement were not plain enough.24 A third pamphlet branded Ethiopia “the last stronghold of slavery,” a corrupt, premodern vestige whose reform was a moral duty of civilized nations. Even its ancient Christianity was identified as ludicrously archaic: “But who can take seriously
