[giudaiche] practices, and superficial and beggared Christian assimilations.”25 Whereas the Ethiopians have been pandered to even while continuing to squander their land’s natural richness, the Italians have made the most of “a country which is naturally poor”: “The Italian people, who have given such a formidable contribution to western civilisation and progress, have a general standard of living unworthy of their past and of the position they have gradually acquired in the modern world through science, art, culture and social reform.”26 By insisting on Italy’s unequivocal right to colonial expansion as a vital matter of national self-determination, Mussolini’s regime announces itself without apology:
Those who oppose Italian expansion are hardly loyal to the cause of peace nor do they favour political balance of Europe [sic]. There can be no peace or political balance without justice. Economic penetration, concessions, spheres of influence, are inadequate means to solve such far reaching problems as those entailing the whole future of a people. No enterprise, especially colonial, is either lasting or safe, unless it is protected by the national flag.
New Italy refuses to submit to impositions such as mortified and humiliated the Italy of old, which had not acquired full consciousness of its value and position among independent and united nations.27
In this imperial guise, the fascist was cast in the role of modernizer.
This propaganda campaign met with mixed success. More candidly than others, one European delegate at Geneva stated, “The Italians want us to eat shit. All right. We will eat it. But they also want us to declare it is rose jam. That is a bit much.”28 More characteristic of diplomatic opinion was John Maffey’s report for the British Foreign Office on British interests in Ethiopia, which in June 1935 saw Italian conquest as inevitable (a year before it was accomplished), but reasoned that Ethiopian independence offered little that Italian control took away.29 The Last Stronghold of Slavery shrewdly quoted Maffey’s report to support its claims, and the pamphlet had an especially large distribution in Britain. In addition to copies printed in Rome, at least fifty thousand were printed in London at the height of the crisis, and the text was highly influential among Mussolini’s admirers in the liberal democracies.30 The most concerted resistance to Italian aggression came from the black diaspora, for whom Ethiopia’s ancient sovereignty, guarded for centuries against incursion, offered a symbol of the future, its continuing self-determination a principal coordinate of racial internationalism. When it became clear that the nation was only a “pawn in European diplomacy,” the implications of the crisis could no longer be sequestered as a peripheral affair, as Ernest Work, an African American educational adviser in Ethiopia, powerfully declared: “Evidently Ethiopia is to be sacrificed in an effort to maintain the peace of Europe. If such is the case the sacrifice is too great and instead of securing the peace of Europe this utterly unrighteous bartering of a weaker brother among the nations of Europe may easily prove to be the rock of offense upon which Europe herself shall be broken.”31 Work’s bitterly unambiguous reference to chattel slavery was in turn echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois in “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” a stinging and cautionary analysis published by Foreign Affairs in October 1935. Examining the “changes through which the color problem has passed” in the preceding two decades, Du Bois sees the crisis as a regression to prewar conditions of racial domination.32 Without qualification and with only the barest rhetorical finesse, Italy has announced its intention to subjugate Ethiopia because it has the power to do so. It is a lesson he knows will not go unnoticed: “The results on the minds and actions of great groups and nations of oppressed peoples, peoples with a grievance real or fancied, whose sorest spot, their most sensitive feelings, is brutally attacked, can only be awaited. The world, or any part of it, seems unable to do anything to prevent the impending blow, the only excuse for which is that other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing.”33 For Du Bois, the aggression against Ethiopia and the seemingly inevitable assent of the white world to imperial domination are the latest, and gravest, manifestations of a long-standing relation of oppression to rationalization.
Ensemble and Microphone
Within the more delimited sphere of Irish foreign relations, “the spirit of Geneva” is almost exclusively associated with the figure of Eamon de Valera, whose highly visible participation in the League during the thirties marks a definitive turn in Irish politics between independence and the Second World War. While the validity of this association is unquestionable, the singularity of its focus misrecognizes not only the institutional character of the League, but the extent to which de Valera relied on the canny insight of the Irish delegation at Geneva. As Michael Kennedy argues, “[De Valera’s one-man-show] might not have been an ensemble piece on stage, but behind the scenes the solo performer was prepared, advised and initially supervised by the staff of the Department of External Affairs. De Valera was certainly not their mouthpiece, but neither was he performing all his own work. A solid base to work from, de Valera’s inspiration and the Department of External Affairs[’] perspiration and expertise, were the significant factors behind Ireland’s position in the League in the 1930s.”34 As the foregoing section outlined, internationalism was at once encouraged and challenged by the vertiginous rise of competing forums of exchange during the interwar years: new voices in new media, old forms reinvented as new configurations, new articulations of old relations. Against this background, de Valera’s performance remains no less impressive, insofar as it records a specifically Irish variation on the decade’s themes. At the same time, however, this variation reveals dynamics within the larger context of international tensions that are otherwise inaudible.
De Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932 coincided with the start of Ireland’s term in the rotating presidency of the League’s Council. This coincidence disquieted the great powers, which feared he would use the position to denounce Britain and thereby disturb the body’s procedural equilibrium. Regarding him as an intransigent revolutionary and anticolonial firebrand, the British worried that de Valera would be unwilling to cut off discussion of imperialism and instead be too inclined to favor pointed talk of historical grievance and present inequality. At some level, there was truth behind this worry, in that Ireland used its membership to articulate an independent foreign policy derived as much from its postcolonial identity as from its weak position within Europe; indeed, this conjunction was the essence of its anomalous place in the League. The worry was misplaced in its obsession with de Valera as demagogue, the fanatical strongman leading a phalanx of disciples. As Brian Farrell memorably characterized it, “De Valera’s style of chairmanship, in government and party alike, was provokingly patient with opposition, agonisingly tolerant of the irrelevant, overwhelmingly understanding of the stupid. He used exhaustion rather than coercion to secure maximum consent to, and preferably unanimity in, decision-making.”35 In Geneva, where he could only sporadically be present, de Valera relied on the civil servants of the Irish delegation, whose reports from the city demonstrate an astute sense of the machinations and compromises driving outward shows of diplomacy and cooperation.36 If de Valera’s strong speeches during the Ethiopian crisis display his own qualities of ethical appeal, they would have been impossible without the Irish delegation. Its skill made Geneva into “Dublin’s continent-wide European listening-post.”37
In the present context, this aural dimension to the leader’s skill and power is fundamental, even when it was clearly the product of tightly managed techniques of presentation. While most easily understood in relation to the figure of the dictator, this auditory quality could be readily personified in any charismatic authority. Hitler’s screaming and Mussolini’s verbal swagger, both counterpointed by fevered crowds, represent the extremes of this practice, new in its deployment and critically dependent on the broadcasting microphone. Some radio professionals recognized this relationship at the time, and their explanations are instructive. In Saerchinger’s Hello America! a book detailing his work in transatlantic radio during the thirties, personality is framed as “giv[ing] content to an otherwise soulless machine.”38 As Saerchinger is quick to point out, however, radio does not always give back. In examining the “old-fashioned demagogue,
