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 position in a world all too prone to misrecognize belligerence for necessity.
In its three-part organization, this chapter aligns a series of instances in which national trials were actively mediated through international exchanges. In doing so, it follows the circulatory networks of printed propaganda, diplomatic communications, and radio transmissions along an itinerary ranging from Dublin and Addis Ababa to Geneva and Rome. Its first section outlines several interlocking crises of internationalism that materialized with particular force as Italy launched its campaign to justify the annexation of Ethiopia. By aligning geopolitical strategic rivalries, newly viable possibilities for long-range radio broadcasting, and the institutional workings of the League of Nations, the section establishes the political context for the remainder of the chapter, which explores two divergent Irish conceptions of the singular voice made manifest in the disquiet of international hostilities. The second section attends to the work of the Irish delegation at Geneva during the Ethiopian crisis, when de Valera emerged as an especially strong critic of the abandonment of the East African state in favor of balances of power. While long presented as the sole voice of Irish politics in these years, de Valera acted on the canny advice of the civil servants permanently stationed in Geneva, a relationship evinced through comparison of internal diplomatic documents and his formidable speeches during the crisis made in the League Assembly and on the radio. Rather than the caricature of a neurotic strongman, de Valera’s leadership as it played out in front of the microphone demonstrates a resolute commitment to democratic process. In its final section, the chapter reads Walter Starkie’s Waveless Plain, an autobiographical travelogue in which he presents fascist Italy as the harmonious realization of individual freedom and social organization. In conjuring a state of unalienated immediacy predicated on Mussolini’s personality, Starkie mystifies the institutional remediation underwriting his validation of the dictator’s voice. Unlike an item belonging to “another age,” this mystification of institutional formations instead exhibits an emergent tendency.
The Crisis of Internationalism
In 1935, Ethiopia was one of the few areas on the continent of Africa not under direct or nominal control by European powers. Located at the intersection of Near Eastern, North African, and Equatorial African spheres of interest, the kingdom occupied a geographical location that made it especially attractive to outsiders in the first decades of the century. Surrounded by British, French, and Italian territories, Ethiopia was a diffuse polity that had only recently centralized its governmental administration, though it was still largely dependent on international cooperation for material and technological assistance. Despite being denied access to the sea by its imperial neighbors, the nation was largely understood in relation to water. With its strategic proximity to the sea route between Europe and Asia, Ethiopia was drawn into the geopolitical rivalries that structured political and economic relations from the Straits of Gibraltar through the Suez Canal and Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. Sitting atop the headwaters of the Nile at Lake Tana, it was further pulled into the orbit of Mediterranean tensions because of British interests in Egyptian cotton production. During the mid-twenties, in fact, Britain, France, and Italy had agreed to divide Ethiopia into spheres of economic influence, a move determined at least in part to dissuade Japan from continuing to invest in the kingdom’s development and modernization. If nothing else, this maneuvering was a sign of growing unease at challenges to the balance of power established at the end of the First World War, a relationship that was apparent even as it was playing out:
Under post-war conditions too, as resulting from the change in the balance of sea-power and the Washington and London Treaties, the position of Abyssinia is exceptional. Supremacy in the oceans of the world has come to be divided between the United States, Japan and the British Empire, the United States controlling the Western Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific, Japan the Western Pacific and Great Britain the Eastern Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Supremacy in the waterways that connect these oceans naturally forms part of this scheme. Thus Abyssinia lies within a region where the police-power of the League [of Nations] would, in the event of trouble, naturally fall to be exercised mainly by Great Britain. In accordance with the spirit of the collective system she would not wish to exercise it alone; but it could not be exercised at all without her active co-operation.6
For many contemporary observers, including the one just quoted, the truly “exceptional” fact of Ethiopia’s position was its continuing independence.
Given the drift of international relations in the early thirties, trouble was not long in coming. For the Italian government, changes to the balance of power were merely overdue recognition of Italy’s claims to the colonial spoils the British and French had promised it in return for joining the Allied nations in World War I. The consolidation of Italian East Africa was viewed as a means to enhance Italy’s prestige among world powers, while imperial expansion would help to fulfill the promise of the fascist regime. Directed toward both domestic and foreign audiences, this message portentously announced Mussolini’s designs for an empire in the greater Mediterranean region, which would alleviate Italy’s chronic problems of underdevelopment and emigration by securing the geopolitical platform on which to stage the nation’s renascent power. However rosy its alignment of political desires and practical realities might be, this thrust effectively linked fascist ideological policy to the regime’s strategic objectives, and in doing so provided a unified rhetorical focus to its multifarious propaganda campaigns. The implementation of this policy was decisive in hardening the politics of the decade’s second half:
Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 threw British and French Mediterranean policy into disarray and compelled the two democracies, as well as Nazi Germany, to reconsider their views of Fascist Italy. What is often dismissed as “the Abyssinian diversion” actually started the chain of events that brought Italy into armed conflict with Britain and France in June 1940. Beginning in 1936 Germany and Italy developed the basis for a mutually advantageous partnership, which encouraged Italy to engage in proxy wars with France in Spain and East Africa. Yet the British government firmly believed it could entice Mussolini away from ever-closer ties to Hitler. That diplomacy only created friction between London and Paris, while Fascist Italy took what it could from the British and continued to strengthen its ties to Nazi Germany.7
