After the devastating First World War, 42 countries came together and created the League
of Nations, an international organization dedicated to peace and prosperity on a global
scale.
After a fairly successful first decade, the ambitions of Benito Mussolini clashed with
those interests, threatening the balance of power by invading the last independent African
nation of Ethiopia.
This was the first of many cases where the major powers appeased a dictator, by sacrificing
a minor nation, in order to keep the peace.
Why did the League betray their own member and how did the outcome of the second Italo-Ethiopian
war reshape the European alliances?
There many ways this scenario could have developed, and now you can get in and change history
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And watch this video too to see what you’ll be working with.
As World War I came to a close, the majority of the world was left shell-shocked and exhausted
and none wanted to wage a war on such a scale ever again.
Many blamed Germany for the disaster, imposing reparations so high that it would divide the
little unity left between the allied nations, while sowing deep resentment in the German
people.
Many states were convinced that the world needed an organization, which would set and
enforce rules that would apply to every member in order to ensure peace and stability.
This was not a new idea, with the concept being proposed as early as 1795 by the philosopher
Immanuel Kant.
Later the president of the US Theodore Roosevelt hinted at the idea during his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech in 1910: "It would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly
bent on peace would form a League of Peace."
But it would take 9 more years, before the leadership of the United States, Great Britain,
and France created the Covenant of the League of Nations.
This massive milestone was incredibly ambitious, featuring articles that forbade member nations
from meddling with the internal affairs of one another or declaring war on each other
without arbitration.
However, the first issue occurred almost instantly and despite being heavily involved in creating
this structure Woodrow Wilson failed to sway the American senate to join the League.
The United States lost a considerable amount during the first World War and was unwilling
to join the organization, unless its authority in it was vastly expanded.
That being said, unofficial observers and American philanthropies, particularly the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, were heavily involved
with the League.
The League of Nations started out with 42 founding members who worked together to solve
numerous issues.
The disarmament commission fought to reduce the number of weapons in the world, while
the International Labour Organisation sought to improve labor conditions.
The precursor of UNESCO was founded and a permanent central opium board was created
in order to reduce the drug trade.
An international organization aiming to promote cooperation between scientists, researchers,
teachers, and artists attracting the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and many
others was formed.
The League also featured an International Court of Justice, the precursor to the world
health organisation, the slavery commission which sought to eradicate slavery and the
slave trade, a commission dedicated to the aid of refugees, and last but not least, the
committee for the study of the legal status of Women, who fought for women’s rights
all over the world.
And yet all these missions, based in the central seat of Geneva are mostly forgotten, as the
world remembers the League of Nations chiefly for its failure as a peacekeeping body.
Indeed their biggest goal was to prevent another world war, but before they failed in their
goal, they had numerous successes in the 1920s.
The League persuaded Yugoslavia to withdraw from Albania, solved the Aaland crisis between
Finland and Sweden, intervened in the upper Silesia dispute between Poland and Germany,
resolved a dispute between Iraq and Turkey over Mosul, and most of all, prevented another
Balkan war after Greece invaded Bulgaria in 1925.
Each of these actions was carefully examined by international committees and in the end,
a resolution was issued and peace restored.
In the same period, the League successfully ran Danzig and Saar, stabilized the currencies
of Austria and Hungary, preventing their bankruptcies, and helped in the return of 400 000 prisoners
of war to their home countries.
Saved thousands with humanitarian aid against malaria and yellow fever and was instrumental
in limiting child labor in multiple countries.
There were also minor and significant failures on the world stage during this decade.
Poland ignored the League as it expanded against Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, supported
by Britain and France.
It failed in stopping the genocides conducted by the Greeks and Turks against each other
in Anatolia and the Balkans.
Meanwhile, Lithuania seized Memel in 1923, France didn’t even consult the league as
they took over the Ruhr valley in the same year alongside Belgium, and Italy invaded
the Greek island of Corfu, again in 1923.
The track record was mixed, but overall Geneva was becoming a beacon of hope, humanitarian
effort, and diplomacy.
During the same period, a new movement rose to new heights under the dictatorship of Benito
Mussolini.
World War I had a devastating effect on the socio-economic state of Italy, which felt
betrayed as they didn’t receive the lands on the Adriatic coastline they were promised,
performed very poorly in the war, and were left in financial ruin.
This led to a rise of socialism, and threatened by this many within the elite decided to give
more power to the fascist party instead.
Benito Mussolini was its leader, but had little control over the brown shirts or the execution
of his ambitious reforms.
With the majority of his reforms failing to industrialize the outdated country and the
Great Depression only exacerbating the situation, the regime needed a victory to prevent its
demise.
A plan was hatched to simultaneously invade France and Yugoslavia in 1932, but the information
leaked after French intelligence broke the military codes, which forced the Italians
to abandon it.
The following year was a momentous one, which would change the course of European politics
forever, as Adolph Hitler was appointed as Germany’s chancellor, again by the elite
worried about the rise of various Marxist parties.
Mussolini was firmly against Hitler’s Germany as it threatened Austria, so he proposed an
alternative take on the League of Nations - the Four Power Act: Mussolini wanted to
bypass the smaller nations and create a bloc of major powers, who could stand against international
threats and ensure peace.
This was initially met with ridicule, but Britain, in particular, considered it after
Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations that same year.
Either way, Mussolini still needed a victory so he turned south hoping to turn Italy into
an Empire by avenging one of its most humiliating defeats suffered in 1896 at the battle of
Adwa, where the failed invasion cost Italy over 15 000 troops at the hands of what they
regarded as the inferior African nation of Ethiopia.
On December 5th, 1934, a skirmish between the border guards caused what is now known
as the Abyssinia Crisis, a flimsy casus belli for Mussolini to launch his invasion.
The Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations, but the British
and French ambassadors who were sent to Rome to discuss terms with Mussolini treated Ethiopia
as nothing more than a bargaining chip.
At the time both nations were afraid of what Hitler could do and they didn’t want to
risk pushing Mussolini to his camp.
Almost a year of failed negotiations ensued as Italy stalled for time, resulting in little
more than the League exonerating both sides on the grounds that they both believed that
the disputed land was their own.
Shortly after, on the 3rd of October 1935, Italy invaded without a declaration of war.
Neighboring Eritrea, which had become the most industrialized region in sub-Saharan
Africa, was used as a base, from which the attack was launched, outfitted with railways,
roads, airports, harbors, munition depos, and 17 warehouses fully stocked with chemical
weapons.
650 000 troops supported by 2000 artillery pieces, hundreds of tanks, and aircraft prepared
to enter the lands of Ethiopia with orders to specifically target civilians for mass
casualties.
The Ethiopian Emperor mobilized a poorly equipped and trained army of 500 000, with no armored
or aerial support.
He declared that any man able to carry a spear should head to the capital and be outfitted
to defend his country.
The League of Nations now denounced Italy and initiated a series of economic sanctions
against the Kingdom.
This was a measure not attempted since Napoleon’s continental system and would test the resolve
and efficiency of the organization.
But what were these measures and how did they affect the war?
The first proposal was to impose a ban on the arms trade both to Italy and Ethiopia.
Proposal II asked all member states to deny private and state loans to Italy, while the
third Proposal prohibited the importation of all goods from Italy with the exception
of gold and silver, and the fourth one banned the exportation of various goods, such as
foodstuff, livestock, machinery and raw materials to Italy.
All of these proposals were accepted, but the most important measure titled Proposal
4A, which added coal, oil, pork, iron, and steel to the embargoed exports was delayed
and then denied.
Additionally, no one even entertained the idea of Britain or France blocking the access
to the Suez which would directly block the thousands of troops pouring into Ethiopia.
In the end, the only meaningful effect these economic measures had, was to incite an unprecedented
amount of support for the regime amongst the Italian populace.
Mussolini even led a campaign where he collected the wedding rings of married women as donations
for the war, one that even Queen Helena gladly joined.
Another measure the League could have taken was to aid Ethiopia, something which occurred
in the previous war, where France and in particular Russia who wanted to safeguard the African
country because of its Orthodox Christianity sold thousands of firearms at low prices.
Surprisingly, the only nation to give any kind of aid to Ethiopia in this war, was Hitler’s
Germany, but it was minimal.
Even if they did receive aid, there was nothing the Ethiopian soldiers could do against the
clouds of mustard gas the Italian planes unleashed upon them.
Between 300 and 500 tons of it were used against both civilian and military targets, causing
a third of the overall casualties, a blatant violation of the 1925 Geneva protocol.
At first, Mussolini denied the attacks and told the observers of the Red Cross that the
cases they encountered were ones of leprosy.
Then neutral observers brought back used canisters, with Italian writing on them, but even that
didn’t drive the League into action.
In fact, while Ethiopian citizens were murdered alongside their livestock, Britain, and France
were preparing to carve their country up, in order to appease the dictator.
On 14 November 1935, the National party government in Britain, led by Prime minister Stanley
Baldwin won the general election with promises to modernize Britain’s defenses, reduce
unemployment, improve housing and support the League of Nations.
However most of his cabinet advised against going to war with Italy, so he commissioned
his foreign secretary - Sir Samuel Hoare to come up with a compromise.
This led to the Hoare-Laval pact, concluded with French premier Pierre Laval in early
December.
Neither Ethiopia nor Italy were present at the negotiation table, but regardless the
two powers proposed that the African country was to be divided with the majority of its
territory being ceded to Italy.
This document was leaked a week later by a French newspaper, causing a massive uproar
in both countries.
Both men were forced to resign, before receiving some heavy criticism from their peers, Premier
Laval was condemned by the opposition French Popular Front party and its leader Leon Blum
said: "You have tried to give and to keep.
You wanted to have your cake and eat it.
You canceled your words by your deeds and your deeds by your words.
You have debased everything by fixing, intrigue and slickness...
Not sensitive enough to the importance of great moral issues, you have reduced everything
to the level of your petty methods".
The following year, Samuel Hoare would return and be instrumental in the Munich Agreement,
which gave Germany the Sudetenland, while Laval became the prime-minister of Vichy France
from 1942 to 1944.
The Ethiopian army did its best to defend its country, prolonging the campaign even
after the capital fell in May 1936, via guerrilla warfare, which would continue until the collapse
of Mussolini himself.
Once the situation was deemed hopeless, all sanctions were lifted and the League simply
stopped caring about the conflict, now that Hitler had broken the Versailles Treaty by
occupying the Rhineland.
Emperor Hailie Selassie left Ethiopia and spoke before the assembly in Geneva, after
being mocked by Italian journalists, attempting to silence him with whistles: “I assert
that the problem submitted to the Assembly today is a much wider one.
It is not merely a question of the settlement of Italian aggression.
It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations.
It is the confidence that each State is to place in international treaties.
It is the value of promises made to small states that their integrity and their independence
shall be respected and ensured.”
His country was devastated, but he continued the struggle from his asylum in Britain, defeated,
humiliated, and abandoned.
Italy was now officially an empire, but prolonged conflict cost Mussolini 33.5 billion lira,
which was six times more than he expected, coupled with his involvement in the Spanish
Civil war, which the League also failed to prevent, the Italian currency lost over half
of its value and the plans for the modernisation of its military were completely abandoned.
The economic sanctions and soft approach towards Italy intended to keep Mussolini as an ally
ended up having the exact opposite effect.
The dictator laid out the blueprint for how nations could bypass the League, one that
Hitler quickly followed and both strongmen put their differences aside, creating the
Berlin-Rome axis.
Japan, whose invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was another failure of the League, left it
and joined this axis later on.
For all of the great humanitarian work the League has done across the globe, its peacekeeping
role was little more than a sham and now the whole world knew it.
Worse still, Britain and France proved that they were using the organization as extensions
of their own governments to pursue their own interests, which meant that the appeasement
policy, which the League followed, was also their national policy, one which Germany would
exploit to an immense degree in the following years.
After it failed as a peacekeeping body, the league turned its attention to humanitarian
efforts.
It ended the slave trade in Liberia, combatted the drug trade, laid the groundwork for a
world bank, gathered experts who wrote about the relationship between food and health and
launched a massive campaign against malaria.
But with the fall of France, Switzerland was surrounded by Mussolini and Hitler, and Geneve
was cut off from the world.
Years later the groundwork and principles of the League of Nations would be revived
and reformed into the United Nations, which keeps many of its structures and laws to this
day, but it is important to remember the failures of the League and avoid them in the future.
We are planning more episodes on the history of this period, so make sure you are subscribed
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