Remember Abyssinia

02.21.2003

UK's Telegraph published a column comparing the Iraq crisis w/ the 1935 crisis between the League of Nations and fascist Italy. Then, as now, Britain took a hawkish stance. Then, as now, France blocked attempts to use force -- even sanctions. Then, as now, France maneuvered to secure its own political and economic interests at the expense of concerted international efforts to enforce international order. With the League unwilling to antagonize Italy and risk war, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (aka Ethiopia). After 1935, Japan, Italy, and Germany (the original "axis of evil") realized the League of Nations was meaningless and wouldn't prevent them from doing as they wished. Soon after, the League disbanded, relegated to the "dustbin of history." France successfully avoided war in 1935. War came, in the end, only four years later -- at the cost of 40 million lives.

Read the column; it gives great historical detail of a little-known but key moment in world history.

Here are excerpts from Haile Selassie's speech begging the League of Nations to enforce its own resolutions:

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 ... In a word, it is international morality that is at stake. Have the signatures appended to a Treaty value only in so far as the signatory Powers have a personal, direct and immediate interest involved?

.....

I have heard it asserted that the inadequate sanctions already applied have not achieved their object. At no time, and under no circumstances could sanctions that were intentionally inadequate, intentionally badly applied, stop an aggressor. This is not a case of the impossibility of stopping an aggressor but of the refusal to stop an aggressor.

.....

Your Assembly will doubtless have laid before it proposals for the reform of the Covenant and for rendering more effective the guarantee of collective security. Is it the Covenant that needs reform? What undertakings can have any value if the will to keep them is lacking?

Sound familiar?

Posted by Miguel at 05:01 AM

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