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Empire des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935–36

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

ROSE PARFITT
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Abstract

The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935–36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was annexed by another (Fascist Italy) – presents one of the clearest twentieth-century illustrations of international law's ‘progress narrative’. International lawyers are encouraged to draw a salutary lesson from the crisis: namely that Ethiopia's sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law had been properly enforced. Yet, the assumption upon which this lesson depends – to the effect that Ethiopia's only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant – is profoundly ideological. For this assumption effects a double suppression: erasing Ethiopia's strategic construction of a hybrid, partially Abyssinian international law from the discipline's memory; and concealing from scholarly view the possibility that Ethiopia's annexation might have resulted from actions that were in accordance with, rather than in violation of, interwar international legal norms regarding sovereignty and the use of force.

Keywords

civilizationEthiopiahybridityLeague of Nationssovereignty
Type
ARTICLES
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 849 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2011

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References

1 Under Art. 16, the illegal resort to war by a League member would be considered ‘an act of war against all other [m]embers of the League’, who were then bound to impose collective, ultimately military sanctions, upon the aggressor state. 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations, 27 LNTS 350, Art. 16.

2 For some British examples, see, e.g., A. Cassese, International Law (2005), 37; A. Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (1950), 249–50; M. L. Shaw, International Law (2003), 30. For a similar construction of the Abyssinia crisis in more critical accounts of international law, see, e.g., on the left, C. Miéville, Between Equal Rights (2005), 260; and M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (2005), 592; and, on the right, Schmitt, C., ‘Die siebente Wandlung des Genfer Völkerbundes’, in Schmitt, C. (ed.), Positionen und Begriffe in Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles 1923–39 (1988)Google Scholar, 2010–13 (my thanks to Reut Paz for finding and translating this for me); and C. Schmitt [1950], The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (2003), 242.

3 See 1945 Charter of the United Nations, 1 UNTS XVI, Arts. 2(4), 24–51. In the following analysis of a specific illustration of what David Kennedy has called international law's ‘progress narrative’, I am building on a tradition of critical international legal scholarship. See, e.g., Kennedy, D., ‘The Move to Institutions’, (1986–87) 8 Cardozo Law Review 841, at 841–988Google Scholar; and Berman, N., ‘In the Wake of Empire’, (1999) 14 AUILR 1521, at 1521–69Google Scholar.

4 H. I. M. Haile Selassie, Address to the League Assembly, 30 June 1936, in S. Heald, Documents on International Affairs, 1935, Vol. 2 (1937), 522: ‘I ask the 52 nations, who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor, what are they willing to do for Ethiopia?’

5 Nathaniel Berman's account is exceptional in relying far less heavily on this assumption than most. See N. Berman, ‘Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism? Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia, and “Peaceful Change”’, (1966) 65 NJIL 421, at 421–79. On the difference between ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Abyssinian’, see section 3, infra.

6 On the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, see section 2, infra.

7 See especially Bhabha, H. K., ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ and ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Bhabha, H. K. (ed.), The Location of Culture (1994), 121–31Google Scholar; and Bakhtin, M. M., ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Holquist, M. (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination (1981), 259–422Google Scholar; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984); Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986).

8 I follow Susan Marks and John Thompson in defining ideology as ‘the ways in which meaning is used to establish and sustain relations of domination’. J. Thompson, quoted in S. Marks, The Riddle of All Constitutions (2000), 10.

9 See supra note 3.

10 See Bakhtin, supra note 7, at 276.

11 My thanks to Nathaniel Berman for pointing me in this direction.

12 See 1945 Statute of the International Court of Justice, Art. 38(1).

13 I borrow this term from D. Donham and W. James (eds.), The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Social Anthropology (2002).

14 See R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire (1995), 4–20.

15 Ibid., at 8.

16 E. Long [1774], The History of Jamaica (2003).

17 D. Harper, Online Etymological Dictionary, available online at www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mulatto.

18 See Young, supra note 14, at 8.

19 Ibid., at 18.

20 See Commonwealth of Australia, Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1997).

21 Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, supra note 7, at 125.

22 Ibid., at 159–60.

23 See generally R. J. C. Young, White Mythologies (2004), 181–98.

24 Bakhtin, supra note 7, at 276.

25 Ibid., at 341–6.

26 Ibid., at 305.

27 Bakhtin, supra note 7, at 185.

28 Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974 (2001), 8.

29 Ibid., at 9.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., at 9–10.

32 Ibid., at 26.

33 Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (1995), xiv.

34 Ibid., at xii–xiv.

35 Ibid., at xvii, quoting C. G. Seligman.

36 Ibid., at xvi.

37 E. Gibbon [1781] The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2 (1977), 624.

38 J. Biever (1910), quoted in H. G. Marcus, ‘Racist Discourse about Ethiopia and Ethiopians Before and After the Battle’, in A. H. Ahmad and R. Pankhurst, eds., Adwa: Victory Centenary Conference, 26 February–2 March 1996 (1998), 396.

39 A. Liano, Éthiopie: Empire des Nègres blancs (1929).

40 E. Ullendorf, Ethiopia and the Bible (1968), 75. The Kebra Negast is understood to have been compiled during the early fourteenth century. See, e.g., Zewde, supra note 28, at 1.

41 Recounted in the Bible at 1 Kings 10:1–13.

42 See Teshale, supra note 33, at 14.

43 Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity shares many features with Judaism. See ibid., at 7–10. See generally Ullendorf, supra note 40.

44 Teshale, supra note 33, at 71.

45 D. Donham, ‘Old Abyssinia and the New Ethiopian Empire: Themes in Social History’, in Donham and James, supra note 13, at 24.

46 Ibid., at 12.

47 Ibid.

48 See Teshale, supra note 33, at 13.

49 See Donham, supra note 45, at 13 (emphasis added).

50 Ibid., at 12.

51 Leviticus 25:44.

52 Cited in this context by Teshale, supra note 33, at 54.

53 Quoted in ibid., at 6.

54 See ibid., at 63–4 (emphasis in original).

55 See Donham, supra note 45, at 5.

56 ‘Comments by M. Griaule on Some of the Questions Dealt with in the Italian Government's Memorandum on the Situation in Ethiopia’, in League of Nations Official Journal (November 1935), at 1593.

57 My thanks to Izabela Orlowska for this analogy. See I. A. Orlowska, ‘Re-Imagining Empire: Ethiopian Political Culture under Yohannis IV, 1872–89’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2006.

58 S. Rubenson, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence (1976), 30–2.

59 Ibid., at 34.

60 Quoted in Donham, supra note 45, at 9.

61 See Schwarzenberger, G., ‘The Standard of Civilization in International Law’, in Keeton, G. W. and Schwarzenberger, G. (eds.), Current Legal Problems 8 (1955), at 212–35Google Scholar; and G. W. Gong, The Standard of Civilization in International Society (1984).

62 ‘The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states’, 1933 Inter-American Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, (1934) 165 LNTS 19, Art. 1. Compare, e.g., L. Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise, Vol. 1 (1905), 99–101.

63 See, e.g., ibid., at 30–3; J. Westlake, The Collected Papers of John Westlake on International Law (1914), 79–85.

64 See, e.g., ibid., at 100.

65 See especially J. Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations (1883–84).

66 Covenant, supra note 1, Art. 2(4).

67 Ibid., Art. 22.

68 See, e.g., Oppenheim, supra note 62, at 35.

69 ‘Annex 5: Abyssinia's Application for Admission to the League, Report of the Second Sub-Committee, Revised Text’, Minutes of the Sixth Committee (Political Questions), in League of Nations, Assembly 4 1923, Committees 4–6, 34–5 (League of Nations Archives, Geneva).

70 These were: 1919 Convention Revising the General Act of Berlin, 26 February 1885, and the General Act and Declaration of Brussels, 2 July 1890, UKTS 018/1919: Cmd. 447, Art. 11; and 1919 Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and Protocol, UKTS 012/1919: Cmd. 414, Art. 6. This blanket ban on arms importation was eased somewhat in 1930. See 1930 Treaty between His Majesty, in respect of the United Kingdom, His Majesty the Emperor of Ethiopia, the President of the French Republic, and His Majesty the King of Italy regulating the Importation into Ethiopia of Arms, Ammunition and Implements of War, UKTS 010/1932: Cmd. 4051.

71 Covenant, supra note 1, Arts. 10, 16.

72 ‘Abyssinia and her Colonies’, Part II, Section B. of ‘Situation in Ethiopia: Memorandum from the Italian Government on the Situation in Abyssinia dated September 4 1925, and Documents Relating Thereto’, in League of Nations Official Journal (November 1935), 1393–6.

73 Ibid., at 1416.

74 Under Art. 20, the Covenant's signatories undertook to ‘abrogat[e] all obligations or understandings inter se which are inconsistent with the terms thereof’, and to release themselves from or avoid any such engagements in the future. Covenant, supra note 1, Art. 20.

75 See especially 1906 Agreement between the United Kingdom, France, and Italy respecting Abyssinia, UKTS 001/1907: Cd. 3298 (the ‘Tripartite Agreement’).

76 See Berman, supra note 5, at 445. I have made this argument in more detail in R. Parfitt, ‘Ethiopia and the Incorporation of the Disciplinary “Other”: A Bakhtinian Approach to International Personality’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2010, 164–216.

77 H. G. Marcus, Haile Selassie I: The Formative Years, 1892–1936 (1995), 49.

78 Ibid., at 44.

79 Ibid., at 53.

80 Zewde Retta, Tafari Makonnen: The Long Journey to Civilization during the Reigns of Menelik, Iyassu and Zewditu 1884–1922 [Ethiopian Calendar, E.C.], (1998 [E.C.]), 421–34. I am hugely grateful to Tilaye Gebre-Medhin and Abebaw Yigzaw for translating part of this book for me from the original Amharic. (Translations on file with the author.)

81 Ibid., at 421–5.

82 Ibid. The tabot is a wooden box, a replica of the Arc of the Covenant, and ‘the most important manifestation of Judaism and Christianity in Ethiopia’. Every church possesses one, from which it and its parish derive their name. Teshale, supra note 33, at 8. This is why tabot and ‘patron saint’ can be translated interchangeably.

83 Ancel, S., ‘“Mahbärs” et “sänbäte”: Associations religieuses en Éthiopie’, (2005) 8 Aethiopica 95Google Scholar.

84 Schaefer, C., ‘Maĥbär’, in Uhlig, S. et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Vol. 3: He–N (2007), 649–50Google Scholar. My thanks to Peter Garretson for this reference.

85 Ibid.

86 Zewde, supra note 80, at 421–34. Thanks to Tilaye Gebre-Medhin and Asfaw Damté for discussing this with me.

87 Ibid.

88 See generally Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia (2002).

89 See section 2, supra.

90 Zewde, supra note 80, at 421–34.

91 Ibid.

92 The Tewahido Church is the predominant branch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

93 Zewde, supra note 80, at 421–34.

94 I am relying primarily on the League's translation here. See Appendix III: Request for Admission to the League of Nations from Abyssinia, A.55.1923.VI, 6 September 1923, in Société des Nations, Assemblée 4 (1923), Documents 41–144, League of Nations Archives.

95 Ibid.

96 ‘Ethiopia has been for fourteen centuries a Christian land in a sea of pagans. If Powers at a distance come forward to partition African between them, I do not intend to be an indifferent spectator’, Menelik II, letter to the Heads of State of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, 10 April 1891, in I. Brownlie, African Boundaries: A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopaedia (1979), 777–8.

97 Request for Admission, supra note 94.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100 Teshale, supra note 33, at 45.

101 There is no standard Amharic dictionary equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary. However, this definition has been confirmed in conversations with Tilaye Gebre-Medhin, Asfaw Damté, and Abebaw Yigzaw. (Notes on file with the author.)

102 The English word ‘civilize’ is defined as: ‘[b]ring out of barbarism, enlighten, refine’ – a definition to which hierarchy is central, Concise Oxford English Dictionary (1964), 218.

103 Attention is drawn also to the subtitle to Zewde's book, The Long Road to Civilization (yesilit'ani). It is unlikely that Zewde would describe his country as having been ‘civilized’, in the sense of ‘de-barbarized’, through its increasing contact with the European states, especially during the period in question.

104 Tafari sent two letters to the League: one in French, the other in Amharic (photographs on file with the author). Zewde argues that these two letters were different in content, with the French version stressing Ethiopia's commitment to liberal reforms, and the Amharic version stressing instead common Christian civilization. Zewde, supra note 80, at 421–34. However, having compared the Tilaye and Abebaw translations of the Amharic version of the letter, as reproduced in Zewde's book, with the English translation of the French version of the letter held at the League Archives, it seems that the Amharic and French versions were, in fact, equivalent. However, this does not undermine the hybrid nature of Tafari's argument pointed to by Zewde.

105 Covenant, supra note 1, Art. 1(2). See supra note 72, at 102–44.

106 Donham, supra note 45, at 42–3.

107 It did not disappear, however. See, e.g., Ethiopia's response to the 1925 Anglo-Italian Exchange of Notes, which designated a vast area of south-west Ethiopia a potential ‘zone’ of ‘exclusive Italian economic influence’ (see ‘Letter from the British Ambassador to Rome to the Italian Prime Minister’, 14 December 1925, League of Nations Official Journal (November 1926), 1519–20), maintaining that ‘the purpose of the League is to establish and maintain peace among men in accordance with the will of God’. ‘Protest sent by His Imperial and Royal Highness Tafari Makonnen, Regent and Heir to the Throne of Abyssinia, to the States Members of the League of Nations', League of Nations Official Journal (November 1925), 1517–19.

108 Italian troops crossed the Mareb into Ethiopia at last on 3 October 1935. The catalyst for the crisis was the notorious Wal Wal Incident of November 1934. See, e.g., Potter, P., ‘The Wal Wal Arbitration’, (1936) 30 AJIL 27, at 27–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 See ‘Charter of Assistance’, in ‘Note Handed by the Chairman of the Committee of Five to the Ethiopian and Italian Representatives’, 18 September 1935, in League of Nations Official Journal (November 1935), 1621–4. See also F. Lugard, ‘Slavery in Abyssinia’, 6 November 1922, in Dossier 1/24628/23252, Box R.61, League of Nations Archives.

110 Tekle-Hawaryat, speech before the League of Nations Assembly, 11 September 1935, quoted in ‘Note Handed by the Chairman’, supra note 109, at 1622 (emphasis added).

111 See, e.g., G. W. Baer, Test Case (1976), 297: ‘Surely it was a poignant scene: the exile, taken from Djibouti to Palestine and then to Gibraltar in a British man-of-war (for fear of a rash act against him by some Italian naval captain), then on to England to a cool welcome and an uncertain future, standing there, the first head of state to address the Assembly, with a speech drafted by [legal advisers Gaston] Jèze or [Everett] Colson, by his very presence a rebuke to the League, asking what it was willing to do now for Ethiopia.’ Baer does not substantiate the assertion that Haile Selassie's speech was drafted by his foreign advisers.

112 The American lawyer, John Spencer, then foreign adviser to the Ethiopian government and seated with the delegation during this speech, argues that Haile Selassie had planned to speak in French but changed his mind at the last minute, having been made nervous by the heckling of Italian journalists. J. H. Spencer, Ethiopia at Bay (1984), 74. It is submitted that the two views are not, ultimately, incompatible.

113 The Ethiopian government's records from this period have not yet been organized or made available either to scholars or to the general public.

114 Zewde, supra note 28, at 110.

115 Griaule Comments, supra note 56, at 1588.

116 Ibid., at 1590.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid., at 1591.

119 Ibid., at 1592.

120 Ibid., at 1590.

121 ‘Preliminary Observations of the Ethiopian Delegation on the Italian Government's Memorandum’, in League of Nations Official Journal (November 1935), 1597 (emphasis added).

122 Quoted in Griaule Comments, supra note 56, at 1589, 1594 (emphasis added).

123 Ibid.; ‘Preliminary Observations’, supra note 121, at 1599.

124 Ibid. (emphasis added).

125 Griaule Comments, supra note 56, at 1592.

126 Ibid., at 1593.

127 Ibid., at 1593 (emphasis added).

128 Bakhtin, supra note 7, at 343.

129 Ibid., at 346.

130 For a detailed analysis of the dialogic (but, in relation to Ethiopia's discourse, relatively monologic) nature of international legal discourse during the interwar period, and of the various ‘social languages’ (including those of International Legal Modernism, Positivism, Liberal Nationalism, etc.) at play, see Parfitt, supra note 76, at 74–144.

131 Teshale, supra note 33, at xii–xiv.

132 For an ‘Aksumite’ source, see especially C. F. Beckingham and G. W. B. Huntingford (eds. and trans.), Some Records of Ethiopia, 1593–1646: Being Extracts from ‘The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia’ by Manoel de Almeida Together with Bahrey's ‘History of the Galla’ (1954), 109–29.

133 See A. M. H. Jones and E. Monroe, A History of Abyssinia (1935), 9, 63, 105.

134 See, e.g., A. Haile et al. (eds.), History of the Oromo to the Sixteenth Century (2006); M. Hassan, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570–1860 (1990); Mekuria Bulcha, ‘Conquest and Forced Migration: An Assessment of the Oromo Experience’, in Seyoum Hameso et al. (eds.), Ethiopia: Conquest and the Quest for Freedom and Democracy (1997), 27–68; P. T. W. Baxter, J. Hultin, and A. Triulzi (eds.), Being and Becoming an Oromo (1996).

135 See especially Haile et al., supra note 134.

136 E. Ullendorf, The Ethiopians (1975), 76.

137 Baxter, P. T. W., ‘Ethiopia's Unacknowledged Problem: The Oromo’, (1978) 77 African Affairs 283, at 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138 Ibid., at 284–5.

139 Quoted in ibid., at 97.