Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, launching a war that would drive Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie into exile, pave the way for Italian occupation, and test the capacity and will of the League of Nations to check the aggression of expansionist states. Evidence of an impending incursion had “been accumulating for some months,” Robert Gale Woolbert wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier that year. But in a world still largely governed by European colonial powers, whether Italy would go to war depended on whether “France and Great Britain . . . permit it.”
Much of the writing in Foreign Affairs during the war revealed the racism implicit in Western understandings of the conquest—and, in some cases, the racist ideas used to justify it (Corrado Zoli, the former Italian colonial governor of Eritrea, extolled the imperial expansion as a “civilizing mission”). A powerful indictment of Italy’s “indefensible aggression,” meanwhile, came from W. E .B. Du Bois. Italy, he wrote, had proceeded with its invasion “in spite of the League of Nations, in spite of her treaty of arbitration, in spite of efforts at conciliation and adjustment”—and its actions perpetuated a colonial system of “economic exploitation based on the excuse of race prejudice.”
The League of Nations—of which both Ethiopia and Italy were members—did vote to condemn the war. The achievement “seemed little less than a miracle,” Alfred Zimmern wrote in 1936. But the fact remained that the body “did not succeed in preventing war from breaking out.” Nor, as A. Lawrence Lowell pointed out, were the sanctions imposed on Italy particularly effective restraints. Both scholars still believed the league could learn from its failure; others, however, saw in Ethiopia signs of another war to come. As Du Bois put it, “if Italy takes her pound of flesh by force, does anyone suppose that Germany will not make a similar attempt?”
