1. Introduction
The story of the ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935–36 – in which one League of Nations member (Ethiopia, or the ‘Abyssinian Empire’) was brutally annexed and colonized by another (Fascist Italy) – is generally told as a turning point in twentieth-century international legal history. The lesson gleaned from this story by supporters of the UN system, and international lawyers generally, is that Ethiopia's sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law (particularly Art. 16 of the Covenant, which laid out the League system's cardinal norm of collective securityFootnote 1) had been properly enforced.Footnote 2 The architects of the UN system are understood to have learned this valuable lesson and implemented it in the Charter's more robust definition of the prohibition on the use of force and more rigorous collective security provisions. It follows from this narrative of progress that the causes of the Abyssinia crisis are to be found not in the norms and institutions of international law, but rather in the fraught power politics of the interwar period, which threw a spanner in the international legal works at a moment of disciplinary immaturity now overcome.Footnote 3
Missing conspicuously from this narrative, however, is an account of the response of its ostensibly central character – Ethiopia – to this cataclysmic international legal breakdown. As I shall demonstrate, a re-examination of the crisis and its genesis from the perspective of Ethiopia opens up the otherwise foreclosed possibility that its 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. In particular, I shall argue that, in the process of accepting Ethiopia, conditionally, as a member, the League of Nations reconstituted Ethiopia's international personality. For Ethiopia fulfilled, and/or agreed in future to fulfil, two sets of conditions: both the general conditions of accession contained in the Covenant and the ‘special’ conditions attached to its own accession. As a result, Ethiopia, which had been recognized as a state since at least the mid-nineteenth century, came after 1923 to possess a hybrid international personality that was both sovereign and less-than-sovereign at the same time. As became clear during the crisis, the rights that Ethiopia could claim under the League were weaker and the duties it owed more onerous, compared with the European members of the League. In this sense, Ethiopia's experience provides an interesting example of the League's construction and reconstruction of entities encountered on the periphery of the interwar international community, at least as far as their international legal selfhood or international personality was concerned. Ethiopia's experience also demonstrates, moreover, that this central League project of re/constructing peripheral sovereigns was carried out not only in relation to expressly sub-sovereign ‘mandated territories’ such as Palestine and Mesopotamia/Iraq, but also in relation to recognized non-European – or, in the Latin American case, neo-European – states. Under the League, in other words, sovereign equality was not even a goal, let alone a reality or even a myth. On the contrary, the manufacture of sovereign inequality was one of the League's most characteristic functions.
Historians of the interwar period would perhaps protest that Ethiopia's voice is far from silent in the accepted account of the crisis. After all, the address (immortalized in Bob Marley's song, ‘War’) given by Emperor Haile Selassie I before the League of Nations Assembly on 30 June 1936, appealing to the other League members to fulfil their collective security obligations towards Ethiopia, is one of the most famous speeches ever associated with the League.Footnote 4 However, this paper will challenge the widespread assumption (based almost exclusively on the content of this speech) that Ethiopia's only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively – and ineffectually – to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant. I will argue that this assumption serves to suppress Ethiopia's mobilization of aspects of Ethiopian culture and history in the defence of its sovereignty, thereby constructing a partially Ethiopian (or, more specifically, a partially Abyssinian) international law.Footnote 5 As we shall see, Ethiopia presented a deliberately hybridized discourse to the League of Nations,Footnote 6 in an attempt to present itself as both culturally unique and, therefore, different from the League's other, primarily European members, but also as culturally and hence legally equal to them. To put it another way, I will argue that Ethiopia deployed an international legal discourse of equality-in-difference, as opposed to one of equality-in-sameness. This strategy was made possible by the fact that Ethiopia was, at that time, widely understood as a cultural, racial, geographical, and (as I argue) juridical hybrid. Building on the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin,Footnote 7 I will show how Ethiopia's discursive strategy has been obfuscated, with ideological effect,Footnote 8 by its portrayal as the mouthpiece for international law's supposed cry for justice in the wilderness of power politics.Footnote 9
The methodology to be employed in this article is also hybrid in that it brings the historical to bear on the theoretical, and vice versa. This methodology has been inspired by Bakhtin's ‘dialogical’ understanding of discourse. As Bakhtin wrote:
[n]o living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme . . .. It is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape.Footnote 10
In mixing together historical and theoretical forms of inquiry, I seek to draw attention to the particular ‘elastic environment’, first, between my own ‘authorial’ words (as Bakhtin would have put it) and those I enclose in speech marks; and, second, between these ‘words’ and those of Bakhtin, Bhabha, and other theorists – in order to give them critical, no less than stylistic, ‘shape’.Footnote 11 My aim, here, is to perform a kind of immanent critique that selects its tools not from ‘outside’ the object of its investigation (in the realm of the ideal), but rather from ‘inside’ the historical reality of the object of investigation (in the realm of the material). That is, I derive the critical tools used in this research from the ‘words’ or discourse used by Ethiopia, Britain, France, Italy, in the Covenant, in other relevant treaties, and so on – and therefore from the particular social structures and hierarchies they reflect. Given that international law is understood, according to the formal doctrine of sources, to be constituted of precisely such ‘official words’ – including the text of treaties, and the practice and opinio juris of statesFootnote 12 – this dialogical methodology is well suited to the substantive task at hand.
I begin, in the following section, by examining the theory and history of the concept of hybridity. This is necessary to allow the hybrid quality of Ethiopia's international personality and international legal discourse, together with its significance for the discipline, to be understood. Second, I introduce two conflicting historical and historiographical accounts of Ethiopia's emergence as an independent entity. The comparison between these two accounts is of central importance, since it enables us to compare the way in which Ethiopia's international personality – its rights and duties under international law – was understood by agents of the League of Nations on the one hand and by agents of the Ethiopian state on the other. Third, I look at Ethiopia's international personality upon entry into the League in 1923 and during the crisis of 1935–36 through a telescope set up, as it were, first in Geneva, then in Addis Ababa. Finally, I remove the telescope from both these centres of power and reassemble it in Ethiopia's southern marches.Footnote 13
2. The history and theory of hybridity
Hybridity is a powerful concept: notions of defilement, contamination, and dirtiness have been used to justify the exclusion of those who fail to fit ‘pure’ social categories since the dawn of the very concept of society.Footnote 14 Referring to the product of two different species, the term hybridity was rarely used in relation to humans before the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 15 However, by about 1850, and until the 1940s, the ‘polygenesis’ argument – to the effect that ‘the White and the Negro are two distinct species’Footnote 16 – had come to dominate the social sciences. Animal hybrids such as the mule (origin of the term ‘mulatto’Footnote 17) are, by definition, infertile. The debate over human hybridity therefore hinged on the rather startling question of the fertility or otherwise of mixed-race individuals.Footnote 18 The most common assumption at this time, from the American Deep South to Nazi Germany, was that ‘unions between allied races are fertile, [while] those between distant races either are infertile or tend to degeneration’.Footnote 19 In Australia, however, the theory of ‘absorption’ led thousands of Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children (the ‘stolen generation’) to be removed from their families and brought up in ‘civilized’ white society.Footnote 20
Yet, Bhabha has argued that hybridity may also have an emancipatory dimension. In his view, the inevitable gap between colonist and colonized (‘civilizable’, but only up to a certain point – that point marked, inevitably, by skin colour) is not only alienating for the latter, but also profoundly disconcerting and, indeed, menacing to the former. The hybridity of the colonial subject or ‘mimic man’Footnote 21 therefore has the potential to be deployed against the colonial system, for ‘[h]ybridity . . . unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back on the eye of power’.Footnote 22 Rather than opposing some lost, perhaps ‘traditional’ pre-colonial cultural reality to an imposed Orientalist cultural fiction (which would imply that resistance can only come from an external critic), therefore, Bhabha argues that the locus of resistance is to be found in the living hybridity of colonized identity, both subjective and objective, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, real and artificial, empowered and disempowered.Footnote 23
Bhabha's work is closely related to Bakhtin's earlier literary and linguistic scholarship on discursive hybridity. For Bakhtin, the meaning of a word can be neither fixed nor pure, for meaning is determined by the very contamination (‘dialogization’) of a word both by other words and by alternative uses and interpretations of it in the mouths, ears, eyes, and brains of other speakers and listeners – including uses and interpretations recalled from the past and anticipated in the future.Footnote 24 Language, for Bakhtin, is an organic whole, and its development, though in constant flux, is grounded in concrete social interaction. To this extent, all discourse, if allowed to develop freely and ‘organically’, is hybridized: language is naturally ‘dialogic’. By contrast, Bakhtin asserts, the language of authority is ‘monologic’: its concern is to close off, petrify, and finalize meaning. The process of dialogization – of semantic pluralization – therefore represents a threat to the status quo, which implies that hybridization can be a discursive strategy, to be used for critical/revolutionary as well as stylistic purposes.Footnote 25 Thus, looking at the use of the technique of ‘intentional’/‘authorial’ (as opposed to ‘organic’) hybridization in the novel, Bakhtin argues that, when an author deliberately splices together two recognizable ‘social languages’ into a single phrase, the identity of each is accentuated by its juxtaposition against the other. Any taken-for-granted hierarchy between these two discourses is thereby unsettled: the ‘utterance’, or even a single word,Footnote 26 becomes ‘double-voiced’.Footnote 27 Two such ‘double-voiced’ words that were, as I shall suggest, of crucial importance to the international legal crisis brought to a head by Italy's invasion of Ethiopia were ‘league’ and ‘civilization’, or mahabar and silit'ane, as they were translated, respectively, into Amharic at the moment in question. However, in order to understand the role played by these words in the clash between the ‘orthodox’ international legal arguments coming from the League and the ‘hybrid’ international legal arguments offered by Ethiopia, it is necessary first to understand how Ethiopia had been constructed as an independent entity up until that moment, in Europe and in Ethiopia itself.
3. A brief histor(iograph)y of Ethiopia
The politico-territorial entity of Ethiopia traces its descent back to the Aksumite Empire, which, at the height of its powers, between the first and seventh centuries bce, stretched from the core northern Ethiopian territories of Amhara and Tigre across the Red Sea to the Arabian Coast. The Aksumite Empire converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 330s and, in about 1270, Emperor Yekunno-Amlak (r. 1270–85), an Amhara, established the Solomonic dynasty of which Haile Selassie (r. 1930–74) was the last in line.Footnote 28 With Yekunno-Amlak began a long period of Christian imperial expansion into neighbouring Muslim and animist principalities – a policy continued with vehemence in the late nineteenth century by Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889–1913).Footnote 29 However, in 1531, a devastating jihad launched by Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (known in Ethiopia as ‘Ahmad Gragn’, meaning ‘Ahmad the left-handed’) pushed Ethiopia's boundaries right back to the northern highlands and would have exterminated the empire completely had it not been for the arrival, in 1543, of a Portuguese contingent called to the defence of Christianity. This first near-death experience was followed closely by a second – the arrival of the pagan Oromo people, which allegedly ‘swept across the highlands like a tidal wave’,Footnote 30 destroying everything in their wake. Ethiopia's third historical trauma concerned the subsequent influx of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, whose eventual success in converting Emperor Susenyos (r. 1607–32) to Catholicism triggered a terrible civil war.Footnote 31 The Jesuits were expelled, but Europeans (ferenj) would be associated with perfidy and Catholic imperialism from that moment onwards. Nonetheless, it was an expansionist Egypt, rather than Europe, that posed the greatest threat to Ethiopia until, following the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, the empire found itself, minus a coastline (which became the Italian colony of Eritrea in 1890), surrounded by British, French, and Italian colonies.Footnote 32
While these may be some of the bare facts of Ethiopian history, Teshale Tibebu reminds us that ‘[i]n the scholarly tradition, Ethiopia is depicted with multiple personalities’.Footnote 33 Two of these have dominated the study of the Ethiopian polity: (to use Teshale's terms for them) the ‘Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm’ germane to European and North American scholarship on Ethiopia, and the ‘Aksumite paradigm’ derived from the ancient culture and religious texts of Ethiopia's historically dominant peoples, the Christian Tigray-Tigrinya and Amhara peoples, known as habasha or ‘Abyssinians’.Footnote 34 As I will demonstrate, the nature of the relationship between these two paradigms had a profound effect on the way in which Ethiopia's international personality was constructed, and ultimately (if temporarily) extinguished.
3.1. The ‘Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm’
According to the ‘Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm’, Ethiopian history begins, Teshale explains, ‘sometime during the first millennium [BCE], when a group of [Caucasian] Sabeans crossed from Yemen to Africa . . . [bringing] with them civilization, script, and the knowledge of agriculture’ and then ‘mixed with the indigenous Negroid peoples’.Footnote 35 Ethiopia is therefore ‘unique in and outlandish to Africa’, an ‘outpost of civilization, the ‘south western end of the Semitic world’.Footnote 36 Writing in the late eighteenth century, for example, Edward Gibbon hypothesized that, while the ‘hand of nature’ had ‘flattened the noses of the negroes, covered their heads with shaggy wool, and tinged their skin with an inherent and indelible blackness’, the ‘olive complexion of the Abyssinians, their hair, shape, and features’ marked them out as ‘a colony of Arabs’.Footnote 37 For Friedrich Biever, the Ethiopian (i.e., Abyssinian) nation was ‘the only one that is civilized without wearing trousers and shoes’.Footnote 38 In other words, Ethiopia was, to Europe, an ‘empire des nègres blancs’, as Alejandro Liaño entitled his 1929 volume,Footnote 39 in between white and black, civilized and barbaric, imperial and African.
3.2. The ‘Aksumite paradigm’
Much more familiar to Ethiopians is the ‘Aksumite paradigm’, outlined in the most sacred text of the Abyssinian people, the Kebra Negast (‘Glory of Kings’).Footnote 40 According to this text, Ethiopia's history begins, in about 950 bce, with the birth of King Menelik I, the product of an alleged brief encounter between King Solomon and the Ethiopian Queen Saba (a.k.a. the Queen of Sheba).Footnote 41 All habasha are understood to be descended from Menelik I, who, upon visiting his father in Jerusalem, appropriated the Ark of the Covenant (the tabot) and took it back to Ethiopia.Footnote 42 For the Aksumite paradigm, then, just as for the Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm, the identity of Ethiopia's ruling people is hybrid.Footnote 43
The Aksumite paradigm corresponded to a complex social hierarchy. In the northern Christian highlands, the Abyssinian nobility ruthlessly extracted tribute from the peasant (gebbar).Footnote 44 However, as Donald Donham points out, ‘the poorest peasant from the north considered himself superior to any southerner’.Footnote 45 Moreover, the category ‘Amhara’ denoted less an ethnicity than a particular social position – available to those who were first Orthodox Christians, second Amharic-speakers, and only third ‘not markedly negroid in racial features’.Footnote 46 The opportunity therefore existed for Ethiopia's non-Christian peoples to ‘become’ Abyssinian.Footnote 47 These ‘others’ fell into four (non-Christian) groups:Footnote 48 the Oromo or Galla, as they were known pejoratively; Muslims; the Beta Israel, Ethiopia's indigenous Jewish community; and Shankilla, the darker-skinned, pagan peoples of the south.
Like its European equivalent, then, Abyssinian civilization was founded upon a crucial Christian/non-Christian, civilized/uncivilized dichotomy, which mapped onto a geographical–political split within the empire itself. However, unlike the ultimately racially based European conception of civilization – thanks to which (as Bhabha argued, above) ‘full’ selfhood is always just out of reach for the colonial subject – the process of civilization in Ethiopian society was one that could be completed by those who abandoned their original identity. For example, according to Donham:
[a]lthough ‘Galla’ carried overtones of race and slavery – particularly to Abyssinians in the far north – its primary meaning seems to have been focused on religion and culture, not on race. Galla were pagans. They were uncivilized. Ye-Galla ch'ewa ye-gomen ch'oma yelem (‘It's as impossible to find a Galla gentleman as it is to find fat in greens . . .’). But in fact, some Galla . . . were finally ‘civilized’; over time, they became Amhara.Footnote 49
Therefore, although the origin of the Abyssinian identity was founded on a myth of natural assimilation, the process was, in fact, one of deliberate incorporation couched explicitly in terms of a Christian civilizing mission. Only in the encounter with Shankilla was full assimilation complicated by the issue of race, for Shankilla were understood as ‘reservoir populations of potential slaves, seen almost as part of the natural environment of the Abyssinian state’.Footnote 50
Slavery was, notoriously, one of Imperial Ethiopia's characteristic institutions.Footnote 51 However, while slaves were certainly considered socially inferior, it appears that the status of slave was merely the lowest of several extremely lowly statuses in Ethiopian society, and was not considered the opposite of that of free individual as in what Moses I. Finley calls ‘genuine slave societies’ like classical Greece.Footnote 52 For example, the material circumstances of the slave were often indistinguishable from those of the gebbar, a significant percentage of whose meagre output was systematically appropriated by the local nobility under the system of gult – rights of tribute collection distributed by the emperor to favoured noblemen.Footnote 53 Moreover, the term barya (‘slave’), had a key symbolic function:
[t]o sign a letter with the words baryawe (your slave), was standard procedure. The person who signed baryawe was not a slave at all. He considered himself to be one. In this context, the entire population was treated as the ‘slave’ of the negusa nagast . . . [who] spoke of himself as We . . . to emphasize his singular ultimate power over his ‘slave’ subjects.Footnote 54
Nonetheless, these class-like distinctions were not understood to be fixed as a matter of birth, as in European feudal society; ‘[r]ather, all men were thought to be basically the same, even if chance and personal destiny had rendered them temporarily unequal.’Footnote 55 And, indeed, a number of extremely important members of the Ethiopian elite had risen up the hierarchy from the position of slave.Footnote 56 Power, in Imperial Ethiopian society, must therefore be seen as emanating outwards from a central point – the emperor – via a kind of paper-clip chain of localized hierarchical relations.Footnote 57 This pattern was reflected in Ethiopia's characteristically fractured system of government,Footnote 58 engendered by the mountainous terrain, lack of roads, and long rainy season, and thanks to which, despite the emperor's claim to be the elect of God (siyyume igze'abiher), ‘the real rulers of Ethiopia were the regional governors, the rases and dejazmatches of the various provinces’.Footnote 59 It was in this practical, as well as biblical, sense that the emperor's title was negusa nagast or ‘king of kings’. Imperial Ethiopia's characteristic system of centralization-in-fragmentation is well summed up in the Amharic aphorism: ‘a dog knows his master but not his master's master.’Footnote 60
The following sections will demonstrate how the Orientalist–Semiticist and Aksumite paradigms were incorporated into Ethiopia's (hybrid) international personality.
4. The view from Geneva: the Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm and Ethiopia's international personality
The Orientalist–Semiticist perception of Ethiopia as simultaneously Caucasian and ‘Negroid’, civilized and barbaric, Christian and apostate, empire and potential colony, found its way into Ethiopia's international personality via the two international legal ‘standards’ that were (and are) used to assess the capacity of aspiring sovereigns to assume rights and duties: the criteria for statehood and the notorious ‘standard of civilization’.Footnote 61 While the criteria comprising what I shall call the ‘standard of statehood’ have barely changed since the nineteenth century,Footnote 62 the traits associated, in international law, with ‘civilization’ have varied widely. At first, Christianity was considered fundamental, but, during the second half of the nineteenth century, as states like China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire were granted a degree of international personality, Christianity gave way to other criteria based on European culture and institutions – in particular, the ability to furnish Europeans with the legal, economic, and, later, political institutions to which they had become accustomed.Footnote 63 Though some jurists denied the significance of race,Footnote 64 ‘social Darwinism’ infiltrated the work of many prominent international lawyers.Footnote 65 Indeed, this new, supposedly agnostic ‘standard of civilization’ found itself in the League Covenant, which not only included the criterion of ‘self-government’ (meaning constitutional or liberal government) among its entry requirements,Footnote 66 but also, in placing the overseas colonies of the defeated Ottoman and German Empires in a ‘sacred trust of civilization’, implicitly divided Arab from black African and Pacific peoples, formally recognizing only the former (the ‘Class A’ mandates) as possessing the potential to ‘stand alone’ under ‘the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ following an unspecified period of tutelage.Footnote 67
In keeping with its hybrid cultural and historical identity, Ethiopia confounded both ‘standards’, causing the international lawyers of this period as much anxiety as the legal status of ‘mulattos’ caused its colonial administrators.Footnote 68 The clearest manifestation of this anxiety can be found in the ‘special obligations’ imposed on Ethiopia upon its admission to the League in September 1923. Ethiopia's application for membership was assessed by the League's Sixth Committee using a standard questionnaire, which asked whether Ethiopia been ‘recognized de jure or de facto’, whether it possessed ‘a stable government and well-defined frontiers’, whether it was ‘self-governing’, and what its position was regarding international obligations and disarmament.Footnote 69 Although Ethiopia passed all these tests, it was forced to accede, additionally, to specific articles in two treaties, thereby pledging to abolish slavery – by that time widely considered the marker of ‘barbarity’ sine qua non – and to relinquish its right to import arms.Footnote 70 I suggest that these ‘special obligations’ constituted Ethiopia's interwar personality as hybrid: both sovereign and less-than-sovereign simultaneously. On the one hand, the slavery condition was designed to drag Ethiopia ‘up’ the evolutionary scale by casting the ‘Abyssinian Empire’ as a colonial power, duty-bound to ‘civilize’ its own feckless, slave-raiding ‘natives’. On the other hand, the arms condition cast Ethiopia as itself the ‘uncivilized’ native object of a European colonial treaty designed to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of untrustworthy ‘barbarians’, thereby setting in international legal stone Ethiopia's perceived lack of ‘civilization’ by incapacitating its right of self-defence, and forcing it to become almost entirely dependent on the Covenant's collective security provisions.
The consequences of this hybrid personality became only too obvious in 1935. Italy, in an infamous memorandum to the League Council of 4 September 1935, used both the fact of the ‘special obligations’ and Ethiopia's alleged failure to meet them to argue that Ethiopia's sovereign rights, guaranteed by the Covenant, to territorial integrity, political independence, non-aggression, and collective security had been forfeited.Footnote 71 In effect, that is, Italy argued that the Covenant's provisions regarding non-intervention and the use of force were no longer applicable to Ethiopia. To this end, Italy made detailed allegations about Ethiopia's allegedly ‘barbaric’ culture, stressing the pervasiveness of slavery, the Amharas’ domination of Ethiopia's ‘other’ peoples (portrayed by Italy as oppressive and unenlightened ‘colonialism’), and the gebbar system, which Italy branded ‘a form of servitude akin to slavery’.Footnote 72 The memorandum insisted that:
[n]o Member of the League can invoke rights derived from the Covenant unless it has . . . fulfilled the conditions which the Covenant itself imposes as indispensable for the quality of membership . . ..
Ethiopia has shown that she does not possess the qualifications necessary to enable her to obtain, through participation in the League, the impulse required to raise herself by voluntary efforts to the level of the other civilized nations . . ..
Ethiopia has openly placed herself outside the Covenant of the League and has rendered herself unworthy of the trust placed in her when she was admitted to membership.Footnote 73
As this indicates, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia cannot, as the standard account would have it, be dismissed as the unchecked aggression of a Fascist power acting ‘outside’ or ‘against’ international law. On the contrary, according to one perfectly real understanding of interwar international law articulated not only by Italy but also, at various points, by Britain and France, the League's most powerful members and greatest advocates, the international legal renegade was Ethiopia. This reading understood the corpus of international law in the 1930s to encompass not only the Covenant, but also Ethiopia's ‘Special Declaration’ of 1923 and a number of pre-1914 colonial treaties with which that Declaration was in the closest harmony, the juridical salience of which continued long after 1919, Article 20 of the Covenant notwithstanding.Footnote 74 In these colonial treaties, particularly the notorious ‘Tripartite Treaty’ of 1906,Footnote 75 Britain, France, and Italy had divided Ethiopia's territory up prospectively among themselves, in (hopeful but ultimately misplaced) anticipation of the empire's political collapse. In 1923, therefore, Ethiopia, the League's newest member (along with Ireland), found itself in possession of a chimerical international personality, product of a hybrid international legal order composed of the League system on the one hand and, on the other, of a supposedly pre-League system according to which ‘sovereign’ and ‘African’ were mutually exclusive terms.Footnote 76
4.1. The view from Addis Ababa (1): Ethiopia's accession to the League
By 1923, the split between the conservative faction of Ethiopia's then-Empress Zewditu (r. 1916–30), which included the regional nobility and clergy, and Tafari's modernizing ‘Young Ethiopians’ was already well entrenched. One fiercely opposed reform close to Tafari's heart (in addition to the abolition of slavery and the modernization of Ethiopia's infrastructureFootnote 77) concerned foreign policy: he was convinced of the need for Ethiopia to end its traditional strategy of international isolation by seeking League membership.Footnote 78 In late July 1923, notables were summoned into Addis Ababa from all corners of the empire, and the Council of the Realm met continuously for six days and nights to discuss the idea.Footnote 79 Convincing the conservative clergy and nobility was no easy matter, however.
According to the historian Zewde Retta,Footnote 80 the nobility put three questions to Tafari:
1. Would not membership in the League [Mahbar] of Nations make it very easy for the foreigners [ferenj] to come to our country freely and spy on us, and to invade us as soon as they find it advantageous? It would be impossible to close the door to our house to a fellow-member.
2. As is recorded in our history, ferenj can never be true friends to us; if for the sake of seeking civilization [silit'ane] we open our hearts to them, it might ultimately be more harmful than advantageous. And then what would be our defence?
3. If the number of ferenj coming to our country increased because of our membership, would this not give them the opportunity to convert our children to the Catholic faith using the unscrupulous methods they [always] bring with them?Footnote 81
The Echege, administrative head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, then asked, ‘When we prepare to be a member of the Mahbar of Nations which double patron saint (dirib tabot) are we going to take into the League?’Footnote 82 It is clear, as Zewde argues, that Tafari's apparently strategic decision to translate the term ‘League of Nations' into Amharic as ‘Mahbar of Nations' was crucial. The Mahbar was a characteristic Abyssinian social institution or religious fraternal association. Each mahbar was dedicated to a particular saint,Footnote 83 its members meeting monthly, at each member's house in turn.Footnote 84 However, ‘[b]eyond their ceremonial functions, [mahbars] were organised to provide mediation and mutual assistance for their membership, for instance, to help rebuild a house that had burned down’.Footnote 85 The relationship among its members was therefore extremely close.Footnote 86 This is vital, for, if to join the League of Nations was to join a Mahbar of Nations, then, in joining, Ethiopia would lose the right to refuse anything asked of it by other members – including access to the Ethiopian ‘house’. In international legal terms, the nobility feared that Ethiopia's rights to non-intervention and self-defence would be weakened, rather than strengthened, by accession. The Echege's question refers to the practice of ‘double saint’ (dirib tabot), according to which members of one mahbar were sometimes permitted to join a second one.Footnote 87 For the Echege, then, the issue was not only that of whether Ethiopia would be permitted to retain its own identity when joining the Mahbar of Nations, but also that of which of its multiple identities should be selected as most suited to the task. This takes us back to Bakhtin's distinction between ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’ modes of understanding, the issue being whether joining the League would necessarily imply the destruction of Ethiopia's unique (religious) identity – its ‘otherness’ – or whether Ethiopia would be able to retain its alterity while participating in the League as an equal. The point is clearly not that the nobility and clergy misunderstood the League's function; on the contrary, it is that they put forward a specifically Abyssinian understanding of the Covenant and of international law more generally, upon which they based their suspicion (correct, as it turned out) that the task of defending Ethiopia's identity and independence while demanding its equality would be an impossible one.
Of course, as Tafari and the Young Ethiopians well knew, the League was not a mahbar in the Ethiopian sense.Footnote 88 The word ‘League’, in other words, had a double meaning in Ethiopia in mid-1923. This, I suggest, allowed Tafari to respond to the nobility and Echege with a strategy of ‘intentional hybridization’ (to use Bakhtin's term for it),Footnote 89 mixing together two rationales for joining the League – one based on the Covenant, the other on the Aksumite paradigm – in order to render them mutually more distinctive and more powerful. On the one hand, he replied that ‘if one aggressive government tries to invade another weak government, with arms, the member countries of the Mahbar of Nations will fight it together’ – an orthodox statement of the Covenant's collective security principle.Footnote 90 On the other hand, however, Tafari also appealed to the Aksumite paradigm in reminding his audience that ‘[w]e the Ethiopian Nation, live surrounded by Animists and Muslims’ who ‘look at us as enemies because we are Christians’.Footnote 91 The bond of Christianity did not, he admitted, guarantee that all ferenj could be counted upon as friends; yet there was ‘no reason why our religion should be affected by our determination to benefit from the civilization of the ferenj. We can live together in harmony as Catholics and Tewahidos,Footnote [92] honouring each others’ faith’.Footnote 93
As this exchange makes clear, the importance of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to Ethiopia's conception of its own sovereignty cannot be overstated. On the one hand, the Abyssinian notion of civilization was predicated on the conviction that Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity was the only true form of Christianity. However, when the nobility stressed their 400-year-old suspicion of Europeans as underhand Catholic proselytizers, Tafari countered with a vision of Ethiopia as a member of a worldwide Christian civilization upon which the culture of the League itself was based. To back up this vision of Ethiopia and Europe as members of a common Christian family, rather than as Orthodox ‘self’ to Catholic ‘other’, Tafari appealed to two different but equally long-standing ‘others’: Islam and paganism. When defined against these common enemies, he suggested, Christianity's different factions were unimportant.
Tafari adopted a similar approach in the letter that, having secured Zewditu's consent, he wrote to the League in August 1923, requesting Ethiopia's admission.Footnote 94 Tafari began by arguing that, as ‘[t]he Holy Scriptures bear witness’, Ethiopia had:
since the year 1500 after Solomon . . . been contending with the heathen – by whom . . . we are surrounded – for the true faith and the laws of God, and to maintain the independence of our country and the freedom of our religion. With God's help we have baptized thousands of heathen, who have become our brothers, and only in the time of our Emperor [Menelik II] have we had peace.Footnote 95
Here, Tafari produced the well-worn Abyssinian image of Ethiopia as a Christian island surrounded by an ocean of unbelievers, articulated most famously by Menelik II in 1891.Footnote 96 Tafari blamed the disruption caused by the ‘leanings’ of Zewditu's predecessor, Lijj Iyassu, ‘towards the religion [Islam] against which we had so energetically fought’ for Ethiopia's failure to ‘continue along the path of progress’ after Menelik's death.Footnote 97 In this, Tafari sought to emphasize Ethiopia's role in the defence and expansion of Christianity in the Horn of Africa against its aggressive Muslim neighbours and its internal civilizing mission in which ‘thousands of heathen’ had been converted to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Nonetheless, the letter continued, switching from an Abyssinian conception of Ethiopia's sovereignty to the classic international legal ‘standards’ of statehood and civilization, Ethiopia had:
endeavoured to establish bonds of friendship [with Europe]; we built a railway, we adhered to the Brussels Convention, we joined the Universal Postal Union, and we signed treaties, which we have always observed, with the Powers which co-operated to found the League of Nations'.Footnote 98
Finally, Tafari meshed the Abyssinian and international legal conceptions of sovereignty together by reference to their shared origin in the Christian faith:
As we received the Gospel at the same time as you, we should genuinely have liked, despite the difficulties with which we are surrounded, to bring our laws into agreement with yours . . ..
We know that the League of Nations guarantees the independence and territorial integrity of all the nations in the world, and maintains peace and agreement among them . . .. These principles specially befit a nation [Ethiopia] which has always been firmly Christian.Footnote 99
Here, the principles of international law themselves – including respect for independence, territorial integrity, the prohibition on aggression, and pacta sunt servanda – are understood as specifically Christian principles. Ethiopia's ability, as an African entity, to understand these principles was therefore hardly to be doubted because Ethiopia's own culture and the international legal culture of the League sprang from precisely the same source.
The Amharic word for civilization, silit'ane, also deserves special attention. For Abyssinian civilization – unlike its European equivalent – was, as we have seen, a potentially completable process for those ‘others’ who were incorporated (whether willingly or forcibly) into the collective Abyssinian self. In Tafari's letter, for example, it is evident that ‘others’ can become ‘brothers’ simply by being baptized.Footnote 100 This completability inherent in the concept silit'ane is supported by its literal translation: ‘accumulated knowledge’,Footnote 101 a far more egalitarian definition than its European counterpart.Footnote 102 The Ethiopian desire to ‘seek European civilization’ must be understood against this etymological and cultural background. For, if (Orthodox) Christianity was the most important test of civilization in Imperial Ethiopian society, Ethiopia could not but have seen itself as equally as civilized as, if not more civilized than, the primarily European states of the League. What it lacked – thanks, it insisted, to historical accident – could therefore have nothing to do with culture, race, or institutional structure, all such factors being extensions of Abyssinian civilization. Rather, I suggest, what Tafari sought was simply the technology necessary to bring about the kind of improvements to Ethiopia's infrastructure that he believed essential if Ethiopia was to continue to hold out against the latent territorial ambitions of its colonial neighbours.Footnote 103
How, then, does the Ethiopia's self-conception fit with the League's view of the Abyssinian Empire's international personality and eligibility for membership? If we compare the criteria at issue in Addis Ababa in July 1923 with those used in Geneva by the League's Sixth Committee six weeks later to assess Ethiopia's candidacy, both similarities and differences are evident.Footnote 104 As indicated above, the Sixth Committee's criteria concerned recognition, ‘stable government’, and ‘well-defined frontiers’ (the ‘standard of statehood’), plus ‘self-government’ and reliability concerning the fulfilment of international obligations (the League-era ‘standards of civilization’).Footnote 105 Tafari's letter provided much juridically uncontroversial evidence regarding Ethiopia's recognition, ‘stable government’, and law-abidingness. As to ‘self-government’, however, it put forward a conception centred not on the development of liberal political institutions (as the Sixth Committee's understanding of ‘self-government’ intended), but rather on the expansion of Christianity – Ethiopia's ‘standard of civilization’, as it had once been Europe's and international law's. After all, from the Aksumite perspective, the first responsibility of Ethiopia's government was to the spiritual welfare of its people – not, as in the liberal European conception, to the protection of their individual lives, liberty, and property. Moreover, this idiosyncratically Abyssinian understanding of Ethiopia's ‘self-governing’ credentials was closely linked to the vision of Ethiopia's frontiers put forward by Tafari, which, far from being ‘well defined’ in the territorial sense intended by the Sixth Committee, were described in terms of an ever-shifting front line in the eternal battle between the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its (religious) enemies. For it was not until the arrival of European powers in its hinterlands that Ethiopia had been compelled to delineate its boundaries – a process irrelevant to sovereignty when conceived in Aksumite terms.Footnote 106 That is to say, from the Abyssinian point of view, Ethiopia's borders were less about territorial demarcation than they were about faith and culture. As such, they were, by definition, flexible – expanding when the empire was strong (as under Yekunno-Amlak and Menelik II) and contracting when it was weak (as during the war with Ahmad Gragn).
This cosmic, rather than territorial, conception of sovereignty will be crucial to the conclusions that follow concerning the Ethiopian delegation's strategy during the latter half of 1935. The foregoing also demonstrates, however, that it was in 1923 that one of Ethiopia's statesmen first constructed an international legal narrative that juxtaposed the Aksumite and Orientalist–Semiticist ideas of Ethiopia's sovereignty for strategic purposes. One of these purposes concerns the letter's double audience: Tafari, requiring Empress Zewditu's seal on the letter, needed to convince both the Ethiopian nobility and the League at once. Another concerns Tafari's own part-Abyssinian, part-European cultural background and consequent desire to defend Ethiopia's independence and culture from European colonialism, while improving the lot of its people. Most importantly, however, I suggest that Tafari sought, like Bhabha's ‘mimic man’, to defend Ethiopia's unique identity – to hold off the process of transformation into a pseudo-European state that the Covenant's articles of admission implied – by unsettling, through the juxtaposition of similarity and difference, the League's universalistic assumptions regarding statehood and civilization. I argue, in other words, that what Ethiopia sought to achieve – in 1923 and, as we shall see, in 1935 – was not equality-in-identity, as the standard account would have it, but rather equality-in-difference.
4.2. The view from Addis Ababa (2): the crisis of 1935–36
During the 12 years that intervened between Ethiopia's accession to the League and its annexation, the hybridization evident in its official discourse was often less distinct.Footnote 107 However, when faced, in 1935, with Italian Blackshirts and military hardware massing steadily on its Eritrean and Somali borders, Ethiopia brought its semi-Abyssinian international legal discourse into play once again.
Without a basic understanding of (or, indeed, interest in) Ethiopian culture and history, however, this strategy was and remains obscure. For example, the Committee of Five, set up in September 1935 by the League Council to seek a pacific resolution to the escalating crisis,Footnote 108 quoted in its proposal (which sought to transform Ethiopia into a type of Class ‘A’ mandate, with the League itself as MandatoryFootnote 109) the following passage from a speech made a week earlier by the Ethiopian delegate, Bajerond Tekle-Hawaryat Tekle-Maryam:
Any suggestion calculated to raise the economic, financial and political level of [Ethiopia], Provided it proceeds from the League of Nations and is to be carried out in the actual spirit of the Covenant, will be regarded by Ethiopia as the action of sister nations which have reached a more advanced stage of civilization and are sincerely desirous of guiding my country in the path to progress.Footnote 110
While the Committee of Five appears to have included this passage in order to cast Ethiopia as a kind of macro Uncle Tom, I suggest that Tekle-Hawaryat's appeal, though no doubt tinged with a certain tactical appeal to European vanity, is rather more likely to have been a request for silit'ane (allowing for equality-in-difference) than for the imposition upon Ethiopia of European cultural, institutional, and economic norms (implying equality-in-sameness or, paradoxically but more probably, inequality-in-sameness). Where the League sought, in its entry requirements, to apply the two ‘standards’ of statehood and civilization in order to reconstitute aspiring members in the (supposedly self-governing, pacific, law-abiding) image of its original members, Ethiopia sought to resist this transformation, and to claim the full set of sovereign rights and duties delimited and protected in the Covenant without surrendering its unique identity. To give another example, many have presented Haile Selassie's 1936 address to the Assembly, quoted at the beginning, as noble but naive, bordering on pathetic.Footnote 111 Few, however, have thought to wonder why he chose to deliver it in Amharic rather than French, in which he had been fluent since childhood. Perhaps this decision might also be seen as an assertion of Ethiopia's equal otherness.Footnote 112
The best illustration availableFootnote 113 of Ethiopia's understanding of its rights both as an independent political, territorial, and cultural entity and as a League member is to be found in its response to Italy's memorandum of 4 September 1935. In addition to making its own reply, the Ethiopian delegation to the League asked Marcel Griaule, a well-known French anthropologist and Ethiopianist, to give a formal response to this memorandum. Griaule was, of course, a European scholar appealing to a primarily European audience, while Tekle-Hawaryat was fluent in French and Russian, having been educated in St Petersburg.Footnote 114 It is, therefore, unsurprising that the utility of balancing the ‘otherness’ of the Aksumite paradigm with elements of the far more familiar (to European ears) Orientalist–Semiticist paradigm when discussing Ethiopia's independence and identity before the League and of mixing both these discourses with some of the powerful visions of statehood and civilization embedded in the Covenant was lost on neither of them.
In constructing a compelling case for Ethiopia's equality-in-otherness, both Griaule and the Ethiopian delegation challenged Italy's attempt to refute Ethiopia's claim to be ‘self-governing’ (as required by Art. 1(2) of the Covenant and by the Sixth Committee's entry criteria) by characterizing Ethiopia as an illegitimate-because-unenlightened empire, which, usurping Europe's ‘civilizing mission’, employed ‘uncivilized’ methods of repressive colonial rule, including enslavement and the gebbar system. Both adopted the strategy of simultaneously defending and denying Ethiopia's imperial self-identity in such a way as to portray Ethiopian imperialism as exceptional, if not unique, and certainly as non-equivalent to, and therefore incomparable with, European imperialism. For example, Griaule argued that ‘[e]ven if’ it were accepted (as Italy had alleged) ‘that Ethiopia forms a nucleus of conquerors living in the midst of conquered tribes’, Ethiopia's ‘international obligations concerning the exercise of effective authority over border districts must surely be viewed with the same tolerance as is extended to European [colonial] Powers’.Footnote 115 Yet, Griaule determined the extent of the Ethiopian Empire, which he described as ‘the oldest colonizing enterprise in the world’,Footnote 116 on a very Abyssinian basis – namely by the date at which its subject territories had ‘become’ Christian, thereby underlining an ‘Aksumite’ cosmic/flexible as opposed to a territorial/static conception of Ethiopia's boundaries.Footnote 117 With regard to the origins of the Ethiopian people, however, Griaule insisted on an Orientalist–Semiticist explanation.Footnote 118 Having provided a racial map, he asserted that, in the centre of the country, ‘the Ethiopian type’ dominated, surrounded by ‘a type which is still Ethiopian but contains a large proportion of black blood’ (again, distinguishing ‘Ethiopians’, i.e., Abyssinians, from ‘black’ Africans).Footnote 119 Subtly refuting the Committee of Five's scheme, Griaule also cast Ethiopia in the role of potential mandatory power (rather than mandated territory) to which the Covenant should entrust the task of ‘tutelage’ over geographically close but civilizationally inferior peoples:
[i]n the same way as in Black Africa, Mohammedanism is more successful than Christianity because it is better suited to the needs of the natives, Abyssinian civilization will succeed better than any other among peoples like those of southern Ethiopia.Footnote 120
By contrast, the Ethiopian delegation mixed an ‘Aksumite’ account with a powerful discourse of nationalism, as theorized in international law, denying any racial hierarchy:
[T]he Ethiopians who came from the Yemen with Solomon's dynasty settled in the kingdom of Aksum, spread over the high plateaux and overflowed into the lower regions, where they intermarried with the Galla and formed a veritable nationality, which, according to the principles laid down by Mancini in his celebrated lesson at Florence in 1851 would be entitled to claim the whole country as far as the sea.Footnote 121
But Griaule, too, at a different point in his submission, appealed to a characteristically Abyssinian vision of what ‘self-government’ should mean, quoting Ras Hailu, former governor of Gojjam province:
It is said that that the Prince enriches himself by grinding down the people, and this is proved by the number of his granaries. In very truth, there is no instance in the chronicles of a Prince who has grown thin through a lack of grinding stones! But there is this that I would cast upon the mind: in hard times, the people make a hollow of the palms of their hands and stretch out their arms towards the granaries of the Prince, for the King is the people's steward.
. . .
Know that at the bottom of my heart there is this great certainty. The power of my reign lies not only in my arms, in my finest machine-gun, it lies in the plough that I drive on the first day when the ground is broken, when I give my people the signal for work in the fields and when by driving a furrow I designate the prince's paramount right of ownership over all land and domains. My royal crown is but the lash of labour around my brow.Footnote 122
In this vision, Ethiopia's social fabric was, indeed, made up of a web of personal hierarchies, which connected every gebbar to his landowner, governor, emperor, and priesthood through ties of custom, labour, tribute, land, and – crucially – through the common endeavour of defending Ethiopia's religious identity and independence.
Italy's allegations regarding ‘barbaric’ practices such as emasculation, burning, and, of course, slavery were tackled head-on both by Griaule and by the Ethiopian delegation. Regarding the first, the delegation (highlighting the hypocrisy involved in the European conception of civilization) pointed out that ‘in the most civilized nations of the world, what opinion might be held by those whose legislation provides for electrocution . . . or by hanging?’.Footnote 123 That is, the delegation appealed precisely to a ‘dialogic’ rather than a ‘monologic’ argument, continuing:
cruelty which appears indispensable to the severity of the punishment assumes different forms in different times and places without the people of one time or of one place having the right to regard this difference as representing stages in a hierarchy of culture when it is merely a case of psychological variations on the same plane of human conscience.Footnote 124
Similarly, Griaule explained the persistence of slavery both on the grounds that ‘Ethiopia's geographical situation’ had ‘kept her aloof from the main trend of western civilization’ and on the grounds that Ethiopian slavery was qualitatively different from its European/American equivalent, Ethiopian slaves being ‘received into the family’.Footnote 125 Yet, drawing on the silit'ane concept, he also pointed out that ‘[a]ny Ethiopian, whether free or not [i.e., whether a slave or not], can rise to the highest honours in the Empire’,Footnote 126 implying that ‘Abyssinian civilization’ was progressive and legitimate, but in a specifically Ethiopian way. Equally hybridized was his argument that the League could ‘count on the personal action’ of Haile Selassie to hasten abolition and ‘on the increased contact with Western civilizations’ via the League; for the ‘Christian Empire of Ethiopia, relying on the ancient liberalism which is the basis of its people's character, has . . . realized the necessity for accelerating this evolution’, which would ‘proceed in the best possible conditions if the Ethiopian Empire remains mistress of its own destiny’.Footnote 127 This argument accepted that Ethiopia's ‘primitive’ institutional structures required Western tutelage; yet, the Ethiopian claim to equal otherness was reasserted by embedding what Griaule described as an ‘ancient liberalism’ within the ‘people's character’, rather than externalizing it in a European culture to be imported. In constructing what could be assumed (at least by the fellow Christians of the League) to be the characteristic tolerance of one of the world's oldest Christian peoples as an ‘ancient liberalism’, Griaule simultaneously affirmed Ethiopia's claim to be ‘self-governing’ on a European reading of the term, and reaffirmed precisely that link between Ethiopia's Christian culture and the liberal culture of the European powers and Covenant that Ras Tafari had deployed in his letter of 1923. In doing so, Griaule was able to cast the requirement for Ethiopia's ‘hastened evolution’ as an argument against the kind of direct, transformative intervention called for by the Committee of Five.
5. Conclusion
What, then, was the effect of Ethiopia's hybridized response to Italy's diatribe on the outcome of the Abyssinia Crisis itself? On the one hand, it is clear that Ethiopia's hybrid identity could, like that of Bhabha's colonial subject, be a source of strength as much as one of weakness. And, indeed, as we have seen, Ethiopia, like Bhabha's ‘mimic man’, took full advantage of the discomfort it was able to cause the European League states by its simultaneously different-yet-similar attributes – particularly by its persistent tendency to identify ‘civilization’ with Christianity. And yet, this strategy of intentional hybridization failed. To explain why, it is necessary to return once again to Bakhtin's distinction between ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’ discourse. ‘Authoritative discourse’, Bakhtin argues, is monologic; it ‘enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it’.Footnote 128 By contrast, ‘internally-persuasive’ or dialogic discourse is ‘open’ in terms of its ‘semantic structure’ so that ‘in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean’.Footnote 129 I suggest that, unable to experience the Ethiopian Empire as anything other than a corrupted version of itself (i.e., of the textbook liberal European state on which the Sixth Committee's entry criteria were based), and therefore unable to interact dialogically with Ethiopia's discourse, the ‘authoritative’ language of interwar international law (the intermingled ‘words’ of the Covenant, the League's members and organs, the Tripartite Agreement, and so on) drowned out Ethiopia's semi-Abyssinian international legal ‘dialect’. That is to say, during the crisis of 1935–36, the (relatively) ‘monologic’ language of international lawFootnote 130 suffocated a parallel discourse germane to Ethiopian history and culture, so that the strategic semi-otherness mobilized by the Ethiopian delegation for the purpose of resisting Ethiopia's ‘civilization’, and hence its transformation into a pacified European clone, was disastrously lost in translation.
Nonetheless, even though Ethiopia's strategy was unsuccessful, I suggest that the task of ‘remastering’ the discipline's memory-recording of the crisis, in order to make the ‘other’ side of Ethiopia's hybridized discourse audible, remains of crucial critical importance. For, if an Ethiopian (or, more accurately, a semi-Abyssinian) international law existed, as a discursive reality, between 1923 and 1936, and if its suppression facilitated the extermination of Ethiopia's sovereignty by allowing its discourse of resistance to be (mis)translated as a discourse of capitulation, this points, potentially, to the existence of countless ‘other’ (or partly ‘other’) ‘international laws’ in existence at any moment in time. The insistence of international lawyers on the inherent progressiveness of the discipline and, in consequence, their continuing and wilful deafness to precisely such hybridized discourses of international legal resistance as Bhabha identifies in the field of post-colonial theory can only implicate them – us – further in the ongoing production and sustenance of (international) relations of inequality and domination. More generally, it is also arguable that the continuing failure of scholars and practitioners of international law to resist the allure of the discipline's frankly teleological auto-history is related directly to the discipline's manifestly ahistorical axiom of sovereign equality. For, as I and the other contributors to this symposium have sought to show, this assumption is belied, if not by such newly minted doctrines as that of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ (one that would hardly have looked out of place in Italy's memorandum of 4 September 1935), then certainly by the League's flagship project of constructing less-than-equal and therefore pacified and controllable sovereigns on the periphery of its domain.
6. Counterconclusion: Abyssinia's ‘others’
However, an important qualification must be made to the argument presented above. For Ethiopia may have sought to defend its independence by appealing to what I have argued was a ‘dialogical’ mode of understanding; yet its own sense of identity was founded on a dialectic of ‘self’ and ‘other’ no less than the international legal discourse(s) against which it fought. For this reason, when it came to supporting the internal legitimacy of the Ethiopian Empire, the Aksumite and the Orientalist–Semiticist paradigms were in fact, for all their differences, mutually reinforcing.
In particular, as we saw earlier, both the Orientalist–Semiticist and Aksumite paradigms cast Abyssinians as a hybrid people, born of an intermingling between an extra-African ‘civilized’ element and an ‘uncivilized’ indigenous element. This enabled both narratives to construct Ethiopia as exceptional: as the only country in Africa to have (more or less) ‘escaped’ colonialism. The reason it escaped, these narratives imply, is because it was ruled by a people that was neither (entirely) African, nor (entirely) ‘negroid’, nor even missionary-converted, but originally Christian. Scholars contributing to a third, more recent and more controversial ‘paradigm’ of Ethiopian historiography, which Teshale calls ‘radical left’ scholarship, have argued that this exceptionalism served as a legitimating narrative for Abyssinian domination, obscuring from view the nobility's ruthless exploitation of ethiopia's non-Christian and Christian peasants.Footnote 131 To illustrate, common to both the Orientalist–Semiticist and Aksumite paradigms, as we have seen, is the assumption that the Oromo swept ‘up from the south’ in the sixteenth century, in the wake of Ahmad Gragn's invasion, ruthlessly exploiting the empire's moment of weaknessFootnote 132 to the point at which it was nearly ‘wrecked’.Footnote 133 Yet, more recent research on the history and origins of the Oromo contends that Oromo inhabited core areas of the empire from at least the fourteenth century, if not earlier.Footnote 134 Indeed, for some, the huge migration was none other than a retaking of originally Oromo lands.Footnote 135 Equally, both the Aksumite and Orientalist–Semiticist ‘paradigms’ tend to manifest an implicit (sometimes explicit) hierarchy between ‘civilized’ Abyssinian and ‘barbaric’ Oromo culture. Edward Ullendorf, for example, declared that the Oromo ‘had nothing to contribute to the civilization of Ethiopia’.Footnote 136 And yet, Oromo culture, based on the gaada system of age and generation grading,Footnote 137 is famous among anthropologists for its profoundly democratic nature.Footnote 138 Nonetheless, as P. T. W. Baxter points out, ‘[o]ld-fashioned evolutionists and racist assumptions, mostly unvoiced, have contributed to the belief that a Christian, Semitic culture with Middle Eastern leanings had to be superior to a black, African culture’.Footnote 139
In other words, just as Ethiopia had, during the ‘Abyssinia Crisis’, two ‘choices’ – be exterminated (by Italian colonialism) or relinquish its alterity voluntarily (as in the Committee of Five's proposals for its ‘reorganization’) – so for the ‘other’ peoples within Ethiopia the options were to be exterminated or ‘become Amhara’. The fact that this process of ‘civilization’ was, unlike in Europe, completable in Ethiopian culture is, therefore, perhaps less significant than it appears for the ‘others’ in question. It is therefore arguable – particularly given the interest of the post-1945 Ethiopian state in resisting calls for self-determination on the part of the Oromo and other groups – that the imperial-yet-not-illegitimately-colonial self-image of the Ethiopian state that Ethiopia deployed during the crisis of 1935–36 was just as ideological as the legitimately colonial-and-imperial self-image of international law it sought to challenge.
