David Froomkin Responds to Susan Pedersen (Columbia, history), CHESS Workshop, October 30, 2015
In her much celebrated 2015 book, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, Professor Pedersen examined the role of the League of Nations in both extending and setting the terms of European imperialism, a role both ideological and institutional. Pedersen argues that the League aimed to strike a compromise between imperialism and “internationalism.”
In this paper, Pedersen focuses on the role of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis as a “test case” for the League of Nations, which challenged its ideological underpinnings and threatened to undermine its political purpose. At the same time, she observes, the League always embodied a complicated mixture of exploitation and humanitarianism. Indeed, the League’s efforts to combat slavery laid the “foundations for today’s anti-trafficking efforts” (7). Thus, the legitimacy of the League rested on a peculiar dialectic of imperialism and humanitarianism, held together by an ideology of the “civilizing mission”: the need, as Article 22 of the League Charter put it, for “advanced nations” to provide “tutelage” to colonies “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”
Pedersen’s paper examines the Italo-Ethiopian crisis as a challenge to this conception of the League. As she puts it:
“What I want to do today is to delve into that history to show how profoundly it affected the project of imperial conciliation, legitimation and reform that I have been tracking in these lectures. That project, recall, had two ostensible aims: to share out the benefits of empire, and to insist that alien rule adhere to certain common humanitarian norms. Holding these aims awkwardly together was precisely the argument Holtby demolished in her novel: that European rule helped backward nations to rise on the scale of civilization. But Italy’s war on Abyssinia caused what we might call ‘framework trouble’, precisely because Italy insisted that her war too was a ‘civilizing’ endeavor against a backward, disorganized, slave-trading state; Italy too would be happy to govern in line with the ‘sacred trust.’ The war caused such heart-searching for British politicians and the British public alike, in other words, because it put the project of imperial reform, and the value of ‘civilizational’ arguments, squarely on the table.” (10-11, my emphasis)
Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia threatened the basis of the League because Abyssinia was a League member, and the League’s purpose was, first and foremost, to prevent war between its members. Thus, the conflict drove home that the League was a European institution, not a legitimately international one.
The conditions of the war, as much as the tensions of its ideological justification, undermined the concept of the “civilizing mission” – especially the Italian use of gas attacks. Pedersen writes, “In most comment, the Ethiopians appeared as the defenders of ‘civilization,’ and once the news of Italian use of gas became widespread, it became hard to use the term ‘civilization’ except ironically” (24-25). Thus, the conflict challenged the precarious association of imperialism and humanitarianism on which the legitimacy of the League’s mandate system depended.
This is a project with great relevance today as we grapple with difficult questions surrounding humanitarian intervention.
II. Questions
I have two big questions and two smaller questions.
1. The Term “Internationalism”
The paper focuses on the dialectic between imperialism and “internationalism.” I wonder if you could elaborate on what is meant by “internationalism” in this context? One issue is that the paper reveals that there are in fact rival internationalisms competing during this period. For instance, there is Holtby’s internationalism based on the premise that “’race’ had no place as a political category at all” and the internationalism of Harris and the Anti-Slavery Society, which, you note, wanted to preserve a domain for ‘native institutions’ and customary law (3).
Further, is the imperialism-humanitarianism dialectic the same one? There seem to be two distinct poles in the debate over the extent to which imperial powers should be intervening to change native practices, which do not line up neatly with attitudes toward humanitarianism. Thus, the Anti-Slavery Society can endorse a mild imperialism which focuses on eradicating the major moral wrong of slavery while preserving wide native autonomy, whereas it seems that Holtby endorses a humanitarian internationalism without imperialism. So it would seem like there is at least an imperialism-internationalism-humanitarianism triangle.
Humanitarianism seems to rest on a moral universalist claim, which also does not seem to align perfectly with the imperialism-internationalism dichotomy. Moreover, it sounds like Holtby believes in some form of modernization theory, in which respect her views are more homogenizing than those of the Anti-Slavery Society: “the future is surely, whether we like it or not, with a homogeneous civilization” (3). So internationalisms may be either universalistic or not. Of course, one story about the Italo-Ethiopian crisis is that it reveals ideological contradictions in the League, such that its universalist premises are belied by its practices.
Of course, I take it to be one of the paper’s main points that the imperialist and internationalist motivations behind the League are not in fact dichotomous.
2. Power and Ideology
My second question has to do with the relationship between power and ideology. Is this a story of great power politics subverting noble humanitarian intentions? Or a story of ideological rationalization of material interests? Presumably the truth is more complicated than either, but to what extent can we extricate the one from the other?
Characterizing the Italian position on Ethiopia, Drummond writes “It would not be too much to say that Italy has latterly been staking out a moral claim to be the instrument whereby civilization shall be brought to a barbarous anachronism” (13). When Drummond writes that “to any impartial person it must be apparent that by no means all of the Italian complaints…are unfounded’” (14), you write that such arguments indicate Drummond’s “unvarnished realism” (15). But is it not also possible that he is agreeing quite honestly with Italian claims, regarding Abyssinia as a backward and barbaric country in need of civilization? Indeed, Abyssinia was only a member of the League because it had been powerful enough to resist imperial domination prior to 1923, and the Anti-Slavery Society had wanted to make it a mandate for humanitarian reasons.
3. War and Humanitarianism
You write, “it was war and not imperialism that [diplomats] thought beyond the pale” (22-23). Is it really such hypocrisy to think that the avoidance of war should take precedence over other humanitarian aims? After all, a significant tradition in the history of political thought, going back at least to Kant, has viewed the avoidance of war as the ultimate aim of international relations.
But of course, imperial conquests were justified in the name of humanitarian intentions, so clearly priorities changed depending on the countries involved: it was more necessary to prevent wars between European powers than wars between Europeans and others. (This view too, of course, was supported by a significant tradition in the history of political thought.) But so one issue at stake here is the circumstances under which Ethiopia came to be elevated alongside the European powers as a member of the League of Nations and the ideological implications of that elevation. Perhaps the key to understanding the dynamics at play here is a fuller picture of how Ethiopia came to be constructed as the virtuous power in the war. Is it possible that this was connected to dynamics on the European Continent? It would be interesting to look at conceptions of fascism as barbarism, for instance.
(4) The Role of the United States
You characterize Liberia as having a “white protector” (6). Presumably that would be the United States. The implication seems to be that the United States is an imperial power equivalent to the European powers. Is that an accurate characterization of the role of the US in relation to European imperialism during this period (both ideologically and materially)?