Italy leaves the League of Nations

On the evening of 11 December 1937 the Grand Council of Fascism, the regime’s highest body, met in Rome. After a brief session it unanimously resolved that Italy would leave the League of Nations. That same evening Benito Mussolini announced the decision from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to the crowd gathered in the square below. The departure of one of the founding states, which had held a permanent seat on the League Council since 1920, sealed the collapse of the Geneva system of collective security. Of the great powers that had made up the League in the 1920s, only Britain and France now remained.

The Ethiopian question

Fascist Italy’s attitude to the League had been cool from the start. Mussolini called it a club of victors who had divided the spoils of war among themselves, and in 1923, during the Corfu crisis, he showed that a great power could disregard Geneva. At the same time Italy enjoyed the prestige of a permanent member of the Council, and in 1923 it even supported the admission to the League of Ethiopia, with which five years later it concluded a treaty of friendship. When the clash at Walwal occurred in December 1934, Ethiopia asked the League for arbitration, while Rome played for time and prepared for war.

The immediate cause of the decision was Ethiopia. When Italy attacked it on 3 October 1935, the League Council and Assembly declared Italy the aggressor, and on 18 November economic sanctions came into force, the first in the organisation’s history. They did not cover oil and did not stop the war, but for Fascist propaganda they were a “siege” of the Italian nation by fifty-two states. Mussolini turned them into a tool of mobilisation: in December 1935 Italian women gave their wedding rings for the war, and from then on plaques on town halls commemorated the day the sanctions were imposed.

In May 1936, after the capture of Addis Ababa, Italy proclaimed the annexation of Ethiopia, and King Victor Emmanuel III assumed the title of Emperor. On 30 June 1936 the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League Assembly in Geneva. Italian journalists tried to drown him out with whistles. On 4 July the League decided to lift the sanctions, and on 15 July they ceased to apply. It did not, however, recognise the conquest. At the Assembly in September 1936 the credentials of the Ethiopian delegation were accepted, so representatives of a state that, according to Rome, had ceased to exist were still sitting in Geneva. From then on Italy in practice took no part in the League’s work. Mussolini demanded not only the lifting of sanctions but also recognition of the annexation and the removal of the Ethiopians, and when he did not get it, he came to regard membership as a humiliation.

Meanwhile, resistance continued in Ethiopia itself. In February 1937, after an attempt on the life of the Viceroy, Rodolfo Graziani, Italian Blackshirts, soldiers and civilians spent three days massacring the inhabitants of Addis Ababa. Present-day scholars estimate the number of victims at anywhere from several thousand to nearly twenty thousand. News of this reached Europe and did not favour the League’s recognition of the conquest.

New friends

By 1937 Mussolini already had new partners. Together with Germany he was supporting General Franco in Spain; in September he visited Hitler; and on 6 November Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, which linked it with Germany and Japan. Both these states had left the League back in 1933: Japan after being condemned for the seizure of Manchuria, and Germany on the pretext of being refused equality in armaments. Staying in Geneva put Italy in an ambiguous position: as a member of the League it was supposed to take part in assessing Japan’s war in China, which the League had found in October 1937 to be a violation of treaties, while Rome openly supported Tokyo. On 29 November 1937 Italy recognised Manchukuo, which under the Assembly’s resolution of February 1933 League members were not to recognise.

Mussolini took the decision to leave in consultation with his Foreign Minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. The Grand Council was by now merely a forum that rubber-stamped the dictator’s decisions. The justification, repeated in the communiqué and in the balcony speech, came down to a few themes: the League had become an instrument hostile to Italy, had imposed sanctions on it and had refused to recognise the Italian empire. The crowd in the square cheered.

Formalities and reactions

The Covenant of the League of Nations provided that a member could withdraw on two years’ notice. The Italian government notified the Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, of its decision, so its membership formally lapsed in December 1939. Like Japan and Germany before it, however, Italy stopped taking part in anything that went on in Geneva from the very first day. At the same time the only League body based in Italy, the International Educational Cinematographic Institute in Rome, ceased to operate.

In Berlin the decision was welcomed. The Reich government declared that a German return to the League was now all the more out of the question, and the German press presented it as proof of the disintegration of the “Versailles system”. Japan praised it too. London and Paris received it with resignation. Neville Chamberlain’s British government believed that the League was in any case incapable of restraining the great powers, and was banking on a direct understanding with Mussolini to draw him away from Hitler. When the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, objected to talks with Rome before the withdrawal of Italian troops from Spain, he resigned in February 1938.

Significance

Italy’s departure closed the period in which the League of Nations could still pretend to be a universal organisation. Of the world’s seven great powers, the United States had never belonged to it, Japan, Germany and Italy had left it, and the only new great power was the USSR, admitted in 1934. In the crises to come no one looked for solutions in Geneva any more. The Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the Sudeten crisis and the Munich Agreement were played out in direct talks between the powers, and the League did not even discuss them.

Mussolini, moreover, received from the democracies themselves what the League had refused him. In April 1938 Britain concluded the so-called Easter Agreement with Italy, and in May, at a session of the League Council, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, pushed through the principle that each member could decide for itself whether to recognise Italian Ethiopia. Haile Selassie came to Geneva then to protest one last time. In November 1938 London and Paris recognised the conquest. Following Italy, Hungary and General Franco’s Spain left the League in 1939, and in December 1939, after its attack on Finland, the USSR was expelled. When Mussolini declared war on France and Britain in June 1940, he again spoke from the same balcony. Ethiopia, the cause of it all in 1937, regained its independence in 1941 as the first country liberated from Axis rule.