The Loss of International Morality

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and member of the League of Nations. By the 1930s, his country and Liberia (a pseudo-American protectorate) were the only two parcels of land in Africa still governed independently and not by European colonial mandate. However, neither Ethiopia’s national sovereignty nor its League membership was sufficient to stop Mussolini’s colonial ambitions. The Italian dictator first articulated an interest in re-establishing a Roman Empire beginning in the mid-1930s. The European Powers (primarily Great Britain and France) did little to dissuade Mussolini from these ambitions as they were currently embroiled in their own security concerns, rendering their governments committed to maintaining cordial relations with Italy in order to present a united front against the menace of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Indeed, the French went so far as to formally renounce their economic interests in Ethiopia at a 1935 conference in Rome, a move Mussolini interpreted as the proverbial green light to ...

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cause while avoiding conflict with Mussolini, stating, “This [was] not a case of the impossibility of stopping an aggressor but of the refusal to stop an aggressor.”
Thus the war continued, and Selassie returned to Geneva in June, 1936, to issue an emotional “Appeal to the League of Nations,” protesting the Assembly’s inaction and, most significantly, warning of fundamental change to the Versailles system that had resulted from the response to the Italian invasion. His primary concern lay in the failure of the principle of collective security as outlined in Article XVI of the covenant – an amendment intended to protect all League members from aggression by another power. Selassie ...

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