On 11 December 1937, a roaring crowd gathered in Piazza Venezia in Rome to welcome Benito Mussoliniās long-awaited announcement about Italy withdrawing from the League of Nations (LoN). In Geneva, the Italian employees of the organization were ordered to leave their posts and return to their country. On 20 December 1937, at the Italian Foreign Ministry which was monitoring their resignations, officials started to wonder why they had not yet received news from one of the most senior Italian employees in the League: the Director of the Economic Relations Section, Pietro Stoppani. 1 While all his fellow nationals who held a high-ranking position in the institution had given their notices in the days immediately following Mussoliniās announcement, nothing was heard from Stoppani until early 1938. News of Stoppaniās refusal to leave his successful career in the first international bureaucracy was totally unexpected when it reached Rome. In his letter to Mussolini, communicating his intention to disobey the order, Stoppani emphasized that, since he had been āshaped or misshapedā for 20 years by the Geneva environment, despite his unshakeable love for Italy, he could only be of some use in an international environment. 2 Hence, he was going to remain at the League.
Stoppaniās behaviour introduces us to the complex interaction between Fascist Italy and the League of Nations. The Italian Director was influenced by the international environment in which he worked to the extent of deciding to ignore Mussoliniās orders in order to maintain his post at the League, with the risk of Fascist retaliations and of remaining a stateless person. While the reasons behind this choice are examined in detail in Chapter 6, Stoppaniās episode offers a glimpse of the practical problems that individuals had to face when attempting to balance between nationalism and internationalism at the League. And it is through the study of individuals, namely, the Italians working in the League, that this book seeks to refine our understanding of the relationship between nationalism and internationalism at the League. My research aims to shed new light upon the role played by Fascist Italy in interwar international cooperation, as well as upon the multifaceted nature of the League and its historical significance.
The League of Nations was established by the 1919 Peace Conference to maintain the newly agreed status quo and guarantee collective security. The League was born as a liberal institution and embodied the principles of enforced peace and mutual defence. It was structured around a Secretariat, dealing with administrative needs; an Assembly, in which every member state could be represented by up to three delegates; and a Council, the main deliberative body of the institution, in which permanent members (initially Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan) and non-permanent ones would discuss the most important problems the League had to face. 3 The organization was intended to provide an international forum for a new, open and multilateral diplomacy, in contrast to the secret diplomacy that was considered to have been one of the causes of the Great War. The League ceased to exist only in 1946 and, during its existence, it had up to 63 member states. 4 The United States, despite playing a key role in establishing the institution, never joined it, but American experts became actively involved in the technical work of the organization.
Italy was one of the founding countries of the League of Nations and remained a member for 17 years. The liberal government which led the country in 1919 joined the organization less out of sympathy with its liberal internationalist principles and more because it wanted to please President Woodrow Wilson and obtain his support to secure the territories agreed upon with the Triple Entente in the secret Treaty of London in 1915. 5 When Italyās territorial claims in the Adriatic area were not fully accepted at the Paris Peace Conference, for many Italians the League became the symbol of the āmutilated victoryā and the bastion of the preservation of an unwanted status quo. 6 The revisionist claims, which grew from the disappointment with the outcome of the 1919 Conference, were embraced by Mussolini and became integral to the populist rhetoric which motivated his supporters and, in 1922, led to his accession to power. 7 Despite Mussoliniās populist anti-League rhetoric, however, under his leadership the Italian membership of the League was not subject to a sudden shift of direction, but maintained the same features of the so-called liberal period. Continuity was guaranteed also by the Italian delegation in Geneva, whose members remained the same.
The relationship between Italy and the League during the Fascist period was contradictory, shifting from moments of active collaboration to moments of open disagreement. The existing historiography and narrative of the Italian membership of the LoN has not reflected this oscillation in policy. Instead, attention has been focused disproportionally on the problems which Italy caused for the League in the 1920s (the Corfu crisis) and the 1930s (the Italo-Ethiopian conflict). In this way, the Italian membership is presented as a failed one and its importance is limited to the negative impact it had on the organization. 8
In particular, the Corfu episode had often been considered as revealing of the ātrue natureā of the Italian membership. 9 The Corfu dispute (AugustāSeptember 1923) developed following the murder of General Enrico Tellini and three other Italians on 27 August 1923 in an ambush in Greek territory, near the Greek-Albanian border. They were involved in an international expedition organized by the Conference of Ambassadors aiming at the delimitation of Albaniaās frontiers. 10 Mussolini interpreted the episode as an offence to the national honour and claimed immediate reparations from Greece. The Italian requests to Greece included demands that could not be met by a sovereign state. For this reason, Greece did not fulfil them. 11 The Italian retaliation against this Greek rejection came on 31 August 1923 in the form of the military attack and occupation of the island of Corfu. 12
The League of Nations was immediately brought into the quarrel. On 1 September 1923, Greece appealed to the Leagueās Council on the basis of Articles 12 and 15 of the League of Nationsā founding agreement and constitution, the Covenant, which covered disputes between member states likely to become a threat to peace. 13 However, the Italian government insisted that the question was under the jurisdiction of the Conference of Ambassadors. It succeeded in this claim thanks to the support of France, which was fearful that if the Corfu issue could come before the Leagueās Council, so too could the Ruhr occupation, which France conducted in January 1923. 14 Eventually, a solution was found to the Corfu crisis through the mediation of the Conference of Ambassadors, a traditional Great Powers forum which coexisted with the League until 1931, catalysed by the threat of an Anglo-Italian conflict if Italy did not leave the island. 15
The fact that the League, despite heavily debating the question at the Council and the Assembly, had been relegated to a marginal role in a matter which was indeed under its jurisdiction, was perceived as a defeat for the institution. Referring to the recent events, LoN Secretary-General Eric Drummond wrote in September 1923 that the Corfu crisis had ādone much to weaken both the moral authority of the Council and the general confidence that the precise obligations of the Covenant will be universally accepted and carried outā. He added that it was generally believed that Italy successfully refused āto carry out its treaty obligations under the Covenant, and has succeeded in doing so with impunity, some might even say, with an increase of prestigeā. 16 The Corfu episode revealed how Mussolini interpreted the Italian membership of the League as neither legally nor morally binding. It also showed how the organization worked only if its member states were willing to make it work.
Alan Cassels described the Corfu crisis as a āveritable dress rehearsalā of the Ethiopian crisis in the 1930s. 17 Italian membership of the League has been commonly associated with the powerful impact that the Ethiopian crisis (1934ā1936) had in weakening this international organization and its reputation. 18 Italian colonial ambitions, left dissatisfied by the Peace Conference in 1919, were partially fulfilled with the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Italyās interest in this country was not new: at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy had attempted to obtain a protectorate in the area and occupied Ethiopia, only to be defeated by the Ethiopian army in the Battle of Adwa in 1896. 19 The Italians never forgot this episode, and the fact that in the 1920s Ethiopia was still independent and the neighbouring country of the Italian colonies of Somaliland and Eritrea made it a natural target of Fascist colonial aspirations. In December 1934, taking as an excuse a frontier quarrel at the oasis of Wal-Wal, Italy started a dispute with Ethiopia which led to the military invasion of the country on 3 October 1935 and its annexation to the Italian Empire on 9 May 1936.
The action taken by Italy, an influential European member of the League, not only to attack another member but further to deploy poison gases, outraged public opinion and prompted the League to find a quick solution in order to maintain its credibility. The institution, however, immediately encountered difficulties in organizing a coherent collective response to the Italian threats. The embargo and the sanctions, which the League enforced on Italy, were unsuccessful. Instead they fuelled the Fascist anti-League rhetoric, which was very successful in convincing the Italian population of a British-Geneva conspiracy at the expense of Italy. 20 The Leagueās inability to deal with the matter not only prompted widespread indignation in public opinion, which started seeing the League as a failed institution, but also showed the limit of the League as an agent of collective security, accelerating its collapse. 21 The unilateral action of the Fascist regime uncovered in an irreparable way the institutional weaknesses of this organization, which being already in its decline did not manage to recover.
The Italian attitude to the League was not limited, however, to these two instances of conflict. Throughout the later 1920s and the early 1930s, there were contradictory features in Italyās behaviour. Seen from Mussoliniās point of ...