Legittimare la guerra d’Etiopia. La missione civilizzatrice nella diplomazia fascista

Slavery in Ethiopia became a problem for Addis Ababa when it asked for admission to the League of Nations because of its instrumental use by Great Britain, but over ten years Italy used the same strategy. Mussolini tried to justify the decision to invade the Negussite Empire upholding the existence of an alleged civilizing mission for the Fascist regime in East Africa. This theme was without any importance for the consciousness of Italians and therefore the propaganda was a failure: different was the case of diplomacy, which all over the crisis tried to legitimize the imperialist undertaking of the dictator. The most important attempt was the memorandum of 4 September 1935, a huge volume presented to the League by which Italy asked to leave Ethiopia to Fascist conquest to export Roman civilization into the country. References to the civilizing mission continued after this episode, proclaiming the abolition of slavery in occupied territories and several diplomatic conversations with European powers. Notwithstanding, Italian aggression led to a lot of violations of laws of war denounced many times by Ethiopia but without any real consideration in Geneva. Eventually, the fall of Addis Ababa and the proclamation of the Italian Empire were presented as the triumph of Fascist civilization on African barbarism, and the law instituting Italian East Africa was based on the idea of civilizing mission. In the new colony violence became the normality and the situation of the people wor- sened to such an extent that slavery flourished again in a different form, the total subjugation to the Fascist regime.