L’Etiopia tra Adowa e Maychew: le premesse locali e internazionali della crisi globale del 1935-1936

Ethiopia was already at the centre of European power politics before the victory at Adowa, but it was in the following years that the rivalry among Italy, France, and Great Britain would produce lasting consequences—not only for the Ethiopian Empire but also for the broader European and Mediterranean balance of power. Emperor Menelik skilfully exploited the “Scramble for the Nile” to expand his control over regions never previously reached by Abyssinian armies. His “African imperialism over other Africans” led to a series of border treaties that, by 1907, effectively defined the boundaries of modern Ethiopia, despite the lack of demarcation in Danakil and Ogaden, which stemmed from Italy’s intention to maintain a means of continuous pressure on the central government. The conquest of territories inhabited by non-Amhara populations would, in fact, become a long-term challenge for the Ethiopian state in a national perspective, and it later served Mussolini as one of the diplomatic justifications for his belligerent ambitions—namely, to liberate the "Ethiopian periphery" from the "predatory" rule of Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian Empire remained a focal point of European interest even after the 1906 Tripartite Treaty, which strictly delineated Italian, French, and British spheres of influence both in peacetime and in anticipation of a future partition. The turbulent reign of Emperor Lij Iyasu ended with a coup d’état supported by all three embassies, aiming to prevent Ethiopia from aligning with the Central Powers during the First World War. After the war, France made frantic efforts to expand its economic interests in Ethiopia under the pretext of an "international tutelage" it claimed to have long exercised over the Empire—a position tied closely to its broader attempt to secure exclusive political influence in Addis Ababa. These maneuvers were strongly opposed by Britain (and to a lesser extent, by Italy), but Regent Tafari adeptly navigated the rivalries among the powers. He secured Ethiopia's admission to the League of Nations in 1923 and opened negotiations for access to the sea, culminating in the 1928 Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship, which granted Ethiopia a site in Assab, despite years of fruitless attempts to obtain a similar concession from the French in Djibouti. The rivalry among Rome, Paris, and London was inextricably linked to the broader dynamics of Mediterranean and European geopolitics, to which Ethiopian affairs were consistently subordinated. This explains why France began to reconsider its commitment to "protecting" Ethiopia when the resurgence of Germany led the Quai d’Orsay to view Mussolini’s friendship as more strategically valuable. In contrast, the early 1930s saw a rise in British activity in Ethiopia, as London took advantage of French hesitation and even proposed a territorial exchange that resulted in the formation of a boundary commission. It was the Ethiopian escort of this commission that became involved in the Wal Wal incident of 5 December 1934—an episode that served as the casus belli for the war that erupted the following year. However, Mussolini had already decided by 1932 to embark on a colonial venture to rekindle the “Fascist revolution” and achieve a prestigious success to validate the regime’s decade-long militarist propaganda. Ultimately, the Italo-Ethiopian conflict represented a global crisis that irreversibly altered the international order. Its roots, however, lie in the local issues generated by Menelik’s conquests and in the enduring international competition among the European powers between the Battle of Adowa and Ethiopia’s defeat at Maychew.