[…] Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
The Japanese Pan-Asianists and the Young Ethiopians had similar ideas about how their respective governments should position themselves globally. They both perceptively understood that the universalism professed by international law and international organisation was a façade to defend Western colonial interests […] The international space was constituted according to racist principles that made any Western talk of sovereign equality empty […] As we have seen, however, [their…] political vision […] was not a remaking of the world under more egalitarian principles of horizontal solidarity.
Introduction: Or Else What?
Where can one find the United Nations (UN) and its sister international institutions? As an international organisation (IO) with a ‘universal’ reach,Footnote 2 the UN – just like international law – seems to be both ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere’.Footnote 3 Elsewhere in this volume, I have tried to answer this question by highlighting that IOs always have to function somewhere – and, as such, issued a plea for the study of their geographically situated and materially embedded sites in international institutional law.Footnote 4 Departing from this premise, in what follows I want to take this a step further to think about the entanglements of these institutions with what, following Du Bois, one could call the ‘global colour line’.Footnote 5 With this, I make reference to the ways in which the institutions of international order pivoted on notions of racial hierarchy and white supremacy, including some peoples (while excluding others) within the bounds of the ‘international community’.Footnote 6 As Obregón and others have shown, the quest of international order has long been haunted by the echoes of a nineteenth-century conception of ‘civilised peoples’ that has served to exclude and constrain non-European participation in the ‘family of nations’.Footnote 7
Indeed, given that the UN and its sister institutions were forged in the ideological crucible of what Hobsbawm has called the ‘Age of Empire’,Footnote 8 it would be easy to assume that they were unable to play a role in challenging the global colour line. And yet, as Mazower has shown, the fact that the UN had been created in the image and likeness of ‘imperial internationalism’ did not prevent a cast of generations of non-European and racialised international lawyers to flock to its hall to attempt to create a post-colonial international order from within the very belly of Empire.Footnote 9 This is what Sayward has called the UN’s ‘Nehruvian moment’;Footnote 10 or what Moyn has understood as the ‘high tide of anticolonial legalism’.Footnote 11 For some readers, the label of the first generation of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL I) lawyer-diplomats might a be more familiar monicker.Footnote 12 What matters is that, in all of these attempts to rethink and challenge the global colour line, the UN played a salient role: either as an actor to ally with, as a source of (material and ideological) resources, or as a forum to dispute in.Footnote 13
In this chapter, I show this by focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the UN and its predecessor, the League of Nations (‘the League’), chief among them.Footnote 14 For, if we look closely at one of the sites where the UN fashioned a shell for itself in the city of Addis Ababa,Footnote 15 we can see that the Ethiopian elites understood that the UN (with all of its flaws) had to play a protagonist role in the struggles to come. Let us turn, then, to the central panel of the stained-glass tryptic The Total Liberation of Africa, of 1959 (Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1 A White Knight in Shining Armour?Footnote 16
Designed by the Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle after winning a competition and under the supervision of Emperor Haile Selassie I, this three-part stained-glass window constituted the central artwork of the new building ‘Africa Hall’.Footnote 17 As the edifice was erected to host the new UN Economic Commission for Africa and to provide the continent with a proper site for high-level diplomatic encounters, its design and construction was carefully supervised by the Ethiopian establishment with the purpose of dazzling local, regional, and international audiences alike. Here, tucked in the corner of the panel, we can find the UN. But the portrayal is quite particular: this IO appears as a white knight, clad in European armour and a daunting longsword. All the other figures are dark-skinned and ‘wear traditional Ethiopian costumes, because it is felt by the Artist that Ethiopia should occupy this leading place’ in the decolonisation of Africa.Footnote 18 But the White Knight, the sole European of the composition, with the UN’s blue emblem in his chest, appears as a symbol ‘of what the United Nations stands for and of Africa believing and appreciating its justice and willing[ness] to cooperate in the support of its ideals and aspirations’.Footnote 19
This chapter traces the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the UN (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge the global colour line. The result is neither a blind celebration of the UN’s anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage.Footnote 20 Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other.Footnote 21 For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the UN will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient. To argue this, I show how the Ethiopian polity engaged with the treacherous figure of the White Knight of international ordering, (2) from the pre-modern era all the way to the so-called (3) interwar period, and (4) the post-war age of the UN. This allows me to (5) conclude with some remarks on the limits of taking Ethiopia as a representative polity of the racialised peoples of the world.
In Lewis Carroll’s rendition of this trope, Alice finds herself hostage to an unwanted session of poetry-reading by a towering White Knight.Footnote 22 After he appears to rescue her from (another equally unwanted) Red Knight, Alice falls under his ‘protection’ until she is ready to emerge as an independent queen – that is, a ‘sovereign’.Footnote 23 In the meantime, she is exposed to his technological inventions and mavericks – including a poem that is ‘very, very, beautiful’.Footnote 24 The White Knight proudly claims that ‘[e]verybody that hears me sing it – either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else’.Footnote 25 ‘Or else what?’ retorts Alice. ‘Or else it doesn’t, you know’ replies the Knight.Footnote 26 Either way, Alice was about to hear it! The Ethiopian polity, like Alice, quickly realised that once one falls under the White Knight’s ‘protection’, one might as well enjoy his poetry – what else? But like Alice, Ethiopia did not remain passive through its encounter with the White Knight. She remained always with one eye fixed towards the imaginary border that separated her from her sovereign crown.Footnote 27 With this metaphor in mind, we now turn to the story of Ethiopia’s encounter with the ‘World of White Knights’ and their international institutions.Footnote 28
The Kingdom of ‘Prester John’: Early Modern Fluidity in Interpolity Ordering
‘Before the West’, as Zarakol reminds us, notions of interpolity order looked quite different.Footnote 29 During the Early Modern era, the self-identification of the elites of the Ethiopian Solomonic Empire as ‘an isle of Christians surrounded by a sea of pagans’ made religion, rather than race, the key marker of their approach to foreign affairs.Footnote 30 As early as the thirteenth century, Ethiopian pilgrims and merchants have found their way to the courts of the leading European polities, especially those with ports on the Mediterranean sea.Footnote 31 The first properly documented diplomatic visit sent by an Ethiopian emperor to the Venetian court happened in 1402, opening the door to the ‘first age of Ethiopian-European diplomacy’.Footnote 32 Animated by the myth of a remote eastern kingdom that had been created by a lost Christian Priest-judge (‘Prester John’), the Early Modern Europeans were generally friendly towards the Ethiopian overtures and treated them as ‘peers’.Footnote 33 Indeed, they both shared an ‘interest in military alliance against Muslim powers’ and an ecumenical desire for religious dialogue.Footnote 34 By the sixteenth century, this reproachment reached its climax as Portuguese forces intervened in favour of the Ethiopian sovereigns in its war against Adalite and Ottoman Muslim forces – leading to a period of sharp Jesuit influence in the region.Footnote 35
What matters for the purposes of this chapter is that, before the ‘modern’ era, Ethiopians were not seen as beyond the pale of the European family of nations, but rather as long-lost Christian cousins awaiting to be brought back into its fold.Footnote 36 Records of the arrival of an Ethiopian delegation in Lisbon in 1514 show that their hosts asked a slew of questions related to their ‘written laws, law courts and magistrates […] written history, […] taxes […] and proper styles of clothing and social distinction’ as the Europeans sought to make sense of the shared practices of their Christian equals.Footnote 37 But as Pagden has shown, the ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas increasingly complicated (and racialised) the terms of encounter between Europe and its others.Footnote 38 As Salvadore notes in relation to the story of an Ethiopian noble who sought refuge and was welcomed in the highest echelons of European secular and religious society in the seventeenth century, ‘race defined him in death, but not in life’.Footnote 39 With this, he makes reference that it was only later (in tandem to the introduction of racialised African slavery in the Americas) that an increasingly fixed notion of race began to trump Christian brotherhood in the European imagination.Footnote 40 By the late Renaissance, Korhonen notes that the proverb ‘to wash an Ethiopian white is to labour in vain’ was ‘repeated so frequently […] that it was understandable even when either half of the sentence was omitted’.Footnote 41 Indeed, on the eve of the Age of Revolutions and ‘Modernity proper’, the ‘rather exceptional European attitude toward slavery […] – specifically, its association with the concept of race’ had now fully consolidated.Footnote 42
This had important consequences for interpolity diplomatic relations. As Sluga has shown, the ‘invention’ of international order that occurred in 1815 (in the wake of the post-Napoleonic restoration) tended to ossify conceptual borders – at least in comparison to a ‘relatively diverse aristocratic cosmopolitan brotherhood’.Footnote 43 While the Ethiopian establishment continued to pursue diplomatic relations abroad across the Mediterranean, this was ‘only grudgingly conceded by Europe [… and this same right] was denied to powerful African states of the time like the Asanthi and the Zulu’.Footnote 44 By the late nineteenth century, Ethiopia had gone from Christian peer polity to a potentially conquerable ‘savage’ entity – and it increasingly found itself ‘between the jaws of hyenas’ of its former Christian cousins.Footnote 45 Shortly after the European great powers formalised the rules for the partition of Africa,Footnote 46 the Ethiopian polity inflicted a resounding blow on the encroaching Italian colonial army at the battle of Adwa of 1896.Footnote 47 Like the rising Japanese Empire (which, in turn, defeated the Russian Empire militarily in 1905), the Ethiopian elites understood that to be a ‘sovereign’ in the Modern era military and industrial might were indispensable.Footnote 48 While Ethiopia could have been recognised as an equal, even if ‘black’, Knight in the fifteenth century because of its common faith, on the eve of the Great War in the twentieth century it was clear unless it was ready to brandish its sword it would fall under European ‘protection’. The nineteenth century, in this sense, constitutes a turning point in the relations between Europe and the Christian, but non-European, world.Footnote 49 The same, as the secondary literature has shown, was true of the Ottoman Empire and other polities that suddenly found themselves to be ‘quasi-sovereign’ after centuries of (at least nominal) equality with European rulers.Footnote 50
The Great(er) War: Ethiopia and the League of Nations
Indeed, as an Ethiopian ‘quasi-sovereign’, Lij Iyasu was an unlikely victim of the upheavals of the Great War of 1914.Footnote 51 The prefix Lij is used in Ethiopian Amharic to denote a child of royal blood, which was fitting because Iyasu was never crowned, as such, due to his young age. He had been appointed as successor to Menelik II (the emperor who had defeated the Italians at Adwa) in 1909, and in that capacity attempted to rule amidst the palace wars of the period. But the declaration of an actual war in Europe, kilometres away, eventually led to the coup that deposed the young Iyasu in 1916. Given that he had been trained by a German tutor and was widely rumoured to sympathise with the Central Powers, a pro-Allied faction of local notables deposed him (arguing that it was a just a matter of time until the Crown Prince converted to Islam as an apostate and joined the Central Powers in their war effort).Footnote 52 He was replaced by an ambitious Crown Prince, who would eventually be crowned in 1930 as the Emperor Haile Selassie I.Footnote 53 Given that his rise to power was directly related to interpolity intrigues, it is not surprising that the new emperor would ‘concentrate on Addis Abeba [his capital …] and foreign affairs, around which he would build his authority’.Footnote 54 This led him to undertake a European ‘grand tour’ in 1924, which culminated with the troubled accession of his polity to the new IO created in the wake of the war and international law’s move to institutions: the League.Footnote 55
And yet, Ethiopia’s membership of the League was always tenuous – Getachew understands this as a ‘burdened and racialised’ membership.Footnote 56 Famously, the Japanese had been unsuccessful in their attempt to enshrine a racial equality provision in the Versailles peace settlement, with important consequences for the institutions created there.Footnote 57 As I have noted elsewhere reviewing some of the literature on non-European participation in the family of nations, ‘territorial statehood is always precarious and unstable, constrained to the fulfilment of imperial standards of race; civilization; development; alien/human rights’.Footnote 58 In this particular context, it imposed a series of institutional obligations on Ethiopia vis-à-vis the League in relation to slavery and the slave trade.Footnote 59 With the establishment of the League in 1919, one of its tasks had been to supervise the management of conquered colonial territories, which were given as ‘mandates’ to the victorious allies.Footnote 60 Due to Ethiopia’s racialised membership, its situation was almost closer to the non-self-governing mandates than to its peers among the European and Latin American polities, as the system offered ‘little more than colonialism by another name’.Footnote 61 Most famously, Ethiopia’s member status did not prevent its brutal invasion by another ‘peer’ (Italy) in 1935 – an event that, for Du Bois, proved that despite the League’s lofty promises, the world was run by those who pinned ‘their faith on European civilization, the Christian religion and the superiority of the white race’.Footnote 62
And yet, the institutional set-up of the League (both for the mandates and for Ethiopia as a quasi-sovereign member) offered opportunities for those who sought to challenge racial hierarchy in international order through international order. Du Bois, who had participated in the League’s first General Assembly in 1920, believed that it could play a central role for anti-racist activism on behalf of both African-Unitedstateseans and colonised Africans.Footnote 63 Indeed, even Haile Selassie I never lost his faith in the League. As the Italian armies encroached his homeland, he departed towards exile in the UK. But not before he went to Geneva to personally address the League in 1936.Footnote 64 While he was ultimately unsuccessful,Footnote 65 the League ‘provided a formal stage’ where the emperor performed the dances of (quasi)sovereignty.Footnote 66 Even if the White Knight’s ‘protection’ was but a fig leaf, the League offered a place where its treacherous ways could be called to account. Indeed, when he reconquered the capital city of Addis Ababa at the helm of his ‘Gideon Force’ in 1941 with the support of his British allies as part of the UN military alliance against Fascism, Haile Selassie I (as many in his generation) drew from the experience of the League’s ‘failure’ lessons for the new post-war order.Footnote 67
The First ‘Ally’: Ethiopia and International Order in WWII
Like Alice in Wonderland, Ethiopia was rescued by the White Knight during WWII. And yet, it would soon discover that the ‘protection’ of the ‘White’ UN was not too dissimilar from the occupation of the ‘Black(shirt) Knight’. The wake of the Ethiopian Liberation campaign of 1941 had left the country as a thinly veiled British protectorate,Footnote 68 in which the emperor’s patriots were but ‘grudgingly recognised as allies’.Footnote 69 At first, key imperial policymakers sought to treat Ethiopia as a conquered Italian possession – some even aspired to create a united British East African colony as a post-war trusteeship territory ruled from Nairobi.Footnote 70 Even after some autonomy was devolved to the emperor’s quasi-sovereign government, the British held on to the Somali-inhabited area of the Ogaden and the former Italian colony of Eritrea was war conquests. Moreover, the rump state was forced to use the East African shilling as its national currency (until 1945) and almost all the Italian industrial infrastructure was duly looted by its British ‘allies’.Footnote 71 The emperor remained ‘aware that his country was as much occupied as liberated’ and ‘remained doubtful of British intentions’.Footnote 72 Indeed, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
The emperor, who had neither forgotten (nor perhaps forgiven) Geneva, turned to the promise of a new international order to fight for his polity’s sovereignty. Like many peoples of the colonised and occupied world – both seen as racialised by either the Allied imperial or Axis war machines – the promises issued by the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and the Declaration of the United Nations in 1942 offered a glimpse of hope.Footnote 73 If all people had, pursuant to the clause three of the Charter, ‘a right to self-determination’, this had to be true both for the polities militarily occupied by the Fascist powers (say Poland and Ethiopia), and perhaps even for the whole colonised world. This expectation gained even more momentum when, in 1945, the military alliance of the UN was formally institutionalised into a new ‘universal’ IO – and one, moreover, that enshrined equal rights and self-determination of peoples as one of its cardinal values.Footnote 74
In this spirit, as soon as he retook the capital, Haile Selassie I wrote to the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) arguing that Ethiopia should be seen as the first liberated polity of the UN alliance.Footnote 75 FDR reciprocated by inviting the emperor to meet him personally aboard the USS Quincy near Cairo, where he would stop after the Yalta conference of 1945.Footnote 76 From then onwards, the US became a key supporter of Ethiopian independence. Ethiopia, in turn, committed fully to the UN (being, with Egypt and Liberia, the only three independent African countries that participated in the San Francisco Conference of 1945) and to the idea of the US-led international order.Footnote 77 Translating words into deeds, the Ethiopian army answered the military call of the UN by sending its forces to peacekeeping operations in Korea (1950) and the Congo (1960).Footnote 78 This gambit paid off, as it was untenable for the British to colonise a (nominally) equal ally and fellow UN member. As a British colonial officer noted, ‘the fact that we surround [Ethiopia] and could in the old days have squeezed [it] flat with very little difficulty, is of course irrelevant in the age of Lake Something’.Footnote 79 This is a reference to ‘Lake Success’ – where, as we saw in my earlier chapter in this volume, the UN had its interim headquarters during this period.Footnote 80 The ambiguities of the White Knight, here, appear in their full colours.
Of course, this change in the nature of the liberal international order had more to do with the vanquished than with the victors. Given that the Axis powers had made racial superiority a central banner of their war effort, the allies included an ‘equality of race’ provision in their post-war settlement.Footnote 81 The inclusion of this, however, was not without frictions. Indeed, as I noted elsewhere, the Soviet Union ‘rarely lost an opportunity to embarrass its erstwhile allies by highlighting the persistence of racial discrimination in the US to critique the use of the trope of “civilization” by European empires’.Footnote 82 Indeed, colonial powers frequently invoked the cover of sovereignty to shield themselves from UN criticism over entrenched racial hierarchies – with, of course, South Africa being the most obvious example.Footnote 83 Immigration policy was – and continues to be – a thorny issue in our allegedly post-racial world.
And yet, at the same time that the UN’s notion of sovereignty provided cover for racialised hierarchies, it also created opportunities for those who wanted to challenge the global colour line. The General Assembly, in particular, became a key site of struggle – especially as the increasing tempo of decolonisation added more and more formerly colonised peoples to its ranks.Footnote 84 In time, this IO – and its family of institutions, UNESCO in particular – has developed a series of mechanisms and procedures to highlight the persistence of racial discrimination and the unfulfilled promises of the post-war settlement.Footnote 85 Ethiopia, in particular, became a fervent supporter of the institution’s work in general – and, in particular, became the host of its Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
In fact, it was in UNECA’s building (‘Africa Hall’, as we saw earlier), that the UN’s Security Council met in 1972 for the first time on African soil.Footnote 86 After an extensive diplomatic campaign coordinated with other African member states (and with the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) – created in the wake of a summit held in that same building in 1963), Haile Selassie I managed to convince the UN to discuss African problems within the continent itself. A US diplomat, anonymously quoted in the New York Times, candidly confessed that this was ‘a silly idea, but if you object to it you’re a racist, so naturally we didn’t’.Footnote 87 The agenda was dominated by the thorny issues of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese colonies that remained on the African continent. Unsurprisingly, the session ended in disappointment after the UK vetoed any resolution that threatened white supremacy in their former colonial holdings. Be that as it may, Haile Selassie I and his African allies saw the Council meeting as a triumph. Somalia and Sudan rotated the Council’s Presidency, and in that capacity, they invited Haile Selassie I to address the international community – ultimately, for the last time. For the ageing emperor, the Council session’s highlight was the ceremony held in his palace where the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim awarded him the ‘Peace Medal for his contributions to international peace and justice’.Footnote 88 A fitting end for a monarch who had invested many of his early years in convincing his polity, perhaps somewhat naively, to believe in the promises of a so-called post-racial liberal rules-based international order.
Concluding Remarks: The Star of Ethiopia
The Star of Ethiopia: A Pageant, of 1911, was Du Bois’ debut as a playwriter.Footnote 89 While it had been presented to audiences before, its presentation in Philadelphia in 1916 (to commemorate the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution) represented its theatrical climax.Footnote 90 The plot was simple: merely ‘the history and development of the black race from prehistoric times to the present’.Footnote 91 The involved cast mirrored the play’s ambitions, with at least 1,000 actors involved in different capacities. The result, in Du Bois’ mind, was a pedagogical tour de force that would teach ‘on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre, and on the other, to reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing’.Footnote 92 Ethiopia, in this perspective, appeared as ‘the mother of men’: a polity that could claim to be the true cradle not only of humankind as a whole but of the coloured peoples of the world in particular. In this same vein, the anthem of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (led by the famous Afro-Jamaican thinker Marcus Garvey) adopted as its anthem the song ‘Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers’.Footnote 93
Indeed, for Du Bois and many other anti-racist and pan-African thinkers, Ethiopia remained a ‘northern star’ in their struggle.Footnote 94 The Italian war of aggression against this polity in the interwar years, in particular, became a galvanising call to arms for future generations of anticolonial actors. Haile Selassie I, years later, would also come to adopt the pan-African agenda with the zeal of the convert, becoming one of the architects of the aforementioned OAU in 1963. And yet, any recovery of this polity’s legacy of anti-racist struggle cannot be complete without a mention of the ways in which the Ethiopian Empire, itself, reproduced racial hierarchies within its own borders. As Asseraf well reminds us (in relation to Arabic feelings of ethnic animosity against ‘black’ Africans in French-colonised Algeria), notions of racial hierarchy were not solely a European invention.Footnote 95 Imperialism, no doubt, ossified (and even radicalised) certain ‘racial’ tensions in the colonised world – with lasting consequences to our days.Footnote 96 But we also ought to remember that ‘some of the most vocal “anticolonial states” – such as Indonesia and India – simultaneously repressed independence campaigns and pursued imperial expansion’.Footnote 97 The same was true of the mid-century Ethiopian polity. Ultimately, for ‘the wretched of the earth’, the day will not be saved by any dazzling Knight: white, black, or otherwise.Footnote 98
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