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| The '''Hoare–Laval Pact''' was a December 1935 proposal by ] ] ] and ] ] ] for ending the ]. ] had wanted to take ] as part of its ] and also to avenge ] in the region. The Pact offered to partition Abyssinia (now ]), and thus achieve Italian ] ]'s goal of making the independent nation of Abyssinia into an Italian colony. | The '''Hoare–Laval Pact''' was a December 1935 proposal by ] ] ] and ] ] ] for ending the ]. ] had wanted to take ] as part of its ] and also to avenge ] in the region. The Pact offered to partition Abyssinia (now ]), and thus achieve Italian ] ]'s goal of making the independent nation of Abyssinia into an Italian colony. | ||
Revision as of 00:38, 17 August 2013
The Hoare–Laval Pact was a December 1935 proposal by British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval for ending the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Italy had wanted to take Abyssinia as part of its empire and also to avenge previous defeats in the region. The Pact offered to partition Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and thus achieve Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's goal of making the independent nation of Abyssinia into an Italian colony.
Background
At that moment, both Britain and France were eager to have Italy rejoin the Stresa Front against Adolf Hitler's ambitions. Moreover, Mussolini wanted to end the Abyssinian war, due to the poor performance of his general, Marshall Emilio De Bono, and unexpectedly hard Abyssinian resistance.
The Pact
Under the pact, Italy would gain the best parts of Ogaden and Tigray, and economic influence over all the southern part of Abyssinia. Abyssinia would have a guaranteed corridor to the sea (but a poor one, called a "corridor for camels") at the port of Assab.
Mussolini was ready to agree to this, but he waited some days to make his opinion public.
Reaction
Britain
The Pact was met with a wave of moral indignation in Britain. On 10 December the Opposition Labour Party claimed if the reports in the press of the contents of the Pact were true, then the government were contradicting the pro-League policy they had just won the election on. In an editorial titled ‘A Corridor for Camels’, The Times on 16 December denounced the Pact and said there never was "the slightest doubt that British public opinion would recommend them for approval by the League as a fair and reasonable basis of negotiations". The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, condemned the Pact in a letter to The Times and many other bishops wrote directly to Baldwin opposing it.
Duff Cooper, the Secretary of State for War, later wrote:
But before the Duce had had time to declare himself there arose a howl of indignation from the people of Great Britain. During my experience of politics I have never witnessed so devastating a wave of public opinion. Even the easy-going constituents of the St. George's division were profoundly moved. My post-bag was full and the letters I received were not written by ignorant or emotional people but by responsible citizens who had given sober thought to the matter.
The Conservative Chief Whip told Baldwin: "Our men won't stand for it". Sir Austen Chamberlain in a speech to the Conservative Foreign Affairs Committee condemned the Pact and said: "Gentlemen do not behave in such a way". Harold Nicolson MP later wrote that he had had sleepless nights worrying whether he could keep his seat.
France
When the Chamber of Deputies debated the Pact on 27 and 28 December, the Popular Front condemned it, with Léon Blum telling Laval: "You have tried to give and to keep. You wanted to have your cake and eat it. You cancelled your words by your deeds and your deeds by your words. You have debased everything by fixing, intrigue and slickness...Not sensitive enough to the importance of great moral issues, you have reduced everything to the level of your petty methods". Yvon Delbos declared: "Your plan is dead and buried. From its failure, which is as total as possible, you could have – but you have not – drawn a personal conclusion. Two lessons emerge. The first is that you were in a dead end because you upset everyone without satisfying Italy. The second is that we must return to the spirit of the Covenant by preserving agreement with the nations gathered at Geneva". Paul Reynaud attacked the government for aiding Hitler by ruining the Anglo-French alliance.
On the motion of censure, the French government had a majority of 296 votes to 276, with 37 radicals voting for the government.
Historiography
Historians have differed over the significance of the pact. A. J. P. Taylor argued that it was the event that "killed the League " and that the pact "was a perfectly sensible plan, in line with the League's previous acts of conciliation from Corfu to Manchuria" which would have "ended the war; satisfied Italy; and left Abyssinia with a more workable, national territory" but that the "common sense of the plan was, in the circumstances of the time, its vital defect". The military historian Correlli Barnett has argued that if Britain alienated Italy, Italy "would be a potential enemy astride England's main line of imperial communication at a time when she was already under threat from two existing potential enemies at opposite ends of the line . If – worse – Italy were to fight in a future war as an ally of Germany or Japan, or both, the British would be forced to abandon the Mediterranean for the first time since 1798". Therefore, in Barnett's view, it was "highly dangerous nonsense to provoke Italy" due to Britain's military and naval weakness and that therefore the pact was a sensible option.
See also
Notes
- Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin. A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp. 887-889.
- The Times (16 December 1935), p. 15.
- Middlemas and Barnes, p. 890.
- Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 192-193.
- Middlemas and Barnes, p. 890.
- Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 446-447.
- Macmillan, pp. 411-412.
- Geoffrey Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 126.
- Warner, p. 126.
- Warner, p. 126.
- Warner, p. 127.
- A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Penguin, 1991), p. 128.
- Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (Pan, 2002), pp. 352-3 and p. 356.
References
- Henderson B. Braddick," The Hoare-Laval Plan: A Study in International Politics," Review of Politics (1962) 24#3 pp. 342–364 in JSTOR
- Holt, Andrew. "'No more Hoares to Paris’: British foreign policymaking and the Abyssinian Crisis, 1935," Review of International Studies (2011) 37#3 pp 1383–1401