Hoare-Laval Pact

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The Hoare-Laval Pact was a December 1935 plan concocted by the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Samuel Hoare and the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval for the partitioning of Ethiopia, as a means of ending the Italo-Ethiopian War. It aimed to satisfy the demands of Italy's Benito Mussolini to make the independent nation of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called) an Italian colony.

According to the Pact, Italy would have gained the best parts of Ogaden and Tigray, and economic influence over all the southern part of Ethiopia. Ethiopia itself would have had a guaranteed corridor to the sea, until the port of Asseb.

Mussolini was ready to agree with this, but he waited some days to make his opinion public, and the plan was leaked and denounced as a sell-out of the Abyssinians by a French newspaper the 13th of December, 1935. The British government dissociated itself from the Pact and both Hoare and Laval were forced to resign.

At that moment, both Britain and France were eager to regain Italy to the Stresa Front against Hitler's ambitions. Moreover, Mussolini wanted to end the Abyssinian crisis, due to the inefficiency of Marshall De Bono's command and the unexpectedly hard resistance.

Mussolini expected France and Britain to tolerate his operation in Ethiopia, as a result of the support he accorded to the Anglo-French plan to the stop the Anschluss of Austria in 1934, by moving divisions in the north-east Italy, meaning he was ready to intervene forcibly in case of any aggression against Austria.

Historians have differed over the significance of the Pact. A. J. P. Taylor argued that it was the event that "killed the League [of Nations]" 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".^[1] 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 [Germany and Japan]. 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.^[2]

[edit] Notes

^ 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.