Abyssinia Crisis

The Abyssinia Crisis happened in 1935. It started with the Walwal incident, a conflict between the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Ethiopia (then commonly known as "Abyssinia"). The League of Nations said Italy could not intervene and voted to punish Italy's economy. But the League did not follow through, and Italy quit the League, made special deals with Britain and France and invaded Abyssinia. The crisis made the League look bad, and made Fascist Italy closer friends with Nazi Germany.

Both Italy and Ethiopia did not like each other. The League of Nations said:

At places where there is not a single Italian national, a consul establishes himself in an area known as consular territory with a guard of about ninety men, for whom he claims jurisdictional immunity. This is an obvious abuse of consular privileges. The abuse is all the greater that the consul's duties, apart from the supplying of information of a military character, take the form of assembling stocks of arms, which constitute a threat to the peace of the country, whether from the internal or the international point of view.^[1]

1. ↑ League of Nations Official Journal, 1935, 1601. Quoted G.T.Garratt, Mussolini's Roman Empire, Penguin Books, April 1938, pp.46–47