The Establishment of the Mandates System 1919-25

Abstract

That the Peace Settlement of 1919 was a compromise, dependent upon the continuing involvement of the United States in the affairs of Europe for its success, is a fact widely accepted by students of contemporary history. The nature of that compromise is perhaps nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the colonial aspects of the Treaty of Versailles.1 Under the terms of Articles 22 (League Covenant), 119-27 and 257, Germany unconditionally renounced 'all her rights and titles over her overseas possessions' 'in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers.. .'2 and the 'tutelage' of the inhabitants of these territories was to 'be entrusted to advanced nations' and 'exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League'. The Treaty of Versailles, therefore, contained within it the legal basis for the Mandates System, which was to be applied to Germany's former colonies and the former Arabian provinces of the Ottoman Empire during the inter-war years and which was in the years after 1945 to be transformed into the Trusteeship System of the United Nations. The compromise represented by the Mandates System was that between the idealism of British radicals and socialists, given practical political force by the entry of the United States into the first world war, and the desire of the British, French and Dominion governments to retain unfettered possession of the colonial and Middle-Eastern territories that they had conquered. Undoubtedly