The League of Nations and the Internationalization of Imperialism

Abstract

After the First World War, the Allies, self-servingly declaring the Germans and the Turks to have forfeited the “civilizational standing” required of imperial powers, stripped the losers of their colonies. But thanks to President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic vision of a peace without land grabs, those colonies were not seized outright. The compromise solution brokered by the British parcelled them out to “civilized” overseers, who were in turn overseen by a League of Nations commission. As the League Covenant put it, “‘advanced nations’ would administer ‘peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’” (1). The outcome in effect internationalized colonial rule by putting it under international supervision. The mandates system, under which seven mandatory powers governed fourteen mandated territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East, from Nauru to South West Africa to Palestine and Iraq, affirmed rather than repudiated imperialism. It was not designed to build pathways to self-determination. Even for Western liberals, the time when “backward” peoples would be competent to rule themselves was far in the future.