The Origins of the South West Africa Dispute: The Versailles Peace Conference and the Creation of the Mandates System

1968 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 115-143
Author(s):  
S. Slonim
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
West Africa ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
South West ◽  
Tiered System ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Sliding Scale ◽  
The Creation

The roots of the South West Africa dispute relate back to the events that took place at the end of World War I and led to the creation of the League of Nations mandates system. More particularly, the conflict between the United Nations and South Africa cannot be understood except by tracing the manner in which South West Africa became a part of that system. The “great compromise” hammered out by President Wilson and the Dominion ministers at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 produced a three-tiered system of mandates which reflected in a sliding scale a varied balancing of national and international interests. The result of the compromise was a divergency of interpretation that has endured to this day and in considerable measure has fostered and sustained the dispute in its present-day dimensions.

Betwixt and Between Colony and Nation-State: Liminality, Decolonization, and the South West Africa Mandate

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1704-1708
Author(s):  
Molly McCullers
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
South West ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
South West Africa

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that simultaneously promised and denied them the possibility of self-determination? From Palestine, to Namibia, to Kurdistan, and beyond, the legacies of the mandatory moment remain pressing questions today.

The South West Africa Case: What Happened?

1966 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest A. Gross
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
The South ◽  
South West ◽  
South West Africa

The South-West Africa Case, the New Nations, and International Law

1966 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-380
Author(s):  
Sol Picciotto
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
International Law ◽  
The South ◽  
International Court Of Justice ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
South West ◽  
International Court ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Proper Analysis

The judgment of the International Court of Justice of 18 July 1966 in the South-West Africa case throws revealing light on the role of that Court in the international community. A proper analysis of this case may also help to dispel some of the mystification about international law and the attitude of the new nations to it.

The League of Nations and the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
International Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
New States ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Global Affairs

Although the League of Nations was the first permanent organization established with the purpose of maintaining international peace, it built on the work of a series of 19th-century intergovernmental institutions. The destructiveness of World War I led American and British statesmen to champion a league as a means of maintaining postwar global order. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson followed his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, in advocating American membership of an international peace league, although Wilson’s vision for reforming global affairs was more radical. In Britain, public opinion had begun to coalesce in favor of a league from the outset of the war, though David Lloyd George and many of his Cabinet colleagues were initially skeptical of its benefits. However, Lloyd George was determined to establish an alliance with the United States and warmed to the league idea when Jan Christian Smuts presented a blueprint for an organization that served that end. The creation of the League was a predominantly British and American affair. Yet Wilson was unable to convince Americans to commit themselves to membership in the new organization. The Franco-British-dominated League enjoyed some early successes. Its high point was reached when Europe was infused with the “Spirit of Locarno” in the mid-1920s and the United States played an economically crucial, if politically constrained, role in advancing Continental peace. This tenuous basis for international order collapsed as a result of the economic chaos of the early 1930s, as the League proved incapable of containing the ambitions of revisionist powers in Europe and Asia. Despite its ultimate limitations as a peacekeeping body, recent scholarship has emphasized the League’s relative successes in stabilizing new states, safeguarding minorities, managing the evolution of colonies into notionally sovereign states, and policing transnational trafficking; in doing so, it paved the way for the creation of the United Nations.

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