Sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandates: The Jurists’ Debates

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-587
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
International System ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Inflexion Point ◽  
Political Outcome ◽  
Political Agent ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Political Compromises

Abstract The mandate system took shape at an inflexion point in the evolution from an international system based on rule over territories to one based on rule over peoples. Political compromises made at the Paris Peace Conference resulted in the creation of a new political agent, the League of Nations Mandate, with no clear sovereign. In seeking to systematize this political outcome, jurists located sovereignty with the victorious Great Powers, the League itself, and with the peoples of the mandate territories. Yet they never achieved a consensus, which created an absence at the centre of the mandate system that politics would have to fill throughout the interwar period.

The International Civil Service: Historical Development and Potential for the 21st Century

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udoh Elijah Udom
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
International System ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The United Nations

By-products of World War I and II were the creation of the League of Nations (1919) and subsequently the United Nations (1945). The primary objective of both these global organizations (past, present and future) has been to make the world a better place for humanity. Principally, this has meant working with member states to prevent wars and to carry out humanitarian activities wherever they are needed. Right from the time of the League of Nations, carrying out global mandate of this nature necessitated the creation of international civil service (ICS) to be composed of competent men and women, to assist the world public service to achieve it global mandate. This article argues that ICS is an indispensable instrument of the orderly government of mankind, and must be preserved. The importance of ICS has never been so crucial than today when the world socio-political landscape is more turbulent than in the 1940s when both the ICS and the United Nations were created. The article begins by tracing the history of the ICS from 1919 to the present. It examines the principles of ICS enunciated by the Council of the League of Nations In 1920 and enshrined in the U.N. Charter 25 years later. Here again, the sanctity of the ICS, argued in this article, depends upon upholding these principles by all players in the international system.

State-Sponsored Terror, 1934–37

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-178
Author(s):  
Mary S. Barton
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
British Government ◽  
The Creation

Clandestinely supported by Italian and Hungarian authorities, Balkan terrorists assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou on October 9, 1934, in Marseilles, France. The brazen political murders caused a diplomatic crisis and prompted the League of Nations Conference for the International Repression of Terrorism, which produced two treaties in 1937: the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court. The treaties defined terrorism in international law and included provisions to regulate arms trafficking and fraudulent passports. Only the British Government of India ratified the Terrorism treaty. Neither of the treaties had entered into force by the time of the September 1938 Munich Conference in which the Great Powers ceded the Czech Sudetenland to Adolph Hitler and placed the fate of peacetime Europe in the hands of the Führer.

Transgovernmental processes in the League of Nations

1983 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin David Dubin
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
International System ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Paris Peace Conference ◽  
Foreign Ministries

International relations specialists who have been examining transgovernmental processes in the contemporary international system may be surprised to learn that at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 conscious efforts were made to organize the League of Nations along transgovernmental lines. Key British and French officials, most notably Sir James Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet, supported by Americans involved in implementing the Covenant, hoped to employ both the Secretariat and the organs designed for functionally specific cooperation to bring officials of national social and economic ministries into direct contact with one another, without the intermediation of their respective foreign ministries. While these officials only partially realized their objectives, sections of the League's Secretariat, an elaborate system of expert committees, and the League of Nations Assembly did provide transgovernmental linkages during the interwar period.

The Administrative Anatomy of Failure: The League of Nations Disarmament Section, 1919–1925

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Haakon A. Ikonomou
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Production Of Information

This article investigates the creation and workings of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations Secretariat. It shows that the Disarmament Section was an outlier of the Secretariat: supressed by the Great Powers, it had less autonomy than other parts of the administration, which from an early stage limited its bureaucratic practice to the production of information. This bureaucratic production created unreliable factual foundations for negotiations and unrealistic public expectations. Thus, the article argues that the troubled birth and administrative strangling of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat should play a significant role in our understanding of the broader collapse of general disarmament. By making this argument, the article breaks new ground by introducing failure as an analytical category to understand the role and practices of international public administrations.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

Major powers and geopolitical transformations in the Middle East: competing visions for managing international and regional balances

2019 ◽  
pp. 301
Author(s):  
Marwan Awni Kamil
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
New Realism ◽  
Major Powers

This study attempts to give a description and analysis derived from the new realism school in the international relations of the visions of the great powers of the geopolitical changes witnessed in the Middle East after 2011 and the corresponding effects at the level of the international system. It also examines the alliances of the major powers in the region and its policies, with a fixed and variable statement to produce a reading that is based on a certain degree of comprehensiveness and objectivity.

History of the creation and activities of the League of Nations

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (09) ◽  
pp. 108-113
Author(s):  
Alexander Begichev ◽  
Alexander Galushkin ◽  
Andrey Zvonaryev ◽  
Victor Shestak
Keyword(s):  
League Of Nations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Counterterrorism Between the Wars

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary S. Barton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Second World ◽  
The U.S

This is a book about terrorism, weapons, and diplomacy in the interwar years between the First and Second World Wars. It charts the convergence of the manufacture and trade of arms; diplomacy among the Great Powers and the domestic politics within them; the rise of national liberation and independence movements; and the burgeoning concept and early institutions of international counterterrorism. Key themes include: a transformation in meaning and practice of terrorism; the inability of Great Powers—namely, Great Britain, the United States, France—to harmonize perceptions of interest and the pursuit of common interests; the establishment of the tools and infrastructure of modern intelligence—including the U.S.-U.K. cooperation that would evolve into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance; and the nature of peacetime in the absence of major wars. Particular emphasis is given to British attempts to quell revolutionary nationalist movements in India and elsewhere in its empire, and to the Great Powers’ combined efforts to counter the activities of the Communist International. The facilitating roles of the Paris Peace Conference and League of Nations are explored here, in the context of the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919, the Arms Traffic Conference of 1925, and the 1937 Terrorism Convention.

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The World ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

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