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The League of Nations Experiment in International Protection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Dorothy V. Jones
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Extract

Concerns beyond borders was not a new idea in 1919 when the League of Nations became the institutional guardian of such concerns. The freedom of action implied in the concept of sovereignty had always been subject, at least in theory, to the restraint of judgment by some external standard such as divine or natural law. In the system of international protection administered by the League, a number of standards external to the sovereign state were given explicit formulation and put on a contract basis in treaties and in the League Covenant itself. The standards were not universal in application. They were to be applied only in mandated territories and in states bound by specific minority treaties. Within those geographic limits the standards were detailed and non-negotiable. They concerned civil and political rights, equal protection before the law, religious freedom, economic development, and protection from exploitation. How well did this system of protection function? What was the League of Nations able to do in the twenty years between two world wars when it was responsible for the maintenance of these international norms?

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 8 , March 1994 , pp. 77 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1994

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References

1 The sixteen states were: Poland, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland (as regards the Aaland Islands), Germany (as regards Upper Silesia), and Iraq. See Documents Relating to the Protection of Minorities, League of Nations, Official Journal, Spec. Supp. 73 (Geneva, 1929), 48–49. The standard work for all League activities is F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). For a listing of minorities see 173–75, 211–12, 402–11.

2 Julius Stone, Regional Guarantees of Minority Rights (New York. Macmillan. 1993.203-6. Georges Kaeekenbeeck, The International Experiment of Upper Silesia London Oxford University Press, 1942). 223 24. 358–62, 516– 18.

3 For example, Mineichiro Adachi (Japan), Francisco José Urrutia. (Colombia) and Nicholas Socrate Politis (Greece). The names of the obscure show up throughout F. P. Walters's history of the League. Many of them are the subjects of entries in Warren F. Kuchl. Biographical of Dictionary of Internationalists (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

4 A beginning on this kind of research can he found in the publislied papers of a1980)Sl) symposium held in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations Library and the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, The League of Nations in Retrospect Berlin. walter de Gruyter 1983

5 Salvador de Madariaga, The World's Design (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938). 7.

6 Lugard was working on a history of the mandates system at the time of his death in 1945. His notes were given to H. Duncan Hall for use in his work Mandates, Dependencies, and Trusteeships (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1948). The standard work is still Quincy Wright, Mandates Under the League of Nations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1930). The early publication date suggests how much work is still to he done.

7 Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC). Minutes IX (1926). 35–36. The League's handling of the first uprising, known as the Bondelzwart affair can be followed in Wright. Mandes esp.209–10

8 UN (General Assembly Resolution 1514(XV). December 14. 1060. Declaration on the Granting; of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Deel 3. in Ian Brownlie. ed. Basic Documents in International Law (Oxford: Clarender Pres1083.300

9 PMC, Minutes XX (1931), 229. See also Walter Holmes Ritsher, Criteria of Capacity for Independence (Jerusalem: Syrian Orphanage Press, 1934).

10 A comprehensive account of the minority treaty system would fill this journal many times over. A good starting place is Ronald Veatch, “Minorities and the League of Nations,” in The League of Nations in Retrospect, 369–83, to be supplemented by older works such as Inis L. Claude, Jr., National Minorities: An International Problem (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), and Julius Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).

11 Text of petition from Franz Bernheim, May 12, 1933, League of Nations, Official Journal (OJ) 14 (1933), 930–33Google Scholar.

12 Stone.Regional Guarantees, vii–viii. 202–6.

13 NewYork Times. May 31.1922. p. 4

14 For a details account, see Kaeekenheeek, Upper Silesia. esp 23–30. The influnce of this experiment in international administration on the thinking of one of the architects of the European Economic Community can be seen in Jean Monnet. Memoirs (Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1978) 87-91

15 United Nations Economic and Social Council, Study of the Legal Validity of the Undertakings Concerning Minorities, UN Doc E/CN.4/367 (April 7, 1950), 70.

16 Esther Millon Seeman. “The Administration of the Minorities Treaties by the League of Nations”, PhD, dissertion, University of Minnesota, 1969, 44.

17 League of Nations, OJ 14 (1933), 833–49.

18 Ibid., 833, 843.

19 Ibid., 848.

20 Kaeekenbeeek,Upper Silesia 266

21 Miller, Joyce Laverty, “The Syrian Revolt of 1925,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 8 (1977), 550–63Google Scholar; Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers (forthcoming), chap. 5; Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 373–404.

22 PMC, Minutes, VII (1925), 196.

23 Z. N. Zeine, “The Arab Lands.” in P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 580; “Inter-War Duala Petitions,” Tab. XIII, Austen and Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons; “Equatorial Africa Under Colonial Rule.” in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Morton, eds., History of Central Africa, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1983). 28, 40–41. 54. 68-72.

24 Veatch, “Minorities,”The League of Nations in Retrospect, 371–72.

25 “Access to Minority Schools in Upper Silesia,” advisory opinion, May 15, 1931, Permanent Court of International Justice, Ser. A/B, No. 40; Kaeckenbeeck, Upper Silesia, 298–344.

26 A more favorable view of Germany's actions can be found in Carole Kapiloff Fink, “The Weimar Republic as the Defender of Minorities, 1919–1933” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1968).

27 League of Nations of 14(1933), 847Google Scholar