Journal de Genève
- The mandates
The editorial opens by praising the Mandates Commission, then gives a more ambivalent account of the system’s origins. It presents mandates as a compromise between removal of German colonies and opposition to annexation, while calling the initial reconciliation largely verbal. This opening is a political interpretation, not the text of the Covenant itself.
Title and first two paragraphs of the lead editorial, ending “l’effet d’une hypocrisie”; all later examples and arguments are outside the saved excerpt.
Translation
The mandates
Among the organs of the League of Nations, few deserve more praise than the Mandates Commission. The mandates system, as it appears in Article 22 of the Covenant, was a fortunate improvisation by the peace conference. It reconciled the views of the British Empire, which wanted to take Germany’s colonies away, with those of President Wilson, who did not want annexation. But this reconciliation was chiefly verbal and at first gave the impression of hypocrisy.
Context
Rule under an international mandate
Article 22 placed former enemy territories under administration exercised on behalf of the League. It described inhabitants’ welfare as an international responsibility while assigning practical power to selected states. This was the legal distinction between a mandate and straightforward annexation that the editorial questions.
The commission’s supervisory work
Mandatory powers had to submit annual reports. A permanent commission examined those reports and advised the Council on fulfillment of the mandates. Its importance came from creating recurring scrutiny of administrations that might otherwise have treated the territories as exclusively their own concern.
The inequality built into the system
The Covenant classified peoples by presumed ability to govern themselves and gave different mandates different degrees of outside control. Even the language of welfare therefore retained a hierarchy between rulers and ruled. The editorial’s opening praise and its criticism of an initially verbal compromise reflect this tension between supervision and continued imperial power.
Original
Les mandats
Parmi les organes de la Société des nations, il en est peu qui méritent plus d’éloges que la commission des mandats.
Le régime des mandats, tel qu’il figure à l’article 22 du pacte, a été, de la part de la conférence de la paix, une improvisation heureuse. Il a permis de concilier les vues de l’Empire britannique, qui voulait enlever à l’Allemagne ses colonies, avec celles du président Wilson, qui ne voulait pas d’annexion. Mais cette conciliation était surtout verbale et fit, tout d’abord, l’effet d’une hypocrisie.