The legacy of the First World War for international trusteeship
International Law and WWI | Lecture Series
The legacy of the First World War for international trusteeship
The Versailles Treaty after the First World War created an international Mandate System for the colonies of the defeated powers. Mandated territories and their populations were administered by the victorious powers, on the basis of a ‘sacred trust of mankind’, under the supervision of the League of Nations. It is common to regard these arrangements, and their counterpart in the mirror-arrangements adopted after the Second World War, the UN Trusteeship System, as anachronisms. As such, their utility in understanding contemporary debates about occupation, intervention, development and state-building is dismissed. In the lecture, I will argue that this is mistaken, and so constitutes a missed opportunity to understand the present better by appreciating linkages with the past. I will explain how the trusteeship-over-people concept is significant for the issue of when and on what basis arrangements involving ‘foreign territorial administration’—whether colonialism, administration by states under the League Mandate and UN Trusteeship systems, occupation by states, or territorial administration by international organizations, what I term international territorial administration, ITA—should end. On this issue, the trusteeship concept as epitomized in the Mandate System co-habits in the international normative arena with a rival concept, the self-determination concept. The two concepts offer mutually contrasting visions on the issue of termination. This lecture will discuss the contrasting fortunes of each these two normative visions in mediating the treatment of foreign territorial administration over the course of the 20th twentieth century and into the 21st century, and what is at stake in choosing between them when determining the basis for exits from foreign territorial administration today.
Lecturer: Dr Ralph Wilde - UCL
Register TO-DAY for the event here: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-legacy-of-the-first-world-war-for-international-trusteeship-tickets-18575566018
Speakers
Dr Ralph Wilde
Role: Reader
Organisation: UCL
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2.220
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