The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

THE COLONIAL POWERS` POLICY IN AFRICA IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. (BASED ON THE "AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW")

It is generally accepted that the intractable conflicts that tormented the African States which were freed from colonialism were the result of decisions made in the process of decolonization in the early 1960 s. However, the modern historians believe that the roots of these conflicts are much deeper, and turn to the study of the results of the First World War and the mandate system of the League of Nations.

Laying the Groundwork

This chapter takes the concept of internationalism back to World War I and the League of Nations Mandate System, which undertook the first effort to legitimize global organizational involvement. It clarifies the Anglo-American discord that marked wartime discussion of international involvement in colonial matters. It also cites the US capitulation to the British position that reveals a tendency to lean toward the Western European allies when it came to the idea of international involvement in colonial questions. The chapter discusses the First General Assembly's handling of the nontrust dependent territories, including its initial steps beyond the narrow confines of the Charter. It looks at the proponents of a real UN role in the nontrust dependent territories achieved in 1946 that were a long way from true international accountability.

Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum: Kepedulian Dan Kerjasama Gerejawi Untuk Tanah Misi Dan Di Tanah Misi

The concern to the situation and condition to all other members of the Church and the collaboration for the welfare of the entire Church is the expression of communio (communion) which is the character of Christ Church. The arise of Church in the mission land and its development which like the mustard seed is the fruit of the concern and collaboration of the missionaries showed by the community and Church which have been founded along the history. Considering Church resources are always limited, every form of across continents concern and collaboration should be done effectively. In the process of the evangelization in the mission land, these concern and collaboration encounter various forms of initiatives; starting from the simple, spontaneous, sporadic and individual to the consistent, coordinated organizations. These concern and collaboration often find frictions, conflicts of interest, impartialities, and injustice; especially concerning the implementation of the power of jurisdiction in the mission land and the submission to the superiority of the mission leaders. The negative excesses are seen and observed objectively and corrected to attain the more effective concerns and collaboration for the sake of the development of the mission work. The apostolic see is the central organ has explored and successfully founded an effective and sustainable missionary collaboration system, from the commissio to the mandate system. Nowadays, the missionary concern and collaboration across particular churches have not been centralized, but assigned to each local communities and particular Churches, to develop mutual collaboration according to the mutual need and projects through the written agreement to mutual minister

Empires of Antiquities

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.

Proto-Refugees? Palestinian Arabs and the Concept of Statelessness before 1948

The Palestine mandate was built around the assumption that the League of Nations and the British mandatory government would preside over a gradual demographic and political transformation there, creating a European Jewish settler majority to replace the Palestinian Arab one and allowing for the eventual emergence of a Jewish nation-state. This process required a corresponding de-nationalisation of the incumbent Arab population – a project that formally began with the language of the mandate and continued through the mechanisms of governance set by the British mandate state and the League of Nations throughout the mandate period. Through new legal, economic and political mechanisms, the mandate system coalesced around a project of producing Palestinian Arab statelessness that made notable use of a simultaneously emerging language of refugeedom elsewhere in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This paper explores the use of refugee-related discourse and institutions to produce this deliberate de-nationalisation of Palestinian Arabs during the mandate period, arguing that the League of Nations put into place conditions and categories of statelessness for Palestinians that set them up as ‘proto-refugees’ long before the physical expulsions of 1948 and set the stage for an international acceptance of their refugee status as a long-established and essentially permanent condition.

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

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 British Mandate of Palestine and International Law

The establishment of Great Britain’s mandate over Palestine generated complex issues of international law. The mandate system was devised at the Paris Peace Conference with little prior analysis that might have given a clear answer as to its meaning. Complicating any analysis was the fact that three varieties of mandate were established, as Classes A, B, and C, with differing roles for the mandatory power. The Palestine Mandate was a Class A mandate, meaning a more robust status than that provided for Class B or C territories. Even within Class A differences existed. The three Class A mandates were Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, and Palestine. Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Syria each had a local administration with the mandatory power in an advisory capacity, whereas in Palestine the administration consisted of British personnel. The mandate system was criticized at the time as a continuation of colonial rule in a new guise. Feeding this criticism was the fact that in Great Britain’s governance structure, the Palestine Administration fell under the supervision of the Secretary for the Colonies. At the same time, Great Britain was subject to oversight by the League of Nations, through its Permanent Mandates Commission, and was enjoined to work toward relinquishing its role. Great Britain’s mandate over Palestine was further complicated by the fact that it involved a further injunction, namely, to foster a “Jewish national home” there. A notion of self-determination of peoples was becoming acknowledged at this period, and it was unclear how the concept of a “Jewish national home” might impact the population of Palestine, which was overwhelmingly Arab. Among international law writers of the 1920s, the mandate system generated a veritable cottage industry of scholarship, as they strained to fit it into existing categories of territorial status. Virtually every major international law analyst of the era expressed an opinion, with a number of them writing substantial volumes on the mandate system in general, or on Great Britain’s Palestine Mandate in particular. A technical note: The name “Henri Rolin” can be a source of confusion, as two Belgian scholars by this name wrote about the mandates in the interwar period. The dates of the elder Rolin are 1874–1946. The dates of the younger Rolin are 1891–1973. In the entries, each Rolin is identified by his dates.

Picking Battles

Race is one of the more ubiquitous, yet least explored, shifts in twentieth-century international law. From law that was founded in key areas and concepts on racial distinctions, international law quickly came to denounce various manifestations of race theories and racial discrimination. The establishment of the UN reflected a racialized understanding of the international society assumptions of the League of Nations mandate system. The 1948 Universal Declaration addressed entitlement to human rights without distinction of race, yet the Genocide Convention extended protection to racial (identity of) minority groups. In South Africa, race policies provided both the impetus and multiple occasions for formulating claims about a new, de-racialized international law from 1946 onwards. At these struggles against apartheid, binary political confrontations could take form as competing visions of international law, both old and new. This chapter charts the sites of contestation over apartheid and its effects on international law.