mandate

mandate, an authorization granted by the League of Nations to a member nation to govern a former German or Turkish colony. The territory was called a mandated territory, or mandate.

Following the defeat of Germany and Ottoman Turkey in World War I, their Asian and African possessions, which were judged not yet ready to govern themselves, were distributed among the victorious Allied powers under the authority of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (itself an Allied creation). The mandate system was a compromise between the Allies’ wish to retain the former German and Turkish colonies and their pre-Armistice declaration (November 5, 1918) that annexation of territory was not their aim in the war. The mandates were divided into three groups on the basis of their location and their level of political and economic development and were then assigned to individual Allied victors (mandatory powers, or mandatories).

Class A mandates consisted of the former Turkish provinces of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. These territories were considered sufficiently advanced that their provisional independence was recognized, though they were still subject to Allied administrative control until they were fully able to stand alone. Iraq and Palestine (including modern Jordan and Israel) were assigned to Great Britain, while Turkish-ruled Syria and Lebanon went to France. All Class A mandates reached full independence by 1949.

Class B mandates consisted of the former German-ruled African colonies of Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and the Cameroons, and Ruanda-Urundi. The Allied powers were directly responsible for the administration of these mandates but were subject to certain controls intended to protect the rights of the mandates’ native peoples. Tanganyika (which is now part of Tanzania) was assigned to Britain, while most of the Cameroons and Togoland were assigned to France, and Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) went to Belgium.

Class C mandates consisted of various former German-held territories that mandatories subsequently administered as integral parts of their territory: South West Africa (now Namibia, assigned to South Africa), New Guinea (assigned to Australia), Western Samoa (now Samoa, assigned to New Zealand), the islands north of the Equator in the western Pacific (Japan), and Nauru (Australia, with Britain and New Zealand).

Theoretically, exercise of the mandates was supervised by the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission, but the commission had no real way to enforce its will on any of the mandatory powers. The mandate system was replaced by the UN trusteeship system in 1946.