The 54th. The League's and Mandates Commission's Contra-Fallacy

Seven years after the stillborn League of Nations, the Entente authors of the Versailles diktat stage a fallacy: the accession of the Weimar Republic. The 48 Member States, including Ireland, and a handful of Britain's colonies welcomed a nation that was originally excluded on account of a colonial competitors' argument: incapable of ruling the colonised people decently. Formally, Germany's membership means the end of its exclusivity. Welcome with the club!

Introduction

In March 2021, Aufa100 published a centenary essay on a German woman's fascinating letter to the League of Nations, Geneva. Its 2022 media debut was based on this entry with the new organisation that virtually carried out the dictated Treaty of Versailles. A few years after the ignored and cold-heartedly archived letter, the collectively demonised German Reich was allowed to accede to the British-led League. Did this apparent way out of Weimar's isolation bring about substantial normalisation?

At the time of the Armistice's extension in the second week of December 1918, Woodrow Wilson was the first United States President to set foot in Europe. The peace conference was expected to begin any time soon. While a terribly damaged France welcomed the Democrat leader, postwar elections occupied the British. To the conference's detriment, these were nationally prioritised. Alternately, this caused the American, who left Paris for the political hotspot of London, not only to spend the holidays abroad, but also to prepare for a much longer absence from home than expected. Weeks went by. When the ceasefire was extended once more, Wilson had spent a full month in the Entente capitals. After the conference was finally opened in the third week of January 1919, the exposure to Britain's and its colonists' power play would cause him to renege on promises to a postwar Germany as well as the global community, which meant letting go of quintessential stipulations of his Fourteen Points. However, the termination of hostilities in the autumn of 1918 was brokered on account of these points.

In this article, the League, as the American's innovative contents of the fourteen points, is focused on. His personal concern for the founding of an international organisation surpassed everything else. How come that the peace terms preclude a genesis in alignment with Wilson's concept?

The 54th Member State

In 1925, the leading states of the Versailles order decided to organise a follow-up conference. This time, Germany was allowed to convene with them, which meant a formal end to the country's exclusion.(1)  At the Locarno Conference, it was agreed that Germany would be allowed to acquire League membership. Seven years after Germany's exclusion from both the conference and the forty-plus member-state (1920) organisation, the no longer sovereign country's League membership was arranged for on 8 September 1926. In historiography, the positive effect of this enlargement in terms of the postwar order's stabilisation has been overrated for decades. In theory, this apparent breakthrough of Germany's isolation could have normalised the relations and curtailed rampant revisionism with large parts of the electorate. Why did the realities on the ground look essentially different?

Be it from today's perspective or walking in a Weimar contemporary's shoes, the events from Paris, 1919, need to be evaluated as key, that is, key for the 1926 or 1931 extrapolations.(2)  The thirty signatories of the Treaty and Bund von Versailles formulated two accusations against Germany. The final one became known as the war guilt, stipulating that this country was to be held solely responsible for the war. As a consequence, it had to repair the damages of all parties and pay a huge amount of indemnities, which would not be fixed until a London conference in the spring of 1921. Less known is that the formulation of colonial guilt paved the way for this all-encompassing verdict. In contrast to the war guilt formulated in the final week (article 231), none of the treaty articles referred verbatim to the wintertime's guilt clause. When Wilson and Lloyd George sailed home for a one-month break, in February–March 1919, Germany's colonial empire was confiscated and partitioned among four allied nations and three of Britain's colonies. In an even bolder violation of the ceasefire blueprint's fifth point, Portugal was allowed to annex part of formerly German East Africa. Formally, Britain, its colonial governments, France, Belgium and Japan were to govern the spoils on behalf of the new organisation. The public, respectively the excluded Germans, would not be notified before early May. In contrast, there was no delay in the war guilt clause going global.

The 2026 Vice Versa Versailles anthology, edited by this author, contains an in-depth study on the question of why Germany's membership in the League, in other words, its exclusion from the civilising mission, was precluded on the argument of inhumane treatment of the colonised. It would go beyond the framework of this article to repeat this story of the western powers, from now on, aka the benign colonists and imperialists. Germany, though looking back on a history of no more than a single one generation of pioneers overseas, was deemed unfit.(3)

As a consequence of the Treaty and League, bad colonialism was delineated and, consequently, good imperialism was virtually declared a category of international law. Obviously, it was designed by Britain's leadership of both the Entente and League as well as its colonial proxies at the Paris venue. The novel organisation would be led by Eric Drummond. This British Secretary-General served for as long as the Weimar Republic existed. As alleged by Britain and the League, the argument against the sole generation of German colonists was based on the voice of the colonised, a feature as novel as the foundation of an international body. Obviously, Germany's exclusion from the civilising mission, which may be seen as high imperialism's stage of colonialism, had a vast impact on the prospects for a lasting peace.

Of course, the Locarno and Geneva diplomacy (1925–1926) may be seen as concrete results of the Verständigungspolitik, the profoundly revisionist idea of accommodation with the former wartime enemies. Generations of historians rolled it forward. However, what arguments may be put forward in opposition to the thesis of Germany's return to an equal status in the international system?(4)

1. Germany remained partially occupied and under the tutelage of Paris and London. The restoration of sovereignty remained out of reach.(5)
2. The Treaty of Locarno caused the German Reich's government to resign. Having been less than a year in charge, the instability of the previous years was protracted. Thus, when any historian sees stabilisation here, the critique of self-delusion may be applied.(6)
3. Neither the Treaty of Versailles's appropriate provisions nor the underlying arguments were revoked. Thus, the diktat's retention was confirmed.(7)  It would have been different if the Treaty had been modified in alignment with the League's enlargement. Even when Germany's membership of the League was accompanied by the allowance of a seat in the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), promises, such as the allowance of a mandate (East Africa?), would appear to be hollow.(8)  The British remained intransigent. German historian in London Fabian Krautwald is completely right in his recent statement: 'For the next two decades, the colonial guilt lie stood at the centre of Weimar and Nazi revisionism.'(9)
   
4. As expected, when the new member came to hold up a mirror within the PMC, the good and partially internationalised imperialists knew no better than to stick to their 1919 positions of morality.(10)
5. It would not have been for long that the former point's mirror bothered Britain. In contrast to the votes of either France or the new member in Geneva, their multiple vote in the League's assembly even outweighed a possible coalition of continental member states.(11)  Both Germany's and the international community's 1926 gain appeared a fallacy.

Tendency of thirty-plus bodies versus a continental outcast

A readership with less than substantial knowledge of this history may be inspired by reflections to overtly debated facts of the present post-Cold War order. Less than a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the signing of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990), the question of alarming similarities with Weimar/Versailles could be raised. In defiance of this Charter and the appropriate agreements on the reunification of Germany, the United States and their North Atlantic Treaty Organisation continued the logic of the Cold War by expanding this retained alliance eastward. As of the Central European expansion in 1999, round after round at the beginning of the new century could not but be interpreted by the other party as closing in on its western borders. To meet this challenge to the Russians and the 1990 peace agreements, the NATO-Russia Founding Act, creating a Permanent Joint Council in 1997, was replaced by the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) some five years later on.(12)  It is important to realise that the new century's counterpoint to Russia's growing isolation occurred against the backdrop of cooperation in the war on terror following 9/11. As was analysed in Washington's Weimar an der Wolga, the Russian-American cooperation out of Europe came to obscure the primacy of the immature peace within the transatlantic-Eurasian space as well as the West's military challenges to it.

Particularly from a Russian perspective, the NRC did not at all bring what it promised to be. When the war on terror ended, this council remained at best a paper tiger. Not basically different to the League of 1919, it was consigned to oblivion. Like the Anglo-Saxon imperialists stuck to their course a hundred years ago, the Russian democrats, liberals and others are collectively challenged by their Anglo-American successors from the end of the age of the World Wars.(13)

Obviously, this could have developed in a much more favourable way.(14)  Long-time interests of all parties may well have been served with a substantially reformed Atlantic Alliance, one that was ready to face the challenges of the 21st century together with a possibly less liberal or democratic Russia. Five years into Ukraine's civil war, French President Emmanuel Macron observed NATO's brain death (2019). Another five years following Russia's 2022 escalation, the nearly eighty-year-old organisation seems to be alive and kicking. In the end, the alarm bells may be kept ringing ubiquitously. This does not require more than a hopefully open-ended parallel between the 1926 and 2026 events and developments.(15)

Conclusion

Like communicating vessels, more internationalism for the severely punished Germany of the 1920s would mean, at least in theory, that the motivational grounds for revanchists, violent revisionists and disappointed nationalists would crumble. The above-mentioned points revealed why it went the other way. Within a League at 54, Great Britain was assured that its overwhelming power remained in place. Just like France, the new member was confronted with the League leader's six-time stronger vote. Whether or not radicals, Germany's nationalists found a novel argument in the hollow meaning of a League, which particularly the British and their colonial delegates in Paris and Versailles had failed to embrace from the beginning.(16)  As a matter of fact, the stillborn construct reached the point of absurdity. While the new member became a seat in the Mandates Commission, the colonised people had reason to believe that they were supervised by a state that was essentially qualified as inferior.

 Over the years to follow, it proved once more that the basically British arguments and motivations for the colonial settlement had a totalitarian character. In contrast to the issue of reparations or the status of bordering territories, this settlement was irreversible. This meant for Germany that an escape into unorthodox ways of revisionism seemed to appear as the ultimate Flucht nach vorne.

At this point, a historiographical challenge and desideratum is being revealed. Particularly bottom-up views may broaden our horizon.

Footnotes

1.  In contrast, the British-led League of Nation welcomed the newborn republic of Austria in 1920, at the time of a postwar round of accession with neutral countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands.

2.  Tobias Straumann, 1931. Die Finanzkrise und Hitlers Aufstieg, Darmstadt 2020, p. 45.

3.  Recall for a moment the obvious crimes of the Dutch or the English in their first decades of conquering the world, not to mention the later ones.

4.  The same dynamics between East and West may be observed at the national level of Germany: Thomas Fasbender, Die Causa Professor Meyen, Ostdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 17–23 April 2026. '(…) nicht nur die Teilung ohne Mauer und Stacheldraht fortbesteht, sondern dass der Westen sich mit den ostdeutschen den Anspruch einverleibt hat, diesen ihr Selbstverständnis vorzugeben.'

5.  In the German government's reply to the outcome of the Locarno Conference, it is telling that she failed to make the switch from linguistically negative comments to positive ones. 'Die deutsche Delegation hat von vornherein keinen Zweifel darüber gelassen, dass eine Wiederholung des Versailler Diktats nicht in Frage kommen kann. (…) Deutsche Regierung stehe auf dem Standpunkt, dass die Verhandlungen von Locarno nicht als eine nochmalige, rechtlich bindende Anerkennung des Versailler Vertrages ausgelegt werden könnten.' See Auf den Tag genau, Das Nein der DNVP zu Locarno, podcast, 26 October 2025, citing Die Altonaer Nachrichten, 26 October 1925, https://podcast8c6050.podigee.io/1989-neue-episode; Tobias Straumann, 1931, p. 36.

6.  In other words, why did neither Locarno not its promise of Germany's international emancipation (1926) equal a 'fundamental security arrangement that stabilised Europe in the post-war period until Hitler seized power'? Sacha Zala, The 100 Years of the Locarno Conference, Dodis, https://www.dodis.ch/en/100-years-locarno-conference.

7.  Auf den Tag genau, Das Nein der DNVP, 26 October 1925.

8.  'Mit dem Eintritt Deutschlands in den Völkerbund bestehe auch für uns das moralische Recht auf die Verleihung von Kolonialmandaten. Auch diese Tatsache wurde in Locarno der deutschen Delegation bestätigt. (…) Der Siegestaumel von Versailles sei verrauscht. Heute müssten die Dinge mit anderen Augen angesehen werden.' Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, Berlin radio speech (original lost), 3 November 1925, cited in: Altonaer Nachrichten, 4 November 1925. Source: Auf den Tag genau, podcast, 4 November 2025.

9.  Fabian Krautwald, The Comforts of Provincialism: The History and Future of Colonial Memory in Germany, in: New German Critique 157, 53, 1 (2026), pp. 179–202, here p. 189, https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-12158854.

10. Clarence Streit, Dr. Kastl Resign from League Body; Reich Member of Mandates Commission Will Take Up Duties in Berlin, New York Times, 9 January 1930.

11. Thomas Gidney, An International Anomaly. Colonial Accession to the League of Nations, Cambridge 2025, p. 5, 82, 102, 107–108, 110–111, 131 and 161, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009584432.

12. Glenn Diesen, interview with General Harald Kujat: NATO's Attempt to Defeat Russia Destroys Ukraine, 6 February 2026.

13. Straumann, 1931, p. 45 and 122–123

14. Interview with Godert de Vos van Steenwijk, Huygens Instituut, 7 June 2022, Min. 01:00.10.

15. In 1939, the comedy film Kitty und die Weltkonferenz was released in Germany. The script may be read as a playful abstract of this article. At the time, Germany's League membership was terminated years ago (1933).

16. Hans Ulricht Gumbrecht, 1926, p. 274, '(…) so viele Feinde auf der Welt, (…) Ein Hohngelächter der Hölle würde Antwort auf diese internationale Blamage der Demokratie sein’, 8 Uhr-Abendblatt, 15 March 1926.