This thesis traces the mandate concept as embodied in Art. 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations as an intrinsic feature of the British Imperial mind. Therefore the purview of our study is British imperial thinking and policy making during and after the First World War. It was in respect to Iraq that the mandate concept, as a distinct policy, was formulated for the first time by Mark Sykes. The mandate concept sprang from that part of British Imperial thought which was deeply affected by official apprehension about the Empire's position in the Middle East. This thesis is proved in the following exegesis of the analytical framework of our thesis. Chapter I describes contemporary reactions and thinking on new models of peace order. We have concentrated mainly on Arnold Toynbee's and Leonard Woolf's thinking. Both crystallize the contemporary argumentation in an important way. While they are placed under the sub-title, Premises of Scientific Peace, others such as Amery are for their imperial senti- ments discussed under the second sub-title: Imperial Sentiment and its Impact on Planning for a New World Order. The two chapters reveal the inner conditions which allowed the birth of the mandate compromise. Many of the ingredients of the mandate concept stemmed from the doctrines of democracy. How-ever when these penetrated the East the Arab response to them was bound to bring about conflict with British imperial interests. Yet in its turn, the Empire's reaction and policy was not of one kind. It was marked with the three-cornered antagonism between the Government of India, the Arab Bureau at Cairo and Whitehall. The pivot of this study of British war-time policy is the chapter called: The British Glimpse of a Middle East Empire. Interestingly, the above antagonism gave rise to ideas of a British Middle Eastern Empire. There course and fate was implicit in the frequent committee chages, departmental struggle against rule by committee and in debates on immediate issues of policy. We regard their fate and their impact on the decision-making structure in Whitehall as more indicative of the state of the British will to rule in the East than such paper-designs as the MacMahon-Hussein correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement or the De Bunsen Committee Report. From this angle our chapter is meant to serve as a corrective to the weight of those paper-designs; further it puts the final creation of the Middle East Department in its right imperial perspective. The sectionhas been provided with what one may call a "trailer". Called, Some Features of the Mesopotamian Campaign, it gives the story of how the Admiralty pushed through its policy of physical control over the oil-bearing regions of Iraq. It was their policy which led to the capture of Mosul. The study of the war-time policy concludes with the section entitled: Mark Sykes and the Origin of the Iraq Mandate. This chapter is meant to be a synopsis of the contrapuntal studies of the Matrix of the Mandate Idea, on the one hand, and, on the other, the British Glimpse of a Middle East Empire. This syno-psis is amply contained in Mark Sykes's hitherto unknown memorandum of January 1918, and in his original way of looking at international affairs. Prompted by this find we have scrutinized Sykes's functioning in the policy making of the Lloyd George Cabinet. His thought and personality are separated out under the three topics of Sykes as (1) the campaigner and partisan official, (2) the admonisher and conscience of the age, (3) the nostalgic and reflective mind. The description of his failure to achieve his policy at the end of the war foreshadows the last chapter of this first part of the thesis. Entitled, The "A" mandate before the Supreme Council, this chapter investigates features which point to conflicting views as to the advisability of rendering the mandate concept more strictly. This chapter puts Art.22 of the Covenant in its right perspective as a tentative and somewhat incomplete compromise principle in the new international law. By its resultant vagueness the concept afforded considerable discretion to imperialist policy. The checks which were supposed to mitigate such a policy are examined in the concluding chapter VIII, entitled: Iraq before the League of Nations. The concept has emerged from the first part of our thesis as Janus-faced, combining an extremely flexible political instrument for the expansion of imperial control with an evolutionary political doctrine of "democratic control". In contrast, internationally, the mandate was regarded by League champoins as a check on the imperialistic ambitions of the mandatory. Of these three aspects the evolutionary principle was the new colonial dress. The studyof the application of the mandate starts with a detailed analysis of: The Political Role of the Oil-bearing Regions of Iraq. The oil-issue is followed as it ran like a red line through Iraq's early political history up to 1926. The first section of the ensuing chapter, Towards the Cairo-Conference, deals with what we call the "import article" of the colonial idea in the Middle East as it was designed and propagated advertisement-like for consumption in Britain by such on the spot experts as Gertrude Bell. The remaining sections deal, again contrapuntally, with public opinion and the taxpayer rationale in Britain and the final synthesis of the Cairo-policy. The chapter on the Cairo-Conference, is the opening movement for the subsequent constitutional development of Iraq, in the course of which Britain , set by set, gears the expansion of the governmental infra-structure to the achievement of her imperialistic aims of control. As in the previous chapter the part entitled, The British Gambits in the Constitutional Development of Iraq, gives much room to the role played by personalities. These, because of their more discernible and distinct capacities and idiosyncracies became what one may call "substitutes" for the far less calculable social forces, economic conditions and political circumstances in turmoil. There follows, in the chapter, The Shaping of Iraqis External Relations, a desciption of some features of Iraqis integration into the contemporary international context. The concluding chapter, euphemistically entitled, Iraq before the League of Nations, endeavours to define the three-cornered relationship between Britain, Iraq and the League within the context of immediate practice rather than of the myth which afterthought has woven around it.

This dissertation asserts the British primacy in the deliberations of the League of Nations Council between the two world wars of the twentieth century. It maintains that it was British imperial policy rather than any other consideration that ultimately carried the day in these deliberations. Given, as examples of this paramountcy, are the discussions around the finalization of the borders of the new republic of Turkey, which was created following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. These discussions focused on three areas, the Mosul Vilayet or the Turco-Iraqi frontier, the Maritza Delta, or the Turco-Greek frontier, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta or the Turco-Syrian frontier.

Based on the case study of the mediation of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute from 1920 to 1923, this dissertation explores the League of Nations' emergence as an agency of modern territorial and ethnic conflict resolution. It argues that in many respects, this organization departed from prewar traditional diplomacy to establish a new, broader concept of security. At first the league tried simply to contain the Polish-Lithuanian conflict by appointing a Military Commission to assist these nations in fixing a final border. But the occupation of Vilna by Polish troops in October 1920 exacerbated Polish-Lithuanian relations, turning the initial border dispute into an ideological conflict over the ethnically mixed region of Vilna, claimed by the Poles on ethnic grounds while the Lithuanians considered it the historical capital of the modern Lithuanian state. The occupation spurred the league to greater involvement via administration of a plebiscite to decide the fate of the disputed territories. When this strategy failed, Geneva resorted to negotiating the so-called Hymans Plan, which aimed to create a Lithuanian federal state and establish political and economic cooperation between Poland and Lithuania. This analysis of the league's mediation of this dispute walks the reader through the league's organization of the first international peacekeeping operation, its handling of the challenges of open diplomacy, and its efforts to fulfill its ambitious mandate not just to prevent war but also to uproot its socioeconomic and ethnic causes. The Hymans Plan reflected this ambition as well as commitment to reconciling the tenets of balance of power and territorial status quo with the principle of self-determination and minorities' protection when drawing new boundaries and creating new states.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire began to crumble due to external wars and internal rebellions dating from about 1908. Due to European influence at the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire lost much of its territory in 1919, including Palestine and Syria, comprised of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Iraq. The European powers incited rebellion among the Middle Eastern peoples to the end of aiding their cause in the portions of the war fought in the Middle East. In return, they promised the Arabs independent nations; in the Treaty of Versailles, the regions were indeed freed from Ottoman rule. The European Allies, however, considered it their responsibility to guide these fledgling independent states; aided by the conclusions of the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, as well as preexisting assumptions of the inadequacies of the newly-formed nations to effectively self-rule, the League of Nations decided to create a mandatory system, dividing the regions between Britain and France. Syria and Lebanon fell under French control, and despite the outward appearance of good intentions on the part of the French and British, they were quite imperious in their role as mandatory powers. The Europeans, under the guidance of Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France, carved the region into nations that did little to reflect the ethnic and cultural divisions of the region. Dissenters from the Arab world were quickly dealt with, as in the case of Faysal, who argued for the unity and independence of Syria and Lebanon; he eventually lost and was forced to leave Syria, but became the first king of Iraq under British mandate. Popular opinion in Europe tended towards the idea of Arab nations being less civilized, and many nations were more concerned with the status of Germany than with developing an unprejudiced policy towards the Arab nations. Thus those in control of the mandate quickly fell back on old assumptions and past experiences with the region. In this way, inequalities developed that would prove to have a profound impact on regional politics.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 102 p. Includes bibliographical references.

In this study the guidelines of the League of Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe are investigated in relation to Swedish national curricula, teachers’ perceptions of and students’ work in history, from 1927 to 2002. Inspired by John I Goodlad’s notions of curricula and implementation, the formulation of history is studied. The ideological curricula are analyzed via the international guidelines directed to Swedish history teaching. The formal curricula are examined in national guidelines and also how history is formulated in final examinations and inspectors’ reports. The perceived curricula are studied in teachers’ debates and interviews with experienced teachers. The experiential curricula are examined through looking at students’ choices of topics in final exams, 1,680 titles of students’ individual projects in history and an in-depth analysis of 145 individual projects written between 1969 and 2002. The study shows that the means and goals of history education have been formulated in both different and similar ways within and between curricular levels.  On all the curricular levels studied the history subject has become more internationally oriented. After World War II national history landed in the background and the world history, favored by UNESCO, became dominant in Sweden from the 1950s onwards. Despite the fact that the Council of Europe’s Euro-centrism became more prominent in the 1994 syllabus in history, students still preferred world history over European history. International and national guidelines also stressed the value of paying heed to marginalized groups, local cultural heritage and contemporary history.  These orientations were also represented in the teachers’ views of history teaching and in the students’ work in history. The results of the study suggest that the implementation of the international guidelines were more than a top-down process. During the entire period studied, guidelines have been formulated and transacted, but also reinterpreted and in some cases, ignored. Teachers and students seem to have been co-creators in the transformation of history education. History as a subject, according to the study, encompassed an ever expanding geographical area and more and more perspectives. Not least on the student level, the subject was formulated and dealt with in manifold ways, often oriented towards contemporary world history. Students’ history had great similarities with the international notion of history education in the service of mankind. Students expressed a rejection of war, an understanding of minorities and a wish to safeguard the local cultural heritage. Even if there were exceptions, students’ history appears to have been influenced by international understanding during a century filled with conflicts. / History Beyond Borders: The International History Textbook Revision, 1919–2009

The following paper explores the rise of global biopolitics by focusing on the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) as pivot points around which an international system transitioned into a global system. The central thesis of the paper is that the LNHO served as the first true site of deployment for global discourses on health and hygiene, not as recent scholarship has suggested, the WHO. The purpose of the paper, however, is to provide an overview of the larger transformation of public health in the twentieth century, beginning with the proliferation of nineteenth-­‐century international health organizations and culminating in the WHO. Central to this argument is the belief that population control is the ultimate end of the modern state, firmly placing discourses on health and hygiene at the nexus of modern politics. At its heart, this paper is about the nature of the modern state in relation to an increasingly global world.

In this study the guidelines of the League of Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe are investigated in relation to Swedish national curricula, teachers’ perceptions of and students’ work in history, from 1927 to 2002. Inspired by John I Goodlad’s notions of curricula and implementation, the formulation of history is studied. The ideological curricula are analyzed via the international guidelines directed to Swedish history teaching. The formal curricula are examined in national guidelines and also how history is formulated in final examinations and inspectors’ reports. The perceived curricula are studied in teachers’ debates and interviews with experienced teachers. The experiential curricula are examined through looking at students’ choices of topics in final exams, 1,680 titles of students’ individual projects in history and an in-depth analysis of 145 individual projects written between 1969 and 2002. The study shows that the means and goals of history education have been formulated in both different and similar ways within and between curricular levels.  On all the curricular levels studied the history subject has become more internationally oriented. After World War II national history landed in the background and the world history, favored by UNESCO, became dominant in Sweden from the 1950s onwards. Despite the fact that the Council of Europe’s Euro-centrism became more prominent in the 1994 syllabus in history, students still preferred world history over European history. International and national guidelines also stressed the value of paying heed to marginalized groups, local cultural heritage and contemporary history.  These orientations were also represented in the teachers’ views of history teaching and in the students’ work in history. The results of the study suggest that the implementation of the international guidelines were more than a top-down process. During the entire period studied, guidelines have been formulated and transacted, but also reinterpreted and in some cases, ignored. Teachers and students seem to have been co-creators in the transformation of history education. History as a subject, according to the study, encompassed an ever expanding geographical area and more and more perspectives. Not least on the student level, the subject was formulated and dealt with in manifold ways, often oriented towards contemporary world history. Students’ history had great similarities with the international notion of history education in the service of mankind. Students expressed a rejection of war, an understanding of minorities and a wish to safeguard the local cultural heritage. Even if there were exceptions, students’ history appears to have been influenced by international understanding during a century filled with conflicts. / History Beyond Borders: The International History Textbook Revision, 1919–2009

This thesis has explored the failure of Greece to achieve its one-hundred-year irrendentist struggle as a result of the nationalist movement in Turkey, and discusses Turkish efforts to reverse the dictate (Treaty of Sevres) of the Great Powers after the First World War.

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