Mandates and Trusteeships - United nations trusteeships



The United States entered the era following World War II with the same idea and again faced opposition from its allies. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted in the Atlantic Charter to reestablish the framework for bringing the colonial peoples of the world to free government. The ramifications of this were not lost on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who at one point, in a fit of pique, told Roosevelt that he did not become his majesty's first minister in order to preside over the disintegration of the British Empire. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, on the other hand, was ready with his own interpretation of what free government meant; it included only the right to be a communist state, insofar as the Soviet Union had the military power to ensure such determination of national sovereignty.

President Roosevelt, as a follower of President Wilson's view of dependent peoples, spoke frequently to the issue of independent states in his foreign policy pronouncements of the 1930s. He attempted to promote a new relationship away from the orientation of his predecessors in his Good Neighbor policy in Latin America. His focus was on the preservation and expansion of democracy, and, in the vein of Wilson's Fourteen Points, he set forth war aims in the Atlantic Charter and his Four Freedoms speech. In the former, he persuaded his allies to agree to the principle of self-determination, and in the latter, he attempted to promote freedom of speech, religion, and from fear and want, which he related to his Atlantic Charter objectives. He irritated Churchill by his inclination to encourage the Indians by trying to contact Gandhi while the Indian leader was incarcerated and tried to establish rapport with such leaders in the Middle East as King Saud of Arabia. Also, he tried to convince the French and British to withdraw from their colonial holdings in the Far East.

The concept of trusteeship appeared first in discussions of the Big Three at Yalta in 1945 but was also discussed in general form in the Department of State during the war. It was agreed at Yalta that trusts would be set up under United Nations auspices, with decisions being made on the general procedure by the five powers having permanent seats on the Security Council. (Trusts were substituted for mandates in order not to have any carryover from the moribund League of Nations and because they were to have a broader definition.) Trusteeships would apply only to territories still under mandate in 1939, areas detached from the defeated enemies, or territories voluntarily placed under the system, with the specific geographic areas to be determined later.

John Foster Dulles represented the United States on the Fourth Committee at the twenty-seventh plenary meeting of the United Nations in 1945, which was charged with developing the trusteeship system. Dulles followed Wilson in his challenge to the colonial system, proclaiming that the committee was determined to assume the responsibility for boldly addressing the whole colonial problem, which involved hundreds of millions of people, not just the 15 million who might come under trusteeship. He presented a clarion call for the destruction of colonialism. The anticolonial thrust initiated by Dulles in the name of the committee became a part of the United Nations trusteeship system and continued over the next fifty-five years, implementing Wilson's dreams beyond his expectations and with results not imagined in his time. According to Alger Hiss, the State Department official who in 1948 would be accused of being part of a communist spy ring, there is considerable irony in the wholehearted support for the trusteeship system outlined by the United States at San Francisco. Hiss recalled that Churchill was skeptical of the operation and that Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius turned to Hiss and told him to explain it to Churchill. Hiss off the top of his head set forth the structure of the trusteeship system, and Churchill put his okay on it. Thus, Dulles adopted as gospel a plan put forth by Hiss, whom he later treated as a pariah. There emerged such a myriad of states in Africa, the Near East, and Asia, with differing national objectives and systems, as to boggle the minds of those who originated the mandate system and its objectives.

Chapter 4 of the report of the United Nations Preparatory Commission ordered the Fourth Committee to deal with trusteeships in the interest of the trust peoples. Accordingly, the committee outlined the rules and procedures, including creation of the Trusteeship Council. While this looked very good to the creators of the trust system, reservations appeared immediately, including objections from U.S. Army and Navy spokesmen, who urged outright annexation of the strategic Pacific islands taken from the Japanese. The president and the Department of State proposed a compromise based on the anticolonial position in Articles 82 and 83 of the charter. As primary sponsor of the trusteeships, the United States could scarcely reserve certain areas for annexation. Article 76 sets forth the provisions and restrictions applying to trustee powers and includes procedures leading to independence, representative government, and economic development. It was overridden at the San Francisco conference establishing the United Nations, however, by insertion of articles 82 and 83 of the charter. These articles provide that areas within trust territories might be set aside as "strategic areas" under the direct control of the trustee, which is answerable to the Security Council, where the veto power applies, instead of to the General Assembly, where it does not apply. In this fashion Micronesia—comprising the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana islands, but not the Gilbert, Nauru, and Ocean islands administered by Australia and the United Kingdom—became the strategic area of the Pacific under U.S. supervision.



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