South West Africa: A Study in the “Sacred Trust” Thesis

Extract

The mandate system may be toothless but it is not bootless.

--Parker T. Moon (Imperialism and World Politics)

Students of comparative politics and international relations generally admit that one of the more outstanding political developments of the post-World War II era has been what Hans J. Morgenthau calls “the Colonial Revolution”--the granting of independence to colonial territories and dependencies in Asia and Africa. “What seemed to be almost inconceivable at the end of the Second World War,” Morgenthau comments, “has become an accomplished fact only twenty years later” (1967, p. 344). To Morgenthau this colonial revolution “is in its essence a triumph of the moral ideas of the West…carried forward under under the banner of two moral principles: national self-determination and social justice.” Organski (1968), on the other hand, sees the attainment of independence by these colonies as part of an inevitable historical movement, not necessarily owing to ideas as such: “…colonialism sows the seeds of its own destruction. No sooner is a colony conquered than its population begins to move, slowly and imperceptibly at first, then quickly and noticeably, toward political independence” (p. 234). F. H. Hinsley (1967) sees the declining strategic importance of these colonies as a partial reason for the colonial revolution. Arguing in this vein, he contends that the “withdrawal [of an imperial power] from territory since the second World War has been due…to the growing recognition that it is not vital to hold it from the strategical point of view and not feasible to hold it in the face of metropolitan opinion” (p. 359).