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ABSTRACT
This article analyses the concept of international administration by a multilateral organization through the lens of the effective authority of example missions, arguing that the United Nations Interim Administration of Kosovo (UNMIK) and the United Nations Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET) are very specific and distinct attempts at statebuilding. The article’s main argument is that the two most-cited cases in the interwar years – the Saar Territory and the Free City of Danzig, as well as the international administration of West New Guinea by the United Nation (UN) – while presenting interesting parallels with and providing useful insights into the challenges faced by the contemporary international administrations of Kosovo and Timor-Leste, are in fact drastically different endeavours in terms of the effective authority exerted on the ground. The article builds on this special section’s contribution on authority building, analysing the five international administrations through the prism of claimed, recognized, and exercised authority.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the personnel at the League of Nations Archives in Geneva for their support in conducting historical research for this article. I would also like to thank the guest editors of the special section as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Nicolas Lemay-Hébert is a senior lecturer in the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the political economy of international interventions, peace-building and the local narratives of resistance to international interventions, and the political sociology of statebuilding. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and the Routledge Series in Intervention and Statebuilding. His most recent book is Hybridity: Law, Culture, and Development (co-edited with R. Freedman; Routledge, 2017).
Notes
1 Interview with a DPKO official, New York, 4 October 2007.
2 In the recent past recurring calls for Haiti have been noted (especially post-earthquake, see Lemay-Hébert Citation2014, 199), as well as for South Sudan (Crocker Citation2016) and Syria (Dobbins, Gordon, and Martini Citation2015).
3 Similarly, for Gregory Fox, the origins of the first attempts at international administrations lay in the strategic concerns of dominant states (Citation2008, 19).
4 The same could be said about the definitions of international administrations which include a focus on the ‘transitional’ aspect of the missions (see for instance Zaum, Citation2017).
5 The commission was constituted of five members appointed by the Council of the League. According to the treaty, the commission must include a member who is by birth a French citizen, a member who is a native of the territory and not a French citizen, and three members belonging to three countries other than France and Germany.
6 Interestingly enough, Stephens refused to be named the ‘Canadian member’, seeing himself as a League of Nations official. The pro-French bias of commission members was also confirmed by the Secretary-General of the League of Nations during the debates around the nomination of the next president of the commission, noting that no one would ‘be happy to see Mr. Vezensky [Czechoslovak member], Mr. Lambert [Belgian member], to say nothing of Mr. Morize [French member], as President’ (League of Nations Citation1927b). All translations are my own.
7 In the word of a Saarlander, ‘the influence of the French upon the decisions of the Commission has been all-powerful ever since it has been in existence. Either its chairman was French or else the policy of France was seconded by the representatives of countries allied to France’ (Hellwig Citation1934, 38).
8 Interestingly enough, André Tardieu, Charles Haskins and Sir James Headlam-Morley – who constituted the special committee to which were referred the problems of Alsace-Lorraine and the Saar Valley, and by whom ultimately the chapters of the Versailles Treaty on the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine were unanimously reported to the Council of Four (Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson) – agreed on an earlier proposal, granting France the right to ‘administer the territory under a mandate from the League of Nations’ (Osborne Citation1923, 60). Headlam-Morley even considered it as ‘very well devised and one that might be supported’ (1972b, 60). The proposal was revised afterwards to give a greater role to the Governing Commission.
9 As G. Stephens, the Canadian Chairman of the Commission, said in his resignation letter, he had to balance ‘the rights of the Saar people and … the great interests conferred upon France by the Treaty terms’ (League of Nations Citation1927a).