After winning the war, the Allies tried to re-establish or increase their political and economic domination of their Asian and African colonies. Although fatally weakened, Western imperialism remained very much alive in 1918, partly because President Wilson was no revolutionary. At the Paris Peace Conference he compromised on colonial questions in order to achieve some of his European goals and create the League of Nations. Also, Allied statesmen and ordinary French and British citizens quite rightly believed that their colonial empires had contributed to their ultimate victory over the Central Powers. They would not give up such valuable possessions voluntarily. If pressed, Europeans said their administration was preparing colonial subjects for eventual self-rule, but only in the distant future.

The compromise at the Paris Peace Conference between Wilson’s vague, moralistic idealism and the European preoccupation with “good administration” was a system of League of Nations mandates over Germany’s former colonies and the old Ottoman Empire. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, which was part of the Treaty of Versailles, assigned territories “inhabited by peoples incapable of governing themselves” to various “developed nations.” “The well-being and development of such peoples” was declared “a sacred trust of civilization.” The Permanent Mandates Commission, whose members came from European countries with colonies, was created to oversee the developed nations’ fulfillment of their international responsibility. Thus the League elaborated a new principle — development toward the eventual goal of self-government — but left its implementation to the colonial powers themselves.

The mandates system demonstrated that Europe was determined to maintain its imperial power and influence. Bitterly disappointed patriots throughout Asia saw France, Great Britain, and other nations — industrialized Japan was the only Asian state to obtain mandates — as grabbing Germany’s colonies as spoils of war and extending the existing system of colonial rule in Muslim North Africa into the territories of the old Ottoman Empire. Yet Asian patriots did not give up. They preached national self-determination and struggled to build mass movements capable of achieving freedom and independence.

In this struggle Asian nationalists were encouraged by Soviet communism. After seizing power in 1917, Lenin declared that the Asian inhabitants of the new Soviet Union were complete equals of the Russians with a right to their own development. (In actuality this equality hardly existed, but the propaganda was effective nonetheless.) The Communists also denounced European and American imperialism and pledged to support revolutionary movements in colonial countries, even when they were primarily national independence movements led by middle-class intellectuals instead of by revolutionary workers. Foreign political and economic exploitation was the immediate enemy, they said, and socialist revolution could wait until Western imperialism had been defeated. The example, ideology, and support of Soviet communism exerted a powerful influence in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in China and French Indochina (see “The Rise of Nationalist China”).