Greater Europe. the Debates about Europe’s Colonial Spaces after the First World War

The First World War affected the European colonial empires not only by the export of the political tensions and fighting from Europe to the colonial sphere as well as by the incorporation of huge colonial armies in the European theatres of war, but also by the political debates that came up about the future of Europe’s colonial regime in the world. The disputes about Germany’s role in the colonial sphere and around the consequences of Woodrow Wilson’s “14 points”-statement for the colonized countries, especially in the context of the creation of the League of Nations mandate territories, thus became important arenas in which conflicting visions of Europe’s outer borders in the colonial sphere were propagated, discussed and later implemented.  These concepts of the colonial future of Europe in the world were based on assumptions about the “aptitude” of the different European societies for a colonial rule and on visions of the “stages of development” of the respective territories. In this perspective, the paper analyses the ways in which mayor protagonists of these debates envisioned a future colonial space of European empires in the world as a result of Europe’s internal divisions during the war. It tries to highlight how these visions were shaped not only by the actual power relations in the aftermath of the First World War but also by long established cultural stereotypes about the different European and non-European societies that circulated among the international experts, mainly diplomats, colonial administrators and journalists, and the wider European public.