League Cities

After the First World War, ended, fighting continued throughout the former eastern European and Middle Eastern fronts, driven now by ethnic conflicts. Although the Allies prevented such conflicts as the Yugoslav-Serbian conflict over Bosnia and the Polish-Lithuanian dispute over the Vilnius district from escalating into international warfare, they were unable to deal with the problems along the German and Turkish frontiers. The Lithuanian annexation of the Klaipeda/Memel district of East Prussia very nearly initiated a German-Lithuanian war, but it was the Polish ambitions in East Prussia and the port city of Danzig threatened to ignite a second major European war immediately after the first. At the same time, Greece and Turkey fought a bloody war along their common border in an attempt to determine the ownership of the territories bordering the Aegean Sea.

In 1919, French prime minister Aristide Briand proposed the creation of the entity of the "free city," a sort of protectorate under the League. The city of Constantinople -- strategically located at the mouth to the Black Sea and of religious importance to the Orthodox Christian countries of Europe, and of immense economic and cultural importance to Turkey -- was the first free city to be established, in 1920. As a free city, Constantinople had its own municipal government that provided all manner of services to its population, but it was devoid of any of those functions of government exercised by a sovereign state, such as defense and foreign relations. In the early years of the Constantinople Free City, riots between Orthodox Christians and Turkish Muslims threatened League rule, but the obvious determination of the League to maintain the peace led both populations to sullenly accept the protectorate by the early 1930's.

Danzig -- a German-populated port city of a quarter-million people in the middle of the Polish province of West Prussia -- was less successful. Poland had hoped to acquire the city in order to make use of its extensive port facilities, while Germany sought to keep Danzig on ethnographic and geopolitical grounds. The League-imposed compromise pleased no one. In spite, Poland built the entirely new port city of Gdynia, just two dozen kilometers away from the Danzig border, and redirected its maritime trade to that port. The Danzigers suffered the effects of economic collapse, and an overwhelming majority of Danzigers sought to reunify Danzig with Germany. As Nazi Germany militarized and German-Polish relations deteriorated, Danzig quickly became one of the major hotspots in central Europe. On the very first day of the war, the German Reich occupied Danzig itself without any fighting. Though the League of Nations survived the Second World War, Danzig lost its status as a free city once Soviet armies reached Danzig in December of 1943 and expelled its German population, giving the city to Poland to compensate its territorial losses to the Soviet Union. Danzig's status as a free city under the League effectively ended then.

However, even in the worst years of the Ogulü regime Turkey never openly challenged the League in Constantinople. In the immediate post-war era, the model of the Free City played an important role in the settlement of the 1947 civil war in the British protectorate of Palestine. Soon after the end of the Second World War, tensions between the Zionists -- Jewish immigrants, mostly Yiddish-speakers from central and eastern Europe, who had settled in Palestine in the hope of escaping anti-Semitic violence -- and the native Arab minority expanded into a general civil war. The establishment of a Franco-Italian peacekeeping force charged with guarding the final ceasefire line played an important role in establishing the final borders between the State of Israel and the Republic of Palestine. Tensions over the status of the city of Jerusalem -- a holy city to both Muslims and Jews -- threatened to disrupt the entire settlement. By allowing Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to feel safe in their holy city, the 1948 establishment of Jerusalem as a League Free City placated Israeli nationalists and Muslims and is largely responsible for the productive relationship between Israel and its Arab Muslim neighbours.

In the 38 years from the end of the Second World War to the Third World War, the free cities of Constantinople and Jerusalem prospered exceedingly. Under fair and honest administrations, both Constantinople and Jerusalem became major regional centres in southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Even though Constantinople gained associate membership in the European Confederation in 1974, the general happiness with League administration led to residents of the city voting massively in favour of continued Free City status. Though Constantinople is still poor by the standards of northern Europe and southern South America, it is still the most prosperous city in southeastern Europe. The city has a non-Turkish majority of population -- Greeks form a third of the total, closely followed by Turks, while Armenians, Lebanese Christians, Bulgarians, Egyptians, and Russians have flocked to the wealthiest city in the southeastern European Confederation. Although it would be inaccurate to describe ethnic relations as harmonious, they are peaceful.

Similarly, Jerusalem has flourished as a neutral meeting point for diplomats and businessmen from Israel and the entire Muslim world. Of mixed Israeli Yiddish-speaking and Sephardic Ladino-speaking origin, the Jewish minority of Jerusalem has managed to thrive in their enclaves in the west of the Free City. Elsewhere, Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, and sizable contingents of Muslim West Africans and Iranians have gelled together to form a cosmopolitan Islamic society almost without parallels in the Middle East save in Arabia.

It seems unlikely that any other city in the world will ever receive the status of League Free City. The threat of a Fourth World War seems unlikely, while successor states in Asia and North America have largely managed to reassert control over the territories under their control and are no longer prone to border conflicts. Still, the legacy of the Free City played an important role in creating a precedent for the establishment of the southeast Asian mandates of the League in the mid-1980's, and in creating a coherent framework for off-world colonial expansion. And, of course, the prosperity of Constantinople and Jerusalem signals the general success of the League Free City in ensuring that once-chaotic regions are not peaceful and reasonably prosperous.