The earliest internationalized territories were born of imperial rivalry. In 1863, the British and American concessions in Shanghai were merged into an “international settlement” that would eventually represent 19 foreign powers. The Shanghai Municipal Council, an international body unaffiliated with any single sovereign, governed more than a million residents and commanded its own armed forces to exclude Chinese authorities during periods of unrest. The council had an independent legal system, a gendarmerie of foreign soldiers, and control over day-to-day governance. The settlement enforced “neutrality” not out of idealism, but to allow imperial commerce to proceed undisturbed. Such arrangements reflected a belief that shared access to colonial extraction was preferable to a war among Western powers outside the West. Similar dynamics can be observed in the original plan for an International Congo Colony before Belgian King Leopold II seized the Congo as private property, as well as in the Tangier International Zone and the Kulangsu International Settlement.
After World War I, an effort was made to neatly divide Europe into self-determining nation states. The contradictions between this vision of national self-determination and post-imperial reality are perhaps most visible in the Free City of Danzig. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points promised an independent Poland with access to the sea, but the only port through which that access could be achieved was in the formerly German city of Danzig (now Gdańsk). Granting sovereignty over the city to Poland would violate self-determination; leaving it German would threaten Polish independence.
The League’s solution was to declare it a “free city” under the oversight of the League of Nations. Danzigers were forced to renounce their German citizenship and were issued passports that designated them as citizens of the free territory. The League High Commissioner wielded ultimate authority, overruling the local parliament more than sixty times. Such power wielded by an international institution created a focal point for Nazi propaganda narratives of globalists sabotaging the German state, and ultimately the city was used as pretext for Hitler’s invasion of Poland after the first shots of World War II in Europe were fired in the port of Danzig.