TOO BAD HE UNDERSTOOD HIS OWN COUNTRY SO LITTLE:

Ordained as a Nation: a review of The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism by Erez Manela (Pankaj Mishra, February 2008, London Review of Books)

Trawling through four national archives, Manela has produced an immensely rich and important work of comparative politics centred on the ‘Wilsonian moment’, which he dates from autumn 1918 to spring 1919. ‘Disseminated to a growing global audience’, Wilson’s rousing speeches leading up to the Paris Peace Conference earned him, as Maynard Keynes later recorded, ‘a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’. Emboldened by him, nationalist leaders in Egypt and India joined Sinn Féin in seriously challenging British authority, and China and Korea grew more aggressive in their demands for political and economic autonomy.

Anti-colonialists everywhere had been transfixed by the swift rise of the United States, a new political and economic power rare among Western nations for possessing a strong tradition of anti-imperialism. For much of the 19th century, the United States had been isolationist in its foreign policy and protectionist in its economic; and its footprint was light in Asia and Africa, where, as even Raymond Aron conceded, the natives did not need to read or even understand Lenin, or have to deal with a repressive imperial police state, to identify Europe with imperialism. There was enough evidence for it in everyday life and memory: ‘the exploitation of raw materials without any attempt to create local industry; the destruction of native crafts and the stunted growth of industrial development that resulted from the influx of European goods; high interest rates on loans; ownership of major businesses by foreign capitalists’.

The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers – Britain, Germany and France – and further discredited their regimes, endowed America with both power and moral prestige. Wilson, who barely had a foreign policy before war broke out in Europe in 1914, wasn’t slow to realise the implications of European turmoil for the United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.’

In speeches addressed to ‘the peoples of the countries now at war’ he burnished his credentials as a mediator who could negotiate what he called (borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals as well as conservative politicians would invoke with diminishing returns throughout the 20th century, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which inspired the New Republic to declare George W. Bush ‘the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself’.

Wilson had begun to outline the American preference for regime change in unfriendly countries well before he declared war on Germany. Faced in late 1913 with revolution and the likely rejection of American influence in Mexico, he had decided to ‘teach the South American republics to elect good men’. ‘When properly directed,’ he claimed, ‘there is no people not fitted for self-government.’ Wilson was also convinced that proper direction in the postwar order could be provided only by the United States. When his peace overtures failed, he went to war in April 1917, still confident that ‘we are chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.’

Wilson, an academic by training, was fortified in his convictions by such liberal intellectuals as John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly (co-founder of the New Republic), who believed that by joining the war America would make the world safe for democracy rather than, as was the case, help the Allied powers deliver a knockout blow to the Germans. As Randolph Bourne, a young critic whose opposition to American intervention made him an outcast among liberal intellectuals, pointed out as early as August 1917, the United States had lost whatever leverage it had as an impartial mediator when it declared war on Germany.

Nevertheless, Wilson pressed ahead with his scheme for a democratic international order, which he hoped would be cemented by a League of Nations.

Self-determination and transnationalism are naturally at odds with one another and he disastrously opted top push the unAmerican latter.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2008 8:29 AM