Wilsonian Ideals by Oliver Hart-Wilson
“It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand.” In the post-World War I peace settlements, president Woodrow Wilson was to play a major role. As one of the four main figures in the peace settlements, Wilson brought to the Paris conference his own views on how the peace settlement should pan out. Wilson’s views on world peace were shaped by his own opinions on northern nationalism in preference over southern sectionalism, and to these he added his beliefs on national self-determination. Wilson was one of the greatest advocates of national self-determination, a view that was enforced by the 16th president of the USA who believed in a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”. [Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address”, 19 November 1863] National self-determination would play a major part in the post-World War I situation in the East European states. Out of the Paris peace conferences, many new nation states were created – these included Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Lithuania. These states were created due to the notion of national self-determination put forward by Wilson in the belief that this was the only way to create a stable Eastern Europe. The creation of these states did not solve the problems that Wilson hoped to - in fact it created as many problems as they solved. Wilson’s ideas relied upon national self-determination combining “national consciousness and self-government by emphasising popular sovereignty within democratic nation states” [Ambrosius, L.E., Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy, p. 127], but through this Wilson failed to take into account that nations would not always develop along the principles that he laid out, or that they would follow these principles once introduced. In the case of Poland and Lithuania where national self-determination was introduced after their creation, coups occurred in the late 1920’s that saw a distinct increase in executive power, decreasing the role of popular sovereignty. Another problem that was to arise out of the notion of national self-determination was the question of how one was to define the nation state as set out by Woodrow Wilson. Many believed that it was not sufficient to base the nations boundaries upon the principle of the ethnic groups that it encompassed, but this seemed to be the process that Wilson advocated. To determine ethnonationalism, Wilson turned to the principle of historicism. For the nation state to be a viable creation, the people had to share a common history in which they could find a common identity. This principle had its problems. Although it had solved some of the problems of the eastern European situation by reducing the number of people living under an alien government it failed to reach its full potential for solving this situation. Thirty million people were still left in a state where they were a minority living under an alien government and it failed to address the situation of the Jewish community who shared a common historical and religious identity. Although national self-determination was to solve some of the problem that was present in the Eastern Europe, it failed to offer a satisfactory solution to others. Out of Wilson’s ideas, various nation states were created in a bid to bring stability to east Europe and prevent further hostilities. However, the resulting nation states would prove to insufficiently stable or strong. The creation of the eastern states was done so to prevent war but it was through these states that war was to be created - through stronger states taking advantage of the lack of strength and stability in these states.
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