Woodrow Wilson's Beliefs

Way before American president Woodrow Wilson’s time, there were others who had attempted and failed to advocate a peace treaty based on the principle of self-determination. It was not until early on in the twentieth century, at the end of the first world war, that Wilson was open about his far-reaching expectations and vision for the future. However, unlike his predecessors, and opposed to a balance of power among unequal states, his new ideas suggested an international order of equal states working together for their common security. The League of Nations was for Wilson the organization that he believed could offer this form of collective security. For Wilson who felt very strongly on the matter found it upon himself to be vocal about his

He documents the responses of these four emergent nations to Wilson’s ideas, showing us exactly how much of an impact he had on those placing his ideals at high importance. This demonstrated the impact and the effect that Wilson’s ideas of self-determination and colonialism had on these nations and their local attempts to make things better for themselves. He shows us how the Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans shared quite a few similar elements of historical experience, and how the “Wilsonian moment” was used by each group to advance claims of self-determination and nationhood both nationally and internationally. However, while each campaign for self-determination “had roots in internal developments within each society...they were also intricately enmeshed in the international context of the Wilsonian moment” (p. 12). Nationalism can therefore only be understood within a global context. As Manela writes, “Nationalism, as an ideology and as a form of political practice, evolved conceptually and historically within an international context, and it cannot be fully understood outside that context” (p.

Each group sought to harness his ideals in order to achieve international self-determination. However, when it became clear that there would be no new Wilsonian world order based on rights to self-determination, the colonial world was convulsed in revolt, with many nationalist leaders, feeling betrayed by Wilson and the U.S. In fact it became quite clear to them that Wilson had never truly believed in the self-determination of non-white people. How it is that he could of thought to exclude an entire group I have no idea. “Indeed, acutely aware as he was of the multiethnic character of American society, his model of a self-determining people, he could hardly have thought that ethnic homogeneity was a prerequisite for the exercise of the right to self-determination” (p.42; footnote 28) Apparently when Wilson vocalized his ideals he was really only referring to the situation in Europe and did not even think to care about dependent territories elsewhere. As Manela wrote in his book, “If certain groups were not sufficiently modern,‟ certain communities not fully enlightened,‟ they could be excluded, at least for the time being, from the brave new world that the president envisioned” (p.