Wilsonian Moment Research Articles

'Free and Equal Partners in Your Commonwealth': The Atlantic Charter and Anticolonial Delegations to London, 1941-3.

This article examines the efforts of two anticolonial politicians from the British Empire who used official visits to London and the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter (14 August 1941) to advance their political careers and self-government for their territories: Burma's U Saw in 1941, and Nigeria's Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1943. Rather than a repetition of the 'Wilsonian moment', these campaigns show how anticolonial forces long active across the Empire took advantage of the opening offered by the Atlantic Charter to make claims on the British government in its wartime weakness. Both U Saw and Azikiwe had been involved in anticolonial politics long before the Charter, but its appearance provided an opportunity to advance their position vis-à-vis political competitors as well as to win concessions from the imperial state. Although the two leaders had different immediate objectives, they both used the prestige of official visits to London and the ambiguous universality of the Charter's language in pursuit of their aims. Their ability to do so attests to the power of anticolonial movements by the early 1940s, and points to alternative paths which the Empire might have followed.

The Irish Revolution and World History: Nation, Race, and Civilization in the Rhetoric of the Irish Revolutionary Generation

The Irish Revolution and World History:Nation, Race, and Civilization in the Rhetoric of the Irish Revolutionary Generation Jason Knirck (bio) As the first Dáil was debating the wisdom of Irish support for the League of Nations, Deputy Terence MacSwiney arose and noted that "no League would be permanent if small and large nations were not admitted on equal terms. It could not be permanent if Germany and the neutral countries were not equally admitted. Ireland was the test case."1 At first glance this statement appears to be an example of Irish nationalist self-importance that verges on the ridiculous. Of all the issues that could bedevil the creation of the League of Nations, the status of Ireland seems rather far down the list. But if examined in the context of Irish revolutionary rhetoric about the rest of the world, the comment becomes more comprehensible. Sinn Féin took seriously President Wilson's language about self-determination and the rights of small nations, and thought that the postwar order would be based on a system of equality between large and small countries. As victims of British imperialism, Irish nationalists also anticipated the breakup of European empires in the wake of the First World War. Thus the creation of Dáil Éireann in Ireland, combined with the near-universal hope that the days of large empires were over—what one historian has dubbed "the Wilsonian moment"—led Sinn Féiners and other Irish revolutionaries to magnify Ireland's importance in [End Page 157] the coming postwar settlement.2 As a colonized region whose leaders considered it to be a small, European, civilized nation, Ireland did seem to be a suitable case to test the intentions of the victorious powers—in particular, the United States—in creating a postwar order based on equality, rational discussion, and decolonization. When MacSwiney made this comment in April 1919, President Wilson had already proven unsympathetic to the Irish case and to its Irish American representatives in Paris, and suspicion of American intent was already appearing in the ranks of Sinn Féin. Given how the revolutionary movement saw Ireland as a crucial contact zone between the old world and the new, empire and decolonization, Europeanness and ethnic difference, it seems less absurd that those same revolutionaries would seek to elevate the Irish case into a vital component of the postwar settlement. While nationalists in Vietnam, Egypt, and India undoubtedly thought the same about the positions of their respective countries, MacSwiney's comment reveals fundamental assumptions that many members of Sinn Féin made about the rest of the world and Ireland's primacy in it. Most of these assumptions rested on or were expressed through analogies to other situations that had arisen in imperial and world history. Analogies, of course, are always dangerous terrain for nationalists, as uniqueness is the fundamental assumption of any nationalism, but the perceived definitions of each unique nation also rest on implicit or explicit differences from other nations.3 Thus an argument from analogy risks either undermining the singularity of the nation or categorizing it with other nations in a way that jeopardizes the nation's self-image. De Valera recognized this as the Dáil was preparing to appoint plenipotentiaries to conduct negotiations in London in 1921. He declared, "Nothing disgusted him so much as introducing analogies when there was no analogy there. Their position was totally different to that of the American states or South Africa, and let them deal with plain facts."4 De Valera perhaps had particular reason to be [End Page 158] wary of analogies, having been burned politically by an ill-conceived attempt to compare Ireland to Cuba while touring the United States in 1920. Nevertheless, Irish revolutionaries often saw a need to place their country, themselves, and their revolution in a global context when defending, promoting, or evaluating their case. Recent historiography has exploded the notion that Irish nationalism was particularly insular, and the engagement of Irish nationalists with the rest of the world—particularly the colonized world—has become much better analyzed over the past decade or so. In particular, it has been shown that well before the revolutionary period "Irish...

Defending Turkey on Global Stages: The Young Turk Reşit Saffet’s Internationalist Strategy in 1919

AbstractThe article investigates the internationalist activities of a Turkish nationalist during his Swiss exile at the outset of the postwar settlements in early 1919. Reşit Saffet, a devoted Young Turk and Ottoman diplomat on leave, moved in the internationalist milieus in Berne while his agenda remained utterly nationalist. Drawing on pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic, anti-imperialist, socialist, and Wilsonian ideas, he adapted his rhetoric to the internationalist conferences he attended; he thus sought to disguise and to defend his otherwise discredited nationalist cause on these global stages. The article traces Reşit Saffet’s internationalist activities as a strategy to engage with the ‘Paris moment’ and the Ottoman question beyond official politics and governmental discourse. In a time when Ottoman diplomacy was in deadlock as a result of the Empire’s exclusion from the peace conference and Reşit Saffet’s career faced an unknown future in the face of the Ottoman collapse, internationalism seemed a promising option. The case illustrates the increasingly blurred border between state diplomacy and non-governmental influence, and thus questions exclusively state-centered approaches. It reveals the appeal and potential held by civil society internationalism, not only for Western pacifists and socialists, but also for anti-imperialist nationalists confronted with the disappointment of the ‘Wilsonian moment’.

Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment

Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment

Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism by Elizabeth McKillen (review)

Reviewed by: Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism by Elizabeth McKillen Lloyd E. Ambrosius (bio) Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism. By Elizabeth McKillen. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 320. $55.00 cloth) With her new book, Elizabeth McKillen makes another significant contribution to labor and diplomatic history. She analyzes the interactions between labor and socialist leaders, on one side, and President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, on the other, from its response to the Mexican Revolution, through the Great War in Europe during the years of U.S. neutrality and belligerency, to the Versailles Peace Treaty after the war. With one notable exception, she argues that Wilson’s priorities diverged from those of labor unions and socialist parties in the United States and Europe. Although Wilson called for making the world safe for democracy in his 1917 war address to Congress, while asking it to vote for war against Imperial Germany, his commitment to a world safe for workers was limited by his preference for [End Page 132] protecting U.S. commercial and financial interests abroad. He favored capitalism, not socialism, although workers benefited from some of his progressive reforms. Unlike the U.S. Socialist Party that Eugene V. Debs led, the president did not embrace industrial democracy in his vision of a new world order. McKillen summarized this thesis about the differences between Wilsonian liberal internationalism and the alternative visions of internationalism of most labor and socialist leaders in her statement: “International labor experienced no ‘Wilsonian moment’ during which most labor groups aligned behind Wilson’s agenda. Rather, the continuing debate over Wilson’s foreign policy programs within U.S. and international labor circles exposed fundamental cleavages surrounding the question of whether the president’s unique brand of liberal internationalism really served, or could be modified to serve, the interests of the world’s workers” (p. 2). This fundamental divergence between the labor and socialist Left and the progressive capitalist Wilson culminated in the postwar rift between them, which expressed itself in the Red Scare and the labor and socialist Left’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty, particularly the League of Nations. McKillen’s persuasive argument refutes Thomas Knock’s interpretation in To End All Wars (1992), which emphasized Wilson’s appeal to the labor and socialist Left and downplayed substantial differences between him and them. The most notable exception to this general pattern was Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Under his leadership, the AFL collaborated with the Wilson administration. When the president led the nation into war, Gompers supported U.S. belligerency and sought to improve the conditions of workers without resorting to strikes that would jeopardize wartime production. In exchange for this loyalty, the president appointed Gompers to the Commission on Industrial Labor Organization, which met in Paris in 1919 and created the structure for the new International Labor Organization (ILO). He succeeded in dominating these proceedings, despite widespread criticism from European labor and socialist leaders, [End Page 133] but failed to win U.S. membership in the ILO, which was founded in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1919. Along with rejecting the Versailles Treaty, the U.S. Senate kept the United States out of the ILO as well as the League of Nations. By the time of this failure, however, even Gompers recognized the limits of Wilson’s commitment to American workers. One of the outstanding features of this book is McKillen’s coverage of the intersection between racial/ethnic identity and labor politics. Because American workers came from many backgrounds, racial and ethnic issues overlapped with questions of class in labor unions and their relations with employers and political leaders. She understands these dimensions very well. One minor flaw in this otherwise excellent book is her frequent reference to the Versailles Peace Conference instead of the Paris Peace Conference. Although signed at Versailles, the peace treaty was drafted at the conference in Paris. Lloyd E. Ambrosius LLOYD E. AMBROSIUS is the Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of several...

Introduction: Eurocentric Lens Removed: Wilsonian Impetus

The rise of the West to a position of dominance is one of the most important developments in world history in recent centuries. All writing about the world in recent times has to take into account the rise of the West. However, from its zenith at the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe's hold over Asia was dramatically weakened. The twenty-first century is increasingly ‘The Asian Century’. It is time to remove the Eurocentric lens through which much of recent world history has been viewed. The removal of this lens is the purpose of London 2012. Will a new Wilsonian Moment now occur? Will the ambitious vision of Woodrow Wilson be realised at last in sport if not politics? Will the world experience a Neo-Wilsonian Moment in sport with the nations of the East celebrating the full fruits of full national equality, recognition and acceptance in a long delayed post-1919 harvest earned in recent global sports mega-events? Will future Olympic Games fully embrace the histories, values and traditions of both West and East? Will the Eurocentric lens remain in place?

The Brest-Litovsk Moment: Self-Determination Discourse in Eastern Europe before Wilsonianism

The article argues that the historical origins of the concept of self-determination had less to do with Woodrow Wilson than with the specific circumstances during the last phase of the Great War. It argues that self-determination became the “centre of the discourse of legitimacy in international relations” as a result of a dynamic process involving multiple actors. Lenin and the Bolsheviks first started to employ the concept. Self-determination discourse gained further momentum during the Brest-Litovsk peace conference, where the Austro–German and Russian delegations debated its application at some length. This prompted Allied statesmen to crystallise their ideas and make self-determination their principal war aim. The increasing appeal of self-determination first manifested itself in the entangled spaces of Eastern Europe, where the national aspirations of Poles and Ukrainians, bolstered by the new discourse, converged with the rhetoric emanating from Brest-Litovsk to create a “Wilsonian moment” before Wilson.

A Wilsonian Moment? Dutch Nationalism and Belgian Territorial Claims in the Aftermath of World War I

The Belgian claims on Dutch territory in the aftermath of World War I led to a strong reaction from both the Dutch government and the people living in the areas concerned. Whereas the Dutch government responded with a multi-layered diplomatic counter-campaign, a moment of 'hot nationalism' occurred in Southern Limburg and Zeeland Flanders. This essay investigates the connection between nationalistic expressions by the local population of Southern Limburg and the Dutch foreign policy between November 1918 and June 1919. Situated against the background of the rise of 'new diplomacy' and the principle of self-determination, the Dutch case provides further insight into the interaction between international politics and its reception at grass-root level. It illustrates that the principle of self-determination was used effectively by Dutch diplomats during the preparatory phase, and that it provided the anti-annexationist movement with a valuable tool at a later stage.

The "Wilsonian Moment" in East Asia: The March First Movement in Global Perspective

The March First Movement of 1919 was a major watershed in Korean history, but it also, this essay argues, unfolded in a global context. It was shaped by the numerous currents of change in international affairs in the wake of World War I, including the rise of Wilsonian ideas, the impact of the Russian Revolution, the possibilities inherent in the Paris peace negotiations, and the growing upheaval elsewhere in the colonial world, in East Asia and beyond. It involved not only Koreans on the peninsula but also transnational network of activists abroad. The Korean experience sheds light on the relationship between international events and the development of national movements in the colonial world, showing how the emerging discourse of the especially the spread of the principle of self-determination as the bedrock of international legitimacy-shaped the events of 1919 and beyond.

Joan Hoff, A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush: Dreams of Perfectability

Joan Hoff’s searing critique of American foreign policy from World War I to the War on Terror comes at a time when the Wilsonian legacy is attracting renewed interest. Different historians have chosen to emphasise different aspects of this legacy. Erez Manela has explored how antiimperialist intellectuals in Asia were empowered by the doctrine of self-determination during a global Wilsonian Moment, whereas David Kennedy has portrayed George W. Bush as Woodrow Wilson’s natural successor. Hoff, who has published widely on U.S. foreign relations and the American presidency, admits that a true characterisation of Wilsonian foreign policy is problematic. She resorts to a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Wilsonianism: the former entails ‘spreading self-determination and free trade capitalism to the world through collective security arrangements’, while the latter indulges in unilateral interventionism. (10) In practice, this ambiguous inheritance has resulted in a unilateralist foreign policy tempered by occasional cooperation with other states.

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism - By Erez Manela

Presidential Studies QuarterlyVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 167-168 The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism – By Erez Manela William F. Felice, William F. Felice Eckerd CollegeSearch for more papers by this author William F. Felice, William F. Felice Eckerd CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 January 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2008.03670.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume39, Issue1March 2009Pages 167-168 RelatedInformation

The Great Illusion: The Wilsonian Moment in World History

In the Middle East, as in many other parts of the world, disappointment with the United States is based on an intense and obvious gap that separates noble American rhetoric and far more callous policies. The language of freedom, democracy, and human rights have long been a hallmark of American foreign policy; so too has been the cynicism of U.S. presidents and policymakers during the Cold War and today. In a remarkably lucid and readable book, Erez Manela reminds us not only how this noble U.S. foreign policy rhetoric originated during what he refers to as the “Wilsonian moment” but also how, unlike later U.S. presidents and policymakers, Wilson himself was a tragic, rather than simply cynical, figure. Far more importantly, Manela admirably focuses on how peoples across the world—specifically in Egypt, India, China, and Korea—at first embraced and then were disillusioned by Wilson but how they also elaborated ideas of self-determination and anticolonial nationalism in a manner never envisioned or intended by Wilson.

:The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism.(Oxford Studies in International History.)

:The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism.<i>(Oxford Studies in International History.)</i>

Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (review)

Reviewed by: Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s Daniel Gorman Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s. Edited by Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 276pp. $74.95 (cloth). The historical study of globalization has entered its adolescence. This volume’s forward notwithstanding, it can no longer be said that the field has been ceded to social scientists, that historians need to provide the necessary “context” for global integration, or that historians need to embrace transnational approaches to global history. These challenges have been met by a succession of thoughtful works over the past decade. The task now for historians is how to implement the ideas this infant historiography has advanced. It is time to actually write the history of globalization. The volume under review is thus a welcome addition, meeting the challenges of global history head-on. The contributors are members of “Conceptions of World Order: Global Historical Perspectives,” a research network sponsored by the German National Research Foundation, and this volume illustrates the scholarly benefits of such collaborative work. It provides a model, if at times an uneven one, for how historians can illustrate global connections in an empirical and coherent manner. A perennial difficulty for global historians is how to encompass the global without losing sense of the particularity of the local. Global history demands wide-ranging expertise, which single historians rarely possess; truly global histories, such as W. H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West(1964) or John Darwin’s recent After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire(2007), are thus rare and distinctive accomplishments. The more common approach is to pool the expertise of several specialists with the aim of producing a work greater than the sum of its parts. A. G. Hopkins’s edited collections Globalization in World History(2002) and Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local(2006) and Frank Trentmann et al.’s Beyond Sovereignty(2007) are fruitful examples of this approach. Competing Visions of World Orderdeserves a place next to these works on global historians’ shelves. Conrad and Sachsenmaier tie together the book’s chapters through the concept of “global moments,” defined as “events of a popular significance that appealed to people in discrete and distant locations” (p. 12). There is a danger here in selecting the “global moment” to fit the argument one wishes to make, but by and large the contributors use this organizing construct to good effect. The formation of ideas of world order was a necessary prelude to the emergence of internationalism [End Page 559]in the mid twentieth century. The book’s contributors highlight the era of the new imperialism, World War I, and the postwar decade of the 1920s as the key gestational period for opposition to a Eurocentric world order. Four main types of opposition are identified. Subversive internationalists worked for change within the international system, nationalist movements challenged the hegemony of multiethnic empires, regional and pan-movements fostered oppositional identities built on cultural or ethnic bonds, and traditionalist movements created discursive coalitions to fend off or manipulate the intrusion of Western modernity. Individual chapters are organized into three parts, drawing variously on all four forms of oppositional movements. Part 1 details concepts of world order during the high era of European imperialism. Harald Fischer-Tiné illustrates the links between the Salvation Army’s work in Britain and India, Christian Geulen demonstrates the centrality of racial thought to visions of world order, and Matthias Middell, in the volume’s most narrowly focused chapter, surveys late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century German world histories. Part 2 pairs Erez Manela’s chapter on the “Wilsonian Moment” in the colonial world, an abstract of his fine recent book on the subject, and Sachsenmaier’s chapter on Chinese intellectuals’ response to World War I. Part 3 focuses most closely on alternative ideas of world order. Conrad and Klaus Mühlhahn show how Chinese labor migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered a stronger Chinese identity both within the diaspora and at home; Cemil Aydin, in the book’s best chapter, shows how Japan’s military victory over...

The Wilsonian Moment: Self‐Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism by Erez Manela

The Wilsonian Moment: Self‐Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism by Erez Manela

The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism

The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism

A Man Ahead of His Time?

In recent years, Woodrow Wilson has returned to feature prominently in the public discourse on the role the United States in the world. For students US foreign relations, this is hardly a surprising development. Wilson was responsible for articulating a vision the US role in the world-usually described as internationalism-that has remained, despite well-known flaws and scores critics over the years, dominant in shaping American rhetoric and self-image, if not always policies, vis-a-vis the rest the world. Competing foreign policy postures, such as isolationism or interest realism, have surely been influential in particular eras and contexts. But they have failed to match the ideological and popular appeal liberal internationalism, which has echoed so compellingly the most basic ideas many Americans hold about who they are, what their country is about, and what it should stand for in the world. And not only Americans. Just now it is hard to imagine, but should not be forgotten, that for much history since the American Revolution the example the United States and its ideals have served as inspiration to countless movements-in Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere-that sought to throw off foreign rule. Perhaps the single most striking example this pattern was the Wilsonian moment 1919: after a world war that caused unprecedented devastation, Wilson was hailed in Europe, and many places besides, as a herald peace, independence, and dignity. For a brief period, in the words H. G. Wells, he ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.'The American president soon proved to be a false Messiah, and in the decades since Wilson, his ideas and his policies have had many critics. In the wake Versailles, the president's Republican opponents attacked him for compromising American sovereignty in his quest for the League Nations, while erstwhile supporters were disappointed that he had not gone far enough: rather than heralding the promised new where right would triumph over might, the peace treaty reaffirmed the old order empire and domination. In the middle decades the last century, as the collapse the Versailles settlement led to another world war and then the Cold War, Wilson came under fire realist critics like E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and George F. Kennan. They ridiculed his naive, impractical idealism and moralism, and called for a dear-eyed approach to international relations that proceeded, to cite latter-day realist Condoleezza Rice, from the firm ground the national interest, not the interests an illusory international community.2Some these early critics have since changed their views. Kennan, shaken by the superpower conflict that brought the world to the brink nuclear war, admitted in 1989 that he had reversed his earlier view Wilson and now saw him as a leader of broad vision and acute sensitivities who was ahead any other statesman his time.3 Henry Kissinger, an icon realpolitik, has nevertheless credited Wilson with a pivotal role in defining the terms American engagement with the wider world, and, indeed, this view reflects a broad consensus among commentators on US foreign policy. The international posture the administration George W. Bush, with its emphasis on the forceful projection America's power abroad and on the close relationship it envisions between spreading American ideals and safeguarding American interests, is often described as one that harks back to Wilson's vision. But so were the (quite different) foreign policies the preceding administration. For that matter, the foreign policies nearly every American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt can be understood, in one way or another, to owe a debt to Woodrow Wilson. The frequent invocation Wilson's ghost to describe a diverse range approaches and policies, however, has done nothing to clarify the precise meaning the term. …

The Wilsonian moment and the rise of Anticolonial nationalism: The case of Egypt

This article examines the influence of Woodrow Wilson's rhetoric of national self‐determination on the Egyptian nationalist movement in 1918–20 as a case study in the impact of the Wilsonian Moment on emerging anticolonial movements. It traces the impact of Wilsonian discourse on Egyptian expectations for the postwar international order, on the way they envisioned their place within it, and on the rhetoric and actions they utilized to fulfil these expectations. It concludes that the experiences of the Wilsonian Moment radicalized Egyptian national demands, transformed the Anglo‐Egyptian colonial relationship, and left a legacy of disappointment and bitterness among Egyptians towards liberal internationalism. The article ends by contextualizing the Egyptian case within the surge of anticolonial nationalism in the wake of World War I, and positing the Wilsonian Moment as a watershed in the transformation of colonial relations.

Morality and the Use of Force in a Unipolar World: The “Wilsonian Moment”?

When, where, and how should the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad figure in American foreign policy? A compelling way for liberals to influence this debate is to underscore a Wilsonian agenda's relevance to national security. To the extent that stability in a region is grounded in a commitment to liberal democratic government, American security interests are served directly and powerfully. Nevertheless, liberals must also recognize that in some regions their agenda may be irrelevant, even quixotic. Not every part of the world is ready for the liberal democratic message, and the failure to recognize this fundamental truth has often undercut efforts to advance a Wilsonian agenda.