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WILSONIAN THOUGHT HELPED CREATE INTERNATIONAL PEACE
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- WILSON SUPPORTED AMERICAN COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM
WILSONIAN THOUGHT HELPED CREATE INTERNATIONAL PEACE1. WILSONIAN PHILOSOPHY HELPED CREATE THE U.N. AND HAD A GLOBAL IMPACT Korwa G. Adar, professor of International Relations at the International Studies Unit, Political Studies Department, Rhodes University, South Africa, AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1998, p. np, http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i2a3.htm, accessed April 22, 2002. In his foreign policy pronouncements vis-a-vis the European colonial powers President Woodrow Wilson advocated for the pursuit of democracy and human rights conceptualized within the context of self-determination for the colonized peoples. The idea of universal morality was central for Wilson. In his view, the realization of individual freedom, limited government, and legitimacy of power held the key to both international peace and the emancipation of humanity from injustice. It was within this philosophical context that he advocated for the need to make the world safe for democracy. This, he argued, would promote America's long term interests. Wilsonianism emerged as a distinct policy philosophy at the end of the First World War. One of the central concerns at the time was how to avoid war and conflict in general. For Wilson, the crucial priority was the need to establish people-oriented internal and international democratic institutions that would act as the custodians of democracy and human rights as conceptualised within the general rubric of self-determination. This idealism culminated in the formation of the League of Nations in 1919. Thus, Wilsonianism was not only internationalised but also institutionalised. Although the United States did not become a contracting party to the League, Wilsonianism had a global impact. 2. WILSONIAN THINKING HELPED PAVE THE WAY FOR DECOLONIZATION OF AFRICA Korwa G. Adar, professor of International Relations at the International Studies Unit, Political Studies Department, Rhodes University, South Africa, AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1998, p. np, http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i2a3.htm, accessed April 22, 2002. Such thinking would go on to inform the founding fathers of the United Nations. The UN system tangibly paved the way for the process of decolonization in Africa through the UN General Assembly resolutions, with African countries which were independent at the time as well as India and the socialist countries taking the lead. In this respect, Wilsonianism not only challenged dictatorial and authoritarian systems worldwide but it also helped oppressed people become aware of their rights. For the colonized peoples of Africa, democracy and human rights (or self-determination in general) was equated with the absence of colonialism. Moreover, the momentum on the issues of democracy and human rights was evidenced with the appointment of Eleanor Roosevelt to Chair a Commission on Human Rights. The results of Roosevelt's Commission were the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its corollaries the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 3. WILSON’S IDEAS HELP CONTROL POTENTIAL INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY John Morton Blum, Historian, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: WOODROW WILSON, PBS documentary, 2001, p. np, available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/sfeature/sf_legacy.html, accessed May 1, 2002. If one wants to talk about Wilson’s legacy, I see it at least more in terms of a process than I do in terms of a product. It isn’t the League of Nations but the importance of thinking through a way to the control the potential anarchy and the relations of states. What Wilson was capable of was as a president, to involve himself in great affairs and to try to find ways in which to work out the problems created by those great affairs, he was never evasive in that way. 4. WILSON’S IDEAS WERE VICTORIOUS EVEN THOUGH HIS POLICIES WEREN’T Jay Winter, Historian, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: WOODROW WILSON, PBS documentary, 2001, p. np, available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/sfeature/sf_legacy.html, accessed May 1, 2002. Wilson’s ideas were victorious even if his policies weren’t. He left his stamp upon the way in which American foreign policy has been formulated throughout the 20th Century and the paradox is that a man whose vision was repudiated by the political leadership of his time managed to achieve a way of framing the language of American foreign policy throughout the 80 years since his death.
1. WILSON FAILED BECAUSE HE TRIED TO APPLY AMERICAN PRINCIPLES TO THE WORLD Walter LaFeber, Historian, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: WOODROW WILSON, PBS documentary, 2001, p. np, available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/sfeature/sf_legacy.html, accessed May 1, 2002. It seems to me that Wilson failed because he tried to apply American principles to the world; and the world did not want the American principles. He took a kind of an American liberalism and essentially tried to create a form of world institutions: self-determination, open trade, the things that Americans had evolved over three-hundred years and incidentally in the process of which we had killed six hundred thousand of each other in the Civil War because it hadn’t worked too well. The Europeans knew this. The Europeans knew that Wilson’s principles had problems. 2. WILSON’S “IDEALISM” CONTINUES TO JUSTIFY HORRIBLE TRAGEDIES IN HAITI Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Z MAGAZINE, November 1994, p. 10. Whether Aristide is allowed to return in some fashion is anyone's guess at the time of writing. If he is, it will be under conditions designed to discredit him and further demoralize those who hoped that democracy might be tolerated in Haiti. To evaluate what lies ahead, we should look carefully at the plans for the security forces and the economy. The military and police forces were established during Woodrow Wilson's invasion as an instrument to control the population, and have been kept in power by U.S. aid and training for that purpose since. That is to continue. As discussed here in July, the head of the OAS/UN mission through December 1993, Ian Martin, reported in Foreign Policy that negotiations had stalled because of Washington's insistence on maintaining the power of the security forces, rejecting Aristide's plea to reduce them along lines that had proven successful in Costa Rica, the one partial exception to the array of horror chambers that Washington has maintained in the region. The Haitian military, Martin observed, recognized that the U.S. was its friend and protector, unlike the U.N., France, and Canada. The generals continued their resistance to a diplomatic settlement, trusting that "the United States, despite its rhetoric of democracy, was ambivalent about that power shift" to popular elements represented by Aristide. They were proven right. As the matter is now rephrased, "At first, Father Aristide resisted having so many former soldiers in the police force, but Administration officials said they persuaded him to accept them," so the New York Times reported on the eve of the invasion. This was one of the successes of the educational program designed for the "doctrinaire monomaniac."Aristide's unwillingness to "broaden the political base" has become a kind of mantra, on a par with "Wilsonian idealism." Like many other mindless propaganda slogans, the phrase conceals a grain of truth. Aristide has been unwilling to shift power to the "enlightened" sectors of foreign and domestic Civil Society and their security forces. He still keeps his allegiance to the general population and their organizations -- who could teach some lessons to their kindly tutors about what was meant by "democracy" in days when the term was still taken seriously. It is intriguing to watch the process at work. Consider Peter Hakim, Washington director of the Inter-American dialogue, well-informed about the hemisphere and far from a ranting ideologue. While Aristide was elected by a two-thirds majority, Hakim observes, "in most Latin American countries, movement from authoritarianism to democracy tends to reflect a more broadly based consensus than is currently the case in Haiti." It is true enough that from the southern cone to Central America and the Caribbean, the consensus is "broadly based" in the sense that sustained terror and degradation, much of it organized right where Hakim speaks, has taught people to abandon hope for freedom and democracy, and to accept the rule of private power, domestic and foreign. It hasn't been easy; witness the case of Guatemala, just now attaining the proper broad consensus after many years of education. Hakim also surely knows the nature of the "consensus" at home, revealed by the belief of half the population that the political system is so rotten that both parties should be disbanded. And he knows full well what efforts are made to broaden government to include authentic representatives of the overwhelming majority of the population in Latin America, or by its traditional master. 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