THE IDEAS OF WOODROW WILSON

THE IDEAS OF WOODROW WILSON

In 1919, the Versailles Treaty was signed with Germany during the Paris Peace Conference. However, a new Republican Congress in the United States rejected the peace negotiated under Wilson, skeptical of the League of Nations. A separate peace had to be negotiated between the United States and Germany. Still, the Europeans considered Wilson a key factor in making peace -- he was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize.

FOURTEEN POINTS

The best single summary of Woodrow Wilson’s political philosophy came in his Fourteen Points Address to Congress, where he promoted his plan for peace in Europe. There, we see the ideas he held most dear in both promotion of peace and economic justice.

Before presenting the fourteen points themselves, Wilson had this to say about the end of the “war to end all wars”:
“We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secured once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us,” Wilson said.
How to establish justice? The first five points hold up remarkably well in today’s political climate. In fact, they might have been written after the Gulf War by George Bush or Bill Clinton.
“I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”
One can see in these first several points the framework for establishing what we would call today a “neoliberal” economic order -- one largely supported by both political parties in the United States. The prime points of this neoliberal order include free trade (absolute freedom of navigation, the removal of all economic barriers to trade, an international regime managing trade, and a colonial system that would provide raw materials and labor for the trading system) and an international market that today we might call globalized.
View this in the context of his domestic economic policy: Wilson established the Federal Reserve Bank, stabilized the economy with numerous reforms that foreshadowed big-government liberalism, and established the progressive income tax. Overseas, he sought to promote trade as a path to peace. This shows that he believed in government as a positive force for change in economics as in foreign policy.
Points six through thirteen establish the territorial settlements following the conflict, including evacuation of conquered lands, the establishment of an independent Polish state, etc. But the fourteenth point was the most controversial to the Republican Congress Wilson faced at home, and arguably the one with the most historic staying power:
“XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
As we’ve talked about, this vision is what’s behind today’s U.N. -- a collective body for the nations of the world to gather and discuss problems, solve disputes, and work together toward common goals.
We’ve talked a bit about the left’s criticism of Wilson as a Machiavellian liberal who wanted to build a world he and his country could control. The right has a somewhat different slant, preferring to think of Wilson as a meddlesome tinkerer who bumbled into trouble by trying to do too much good overseas.
As the far-right author David Horowitz wrote this February:
Yet the consensus is that he was one of the worst presidents of the 20th Century from a foreign policy point of view, if not the very worst. Thanks to Wilson’s passion for intellectual abstractions, not one but two empires -- the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman -- were dismantled with catastrophic results. Where there had been peace for more than 100 years in the Balkans and the Middle East prior to World War I, since then there has been endless national conflict, including a World War, ethnic wars (in the Balkans) and two wars -- a ten year inter-state war between Iran and Iraq and a fifty-year war between the Arab states and Israel. Of Woodrow Wilson we can safely say: Stupid is as stupid does.
(Of course, a “consensus” to Horowitz means something different than what it does to the rest of the world. Not even the mainstream right takes him seriously. But that’s another story.)
From another right-wing perspective, groups like the Cato institute toe a more isolationist line. As long as the United States can protect itself with the most powerful military in the world, they argue, why blunt the focus of American foreign policy by taking on multiple “humanitarian” missions? This kind of misguided internationalism, they would argue, is Wilson’s legacy.
Wilson would argue that promoting “justice” (through institutions like American democracy) abroad is the best way to get peace. These thinkers claim that it’s a fallacy to presume we can effectively promote those institutions worldwide, and even if we can, the nation-building activities have bad tradeoffs. Take the example of Latin America, where Wilson once refused to acknowledge non-democratic governments. One scholar on inter-American affairs, Abraham F. Lowenthal, was quoted in a Cato publication as concluding:
An examination of the record from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to the present shows that despite official rhetoric, the United States has only occasionally really been active in promoting Latin American democracy, and that when United States officials have been active, their efforts have often been ineffective and occasionally counterproductive. The few successful instances of U.S. democracy promotion have rarely been sustained.
Of course, it’s overly simplistic to say that only the right favors this line of analysis. Many left-wing thinkers have taken a similar angle, but made more of these policies’ effects on the nations in question rather than the impact they had on the United States.
It is possible, then, to see Wilson at once as overly idealistic and overly cynical. Some see him as a man who naively believed one powerful country could bring peace to the world. Others see him as a man who wanted to bring “peace” to rich nations and rich men living within them, while maintaining other kinds of dominance (economic, for example).

Directory: uploads
uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10
uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers
uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It?
uploads -> For want of a nail
uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models
uploads -> Police Militarization
uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016
uploads -> Township of winfield
uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014
uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now!

Download 5.81 Mb.

Share with your friends: