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Wilson's Internationalism (1)

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By Thomas J. Knock

As World War II drew to a close, several biographies of Woodrow Wilson and monographs on the League of Nations appeared as the question of an international organization once again became a crucial concern.

Then, intermittently throughout the Cold War, historians and political scientists debated whether containment and Cold War globalism represented the triumph or the negation of Wilsonian principles.

Finally, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when President George Herbert Walker Bush prepared to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and called for a ''New World Order,'' references to Wilson and his contemporary applicability became commonplace (for the while).

Robert McNamara and James Blight, in ''Wilson's Ghost'' (2001), held out as ''a historical mirror'' the tragedy of the 28th U.S. president as a parable for our own time.

The subtitle of their book is ''Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st century.'' McNamara and Blight issued a summons for sweeping reductions in the world's nuclear arsenals; an end to unilateral interventions of any kind on the part of great powers; and for what they call ''a bottom-up reinvestment in the United Nations.''

Few could have anticipated the extent to which invocations (if not quite sustained analyses) of Wilson would multiply, however, but for the events that the Bush administration set in motion in early 2003.

Thereon, commentators began to allude to Wilson, or to quote him, in defense of the war in Iraq and in praise of President Bush for having declared ''liberty for the Iraqi people'' as a motivation behind the war.

In March 2003, Lawrence F. Kaplan of the New Republic (which endorsed the war) asserted that Bush is ''the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself,'' while Michael Barone, in the Wall Street Journal, likened Bush's second inaugural address to the Fourteen Points.

At the same time, however, a few others have cast doubt on the comparisons. In a post-inaugural assessment in the New York Times, David E. Sanger said that the President had left ''Wilson's idealism in the dust'' and suggested that phrases such as ''the expansion of freedom'' and ''the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world'' were in fact a convenient ''retroactive rationale for the war in Iraq, where Americans were originally told that weapons stocks were the primary justification for war.''

Then, too, yet another editor at the New Republic, John B. Judis, has characterized Bush as ''a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches'' and his administration as ''deeply hostile to the tradition of Wilson.''

All of the foregoing meditations on American foreign policy through Wilsonian lenses have stimulating observations to make, as they testify to McNamara's perception that ''we are [still] being pursued by Wilson's ghost.''

Once again, they demonstrate the protean nature of ''Wilsonianism.'' A persistent problem inheres in this term, however, because it is in danger of being stripped of meaningful historical context. Thus, Jonathan Schell has written about ''nuclear Wilsonianism.'' Francis Fukuyama, in his latest book, cites the need for a ''realistic Wilsonianism.''

Walter Russell Mead coins the term ''Revival Wilsonianism'' and even refers to ''Wilsonianism on steroids.'' Yet, virtually all of them decline to ask truly searching questions about both the larger subject and the historical Wilson culminating in the year 1919.

Almost all of these studies decline to engage that crucial element of ''Wilsonianism" to which Wilson himself attached the supreme importance.

To be sure, Woodrow Wilson was a champion of free trade, and no chief executive has ever communicated more effectively to the peoples of the world the ideals of democracy.

But whatever his claim to historical greatness, in the end it rests upon his having set in motion what J. William Fulbright once characterized as ''the one great new idea of the 20th century in the field of international relations, the idea of an international organization with permanent processes for the peaceful settlement of international disputes.''

And so, let us, explore what Wilson had to say about these matters. For the things that worried him in 1919, worry us, too, in 2009 ― questions about preponderating armaments and the avoidance of war, about sovereignty as it relates to unilateralism and multilateralism, and, one way or another, the future of the United Nations and the United States disposition toward it.

Whereas the controversial mutual guarantee of territorial integrity originated with a proposal Wilson sketched out in December 1914, the League of Nations had many authors, and Wilson drew most of his ideas from a new internationalist movement that had come into being in the United States in 1915-16.

Two divergent aggregations of activists ― ''progressive internationalists'' and ''conservative internationalists'' ― composed this movement. Thus, in the struggle of 1919, two competing approaches to internationalism were at stake.

Both Wilson and the progressive internationalists envisioned the League as a system in which the great powers, including the United States, could prosper by exercising restraint; it would lessen the chances of another catastrophic war because it provided for the settlement of disputes through arbitration or conciliation, accords to reduce or limit armaments, and collective security as against external aggression, enforced by both economic and military sanctions.

Conservative internationalists, such as Republican Henry Cabot Lodge and William Howard Taft, looked upon these its provisions, probably correctly, as diminution of national sovereignty.

Whereas they could accept a world parliament to make appropriate changes to international law and the arbitration and conciliation to settle certain kinds of disputes, most conservative internationalists also believed that the United States should build up its military and reserve the right to undertake independent coercive action at will.

Thus they not only balked at the League's provisions for collective sanctions, but also feared that membership might restrict independent, unilateral military action.

Thomas J. Knock is a history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He can be reached at tknock@smu.edu. The above article is first in a two-part excerpt of a thesis Prof. Knock presented to a seminar held in Seoul, March 9. The Northeast Asian History Foundation organized the seminar in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement against Japanese colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula. ― ED.


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