[Marxism] "The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism"

Thu Feb 14 16:37:35 MST 2008

Wonderful review of what sounds like a valuable book.  Having been
half-raised on the semi-isolationist criticisms of Wilson by Mencken and Dos
Passos, I think this is the deeper critique that has needed to take root in
this country.

For me, at least, this was must reading, especially for the impact of
Wilson's "idealism" on the then largely colonial regions of Asia and Africa.
Fred Feldman

London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n04/mish01_.html

Ordained as a Nation
Pankaj Mishra 
The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of
Anti-Colonial Nationalism by Erez Manela  Buy this book

Early in The Wilsonian Moment, Erez Manela tells a story about Ho Chi Minh
that I often heard in student Communist circles in India. Ho was an indigent
worker in Paris when Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city in 1919 with a plan
to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Inspired by Wilson’s advocacy of
national self-determination, Ho sought an audience with the US president,
hoping to persuade him to use his new influence to restore Vietnamese rule
in French Indo-China. He carefully quoted from the US Declaration of
Independence in his petition. In Manela’s more poignant version, he also
rented a morning suit. Needless to say, Ho got nowhere near Wilson or any
other Western leader; he found a sympathetic audience only among French
Communists.

Many Communist students I knew in India repeated with reverence the story of
Ho’s failed mission because it appeared to confirm their ur-text, Lenin’s
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916, this pamphlet
had proved that Wilson was as unlikely to restore Indo-China to the
Vietnamese as he was to withdraw American troops from Panama. The United
States was as much of an imperialist power as Britain and Japan, greedy for
resources, territory and markets, part of a capitalist world system of
oppression and plunder whose inherent instability had caused the Great War.

Lenin’s text came to many of us in the Indian provinces as an exhilarating
revelation. No amount of praise appeared sufficient for the Soviet leader
who had pre-empted Wilson in calling for national self-determination. Hadn’t
he exposed the secret agreement between France, Britain and tsarist Russia
to carve up the Middle East, among other booty of the imperialist war? True
to his anti-imperialist rhetoric, he had promised autonomy to Russia’s
ethnic minorities and had voluntarily given up the special concessions
Russia enjoyed in subjugated China along with other Western powers and
Japan.

Communist study circles did not of course discuss what Stalin made of
Lenin’s promise to Russia’s ethnic nationalities, or how Asian Communists
overturned Lenin’s facile equation – imperialism equals monopoly capitalism
– when in the early 1960s China accused the Soviet Union of imperialist
aggression. I learned even less about the capitalist rival of Marxist
internationalism: liberal internationalism, which originated in the
Progressive Movement of the United States and, as eloquently articulated by
Woodrow Wilson, enjoyed worldwide appeal for a few hopeful months after the
end of the First World War, when a new world order seemed likely to rise on
the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian Empires.

Trawling through four national archives, Manela has produced an immensely
rich and important work of comparative politics centred on the ‘Wilsonian
moment’, which he dates from autumn 1918 to spring 1919. ‘Disseminated to a
growing global audience’, Wilson’s rousing speeches leading up to the Paris
Peace Conference earned him, as Maynard Keynes later recorded, ‘a prestige
and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’.
Emboldened by him, nationalist leaders in Egypt and India joined Sinn Féin
in seriously challenging British authority, and China and Korea grew more
aggressive in their demands for political and economic autonomy.

Anti-colonialists everywhere had been transfixed by the swift rise of the
United States, a new political and economic power rare among Western nations
for possessing a strong tradition of anti-imperialism. For much of the 19th
century, the United States had been isolationist in its foreign policy and
protectionist in its economic; and its footprint was light in Asia and
Africa, where, as even Raymond Aron conceded, the natives did not need to
read or even understand Lenin, or have to deal with a repressive imperial
police state, to identify Europe with imperialism. There was enough evidence
for it in everyday life and memory: ‘the exploitation of raw materials
without any attempt to create local industry; the destruction of native
crafts and the stunted growth of industrial development that resulted from
the influx of European goods; high interest rates on loans; ownership of
major businesses by foreign capitalists’.

The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers –
Britain, Germany and France – and further discredited their regimes, endowed
America with both power and moral prestige. Wilson, who barely had a foreign
policy before war broke out in Europe in 1914, wasn’t slow to realise the
implications of European turmoil for the United States; and he fleshed out a
new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his
country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously
declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still
publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our
own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.’

In speeches addressed to ‘the peoples of the countries now at war’ he
burnished his credentials as a mediator who could negotiate what he called
(borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of
the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much
more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist
regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals as well as
conservative politicians would invoke with diminishing returns throughout
the 20th century, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which
inspired the New Republic to declare George W. Bush ‘the most Wilsonian
president since Wilson himself’.

Wilson had begun to outline the American preference for regime change in
unfriendly countries well before he declared war on Germany. Faced in late
1913 with revolution and the likely rejection of American influence in
Mexico, he had decided to ‘teach the South American republics to elect good
men’. ‘When properly directed,’ he claimed, ‘there is no people not fitted
for self-government.’ Wilson was also convinced that proper direction in the
postwar order could be provided only by the United States. When his peace
overtures failed, he went to war in April 1917, still confident that ‘we are
chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world
how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.’

Wilson, an academic by training, was fortified in his convictions by such
liberal intellectuals as John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly
(co-founder of the New Republic), who believed that by joining the war
America would make the world safe for democracy rather than, as was the
case, help the Allied powers deliver a knockout blow to the Germans. As
Randolph Bourne, a young critic whose opposition to American intervention
made him an outcast among liberal intellectuals, pointed out as early as
August 1917, the United States had lost whatever leverage it had as an
impartial mediator when it declared war on Germany.

Nevertheless, Wilson pressed ahead with his scheme for a democratic
international order, which he hoped would be cemented by a League of
Nations. Speaking to Congress in January 1918 he revealed his most ambitious
project yet: a 14-point manifesto for the new world envisaged by the United
States. Secret diplomacy was to have no place, and free trade, popular
government, freedom of the seas, the reduction of armaments, the rights of
small countries, and an association of nations to keep the peace were to be
the new articles of faith.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points would have been lofty ideals at any time (God, as
Clemenceau joked, had only ten). They were particularly unrealistic during a
global war that would soon end with Britain, France and Japan adding to
their possessions in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia. As it turned
out, Wilson was soon forced to compromise his ideals while dealing with the
victorious allies at the postwar peace conference in Paris.

It is likely that Wilson would not have stepped up the rhetorical ante in
January 1918 if the Bolsheviks had not withdrawn Russia from the war and
called on workers and soldiers to cease fighting one another and become
revolutionaries against their own rulers. In asserting that America was
fighting for a better world, Wilson was trying to undercut Bolshevik claims
that the war was a struggle among imperialist powers, with the victorious
elites likely to share the spoils. He aimed to influence those Americans and
Europeans who, growing tired of the endless fighting, appeared dangerously
susceptible to Bolshevik propaganda. Almost by accident, he reached a much
bigger and more receptive audience in the colonised world.

Marxism was then being studied and debated in many Asian cities and towns
where European traders and missionaries had set up Western-style educational
institutions. But the Russian Revolution and its anti-imperialist ethos was
not much known. The United States, too, was an unknown player in
international relations, and its record in the Philippines or Latin America
– Wilson’s imposition, for instance, of military protectorates on Haiti and
Nicaragua – went mostly unexamined. Boosted by a slick propaganda campaign,
Wilson easily won the first round of his war of ideas with the Bolsheviks,
heralding a world where small nations would enjoy the right of
self-determination. And so ‘when peace came,’ Manela writes, ‘colonial
peoples moved to claim their place in that world on the basis of Wilson’s
proclamations.’

In Egypt, Sa’d Zaghlul, a liberal reformist, organised a new political party
called the Wafd (‘delegation’) in preparation for the Paris Peace
Conference. Soon after war began, the British had declared Egypt a
protectorate of the British Empire, formalising their invasion and
occupation of the country in 1882. Zaghlul, who is known in Egypt as the
Father of the Nation, denounced the protectorate as illegal and hoped to
enlist Wilson on his side. ‘No people more than the Egyptian people,’ he
wrote in a telegram to Wilson, ‘has felt strongly the joyous emotion of the
birth of a new era which, thanks to your virile action, is soon going to
impose itself upon the universe.’

Inspired by Wilson’s rhetoric, nationalist leaders in Korea wrote their own
Declaration of Independence. Expectations ran even higher in India and
China, which had contributed more than a million soldiers and labourers to
the Allied war effort in Europe and the Middle East. Tagore wanted to
dedicate one of his books to Wilson and, stirred by Wilson’s wartime
speeches, Hindu and Muslim leaders of the Indian National Congress jointly
demanded to send their delegates – Gandhi among them – to represent India at
the peace conference. In Beijing students gathered in front of the American
Embassy chanting ‘Long Live President Wilson!’ Liang Qichao, the reformist
intellectual and earliest inspiration of Mao Zedong, went to Paris to ensure
that China’s sovereignty was respected by the victorious powers,
particularly Japan, which, in a campaign green-lighted by Britain during the
war, had seized German-held territory in the Shandong peninsula.

Asians and Africans accustomed to stonewalling colonial officials were
naturally attracted to the generous promises of the American president. But
Wilson, a Southerner who shared the reflexive racism of many in his class
and generation (and liked to tell jokes about ‘darkies’), was an unlikely
hero in the alleys of Delhi, Cairo and Canton. Piously Presbyterian, and a
helpless anglophile (he had courted his wife with quotations from Bagehot
and Burke), he had hoped that in the Philippines and Puerto Rico the United
States would follow the British tradition of instructing ‘less civilised’
peoples in law and order. After all, ‘they are children and we are men in
these deep matters of government and justice.’

Ho Chi Minh would not have bothered to rent a morning suit had he known that
Wilson believed as much as his bellicose rival Theodore Roosevelt in
America’s responsibility to shoulder the white man’s burden. In January 1917
Wilson argued that America should stay out of the war in order, as he said
in a cabinet meeting, to ‘keep the white race strong against the yellow –
Japan for instance’. He believed, as he told his secretary of state, Robert
Lansing, that ‘“white civilisation” and its domination over the world rested
largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’ Though apparently
all-encompassing, his rhetoric about self-determination was aimed at the
European peoples – Poles, Romanians, Czechs, Serbs – who were part of the
German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. In his effort to establish the
League of Nations as a framework for collective security and enduring peace
in Europe, he had little interest in persuading Britain and France to
relinquish their colonial possessions.

Not that this was possible. Wilson had had his chance in the spring of 1917
when he first heard of the secret treaties that outlined how Britain,
France, Japan and Italy planned to divide up entire empires among themselves
after the war. He could have made American intervention contingent on the
Allied powers cancelling these arrangements. Instead, he pretended that the
treaties didn’t exist, and even tried to prevent their publication in the US
after the Bolsheviks exposed their existence.

Travelling to Europe in 1919, Wilson hoped to appeal directly to the people,
over the heads of their leaders. Ecstatic crowds in France and Italy
credited him with hastening the end of a deeply unloved war, but in Paris he
confronted hardened and cynical imperialists in Lloyd George and Clemenceau.
After several internecine wars, Europe’s imperial powers had arrived at a
balance-of-power politics. Their representatives in Paris hoped to restore
the equilibrium that war had disrupted by reducing Germany’s power; and
Wilson kept compromising in the hope that old and new problems in the world
order would be solved by his cherished League of Nations.

Mao Zedong caught Wilson’s haplessness in Paris perfectly:

Wilson in Paris was like an ant on a hot skillet. He didn’t know what to do.
He was surrounded by thieves like Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Makino and
Orlando. He heard nothing except accounts of receiving certain amounts of
territory and of reparations worth so much in gold. He did nothing except to
attend various kinds of meetings where he could not speak his mind. One day
a Reuters telegram read: ‘President Wilson has finally agreed with
Clemenceau’s view that Germany not be admitted to the League of Nations.’
When I saw the words ‘finally agreed’, I felt sorry for him for a long time.
Poor Wilson!

The League, rejected by the US Senate, turned out to be a fiasco. Wilson’s
failures in Paris angered and eventually lost him his liberal supporters at
the New Republic. Defeated over Germany, he barely put up a fight when it
came to the rights of non-European peoples, many of whom – including the
Persians and Syrians – did not get a hearing at the conference. Though
backed by a majority of votes, a clause for racial equality proposed by the
Japanese delegation foundered because Wilson feared alienating the British
and their Australian allies, who wanted to maintain their White Australia
Policy.

To a large extent anglophilia blinded Wilson and his advisers, mostly
members of the East Coast WASP elite, to anti-colonial feelings in Asia and
Africa. The American secretary of state fully backed British rule over
Egypt. Allen Dulles, a future Cold Warrior who was then a state department
official, suggested that Egyptian demands ‘should not even be acknowledged’.
The British, working the special relationship to their advantage, ensured
that petitions sent to Wilson in Paris were filed away never to be heard of
again; they also told Wilson that Tagore was a dangerous revolutionary (he
didn’t get permission for his dedication).

Indian and Korean nationalists didn’t get anywhere near Paris. India was
represented by a delegation picked by the British, including a maharajah in
a flamboyant red turban. The Egyptians suffered a deeper humiliation. In
March 1919 the British arrested Zaghlul and deported him to Malta, provoking
widespread public protests in Egypt – what later came to be known as the
1919 Revolution. Faced with nationwide revolt, the British relented and
allowed Zaghlul to go to Paris. But while he was honing his English, the
British managed to persuade the Americans that Bolsheviks had plotted with
Islamic fanatics to fuel the unrest in Egypt. Zaghlul was on his way from
Marseille to Paris when Wilson recognised the British protectorate. The
Egyptian journalist Muhammad Haykal expressed the general outrage when he
wrote:

Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to
self-determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to
self-determination . . . And doing all that before the delegation on behalf
of the Egyptian people had arrived in Paris to defend its claim, and before
President Wilson had heard one word from them! Is this not the ugliest of
treacheries?!

The sense of betrayal was even stronger among millions of Chinese who,
unlike the Indians and the Koreans, were adequately represented at the
conference. Wilson was sympathetic to Chinese claims on Japanese-occupied
Shandong, but he could not persuade Lloyd George and Clemenceau to rescind
their wartime promises to Japan. News of China’s failure in May 1919 brought
enraged students out on the streets of Beijing, denouncing the US president
as a liar. Demonstrations and strikes erupted across China in what would
later be known as the May Fourth Movement, an explosion of intellectual and
political energy that reverberated through the next decades.

‘The emergence of the Wilsonian moment had heralded the end of a great
conflict, the European war,’ Manela writes, ‘but its dissipation gave rise
to a greater one still, one “between East and West, between imperialism and
self-determination”.’ Western powers could not forever ignore or suppress
the nationalist claims and in 1922 China, which had refused to sign the
Treaty of Versailles, received a new settlement, restoring Japanese-held
areas in Shandong to its sovereignty. Egypt remained volatile, and in the
same year the British were forced to grant it a degree of self-rule. In
India they tried to retain the repressive policies introduced during the
war; but the killing of four hundred demonstrators in Amritsar in April 1919
only accelerated the transformation of the Indian National Congress from a
gentleman’s debating club into a mass political party.

‘The new era of self-determination’, as Manela writes, had come, but ‘it was
one of conflict rather than co-operation.’ Wilson’s apparent complicity with
old-style imperialists united many educated Asians in what Manela calls
‘cynical hostility to Western civilisation’. The early generation of Asian
intellectuals and activists had looked to their Western conquerors with awe
and admiration. Their nationalism tended to be frankly ‘derivative’, an
admission that those who wanted to catch up with the West could do no better
than learn from its industrialism and the obviously superior institutions of
liberal democracy. But such bourgeois gradualism no longer seemed so
attractive to many anti-colonial intellectuals after the Paris Peace
Conference.

Liberals such as Tagore who believed in synthesis, a dialogue between West
and East, felt particularly humiliated. Gandhi had never expected much of
Woodrow Wilson but Tagore had, and on a lecture tour of the United States in
1930 he unexpectedly turned on his American audience, who were probably
expecting to be educated about Eastern spirituality. ‘Our appeal does not
reach you,’ Tagore said, ‘because you respond only to the appeal of power.
Japan appealed to you and you answered because she was able to prove she
would make herself as obnoxious as you can.’ Only a deep lingering
bitterness could have made the poet tell a New York audience including
Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Sinclair Lewis that ‘a great
portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’

Travelling to Paris, Wilson may have believed that liberalism ‘must be more
liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilisation is to
escape the typhoon’. But secular liberalism in Muslim countries under direct
British control had been tainted well before the true scale of British
duplicity in the Middle East was revealed at the end of the war. Even the
moderate Islamic scholar, Egypt’s grand mufti Muhammad Abduh, said that ‘we
Egyptians . . . believed once in English liberalism and English sympathy;
but we believe no longer, for facts are stronger than words. Your
liberalness we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us
is that of the wolf for the lamb which he designs to eat.’

In China, hostility to Japan and anger at the country’s own fractious
warlords fused with anti-Western sentiment to create a sharper-edged
nationalism. Western-style liberalism would continue to enjoy a vogue among
educated, well-travelled Chinese. But the 20-year-old poet Qu Qiubai, a
student of Buddhism who later became a crucial contact in Moscow for the
fledgling Chinese Communist Party, found – and he was not alone – that ‘the
sharp pain of imperialistic oppression’ liberated him from the illusions of
‘impractical democratic reforms’. Mao Zedong was left with an enduring
suspicion of Western motives and policies, and a broader awareness of the
political possibilities available to subjugated peoples. As Manela puts it,

the Chinese protest against international injustice, Mao discovered, was
part of a wider pattern of uprisings of marginalised groups in international
society striving for the recognition of their rights to self-determination
and equality. Only the transformation of the norms and practices of
international relations would allow China to attain its rightful place among
nations.

Manela believes that ‘the rise of Communism in China and elsewhere in the
early 1920s was part of that quest, as the failure of the liberal
anti-colonialism of the Wilsonian moment to fulfil its promise sparked a
search for alternative ideologies.’ After initial successes, Wilson’s
influence was overtaken by Lenin’s; China may have been ‘lost’ to Communism
not, as the Cold Warriors alleged, in 1949, but in 1919. State-regulated
capitalism rather than central planning would bring China – and India –
close to their rightful place among nations in the age of globalisation; but
the change of economic models did not diminish the lustre of national
sovereignty. Nationalist feeling, defined by these early anti-imperialist
campaigns for equality, remains potent in both countries, continuing to fuel
middle-class Chinese and Indian desires for greater dignity in a world where
economic power is shifting back to Asia.

Faced with an enormous task of compression, Manela can only outline how
anti-colonial nationalism drew on a great suspicion of Western politicians
with noble ideals as well as of those with guns. It would be too much to
expect him also to examine Wilson’s legacy, the ‘liberal internationalism’
whose tattered flag was held up most recently by liberal hawks supporting
the invasion of Iraq. It is hard, however, to read his book without
wondering how those espousing compassionately liberal policies at home
become susceptible to violent humanitarianism abroad – what Randolph Bourne
incredulously called ‘war in the interests of democracy’. ‘This was almost
the sum of their philosophy,’ Bourne wrote of his old friends. ‘The
primitive idea to which they regressed became almost insensibly translated
into a craving for action.’

Wilson chose to cast American interests abroad in highly moral, even
mystical terms, claiming that, as Bourne described it, the United States had
been ‘ordained as a nation to lead all erring brothers towards the light of
liberty and democracy’; and since the objectives of liberal democracies
coincide, Germany could become peaceful by discarding its militarist regime
and embracing democracy with American help. (The more corporate-friendly
version of this peculiarly American idea is Thomas Friedman’s belief that
countries where McDonald’s burgers are eaten never go to war with each
other.)

In Paris, Lloyd George and Clemenceau demonstrated that leaders of
democracies could be just as brazenly imperialistic as military dictators.
But then Wilson, who had presided over a serious erosion of civil liberties
at home during the war, was no stranger to moral compromises in foreign
policy: he had supported, for instance, China’s militarist president Yuan
Shikai against the nationalists allied with Sun Yat-sen in 1913 in the hope
of keeping America’s ‘Open Door’ to China.

Such expediencies were later to define the Cold War, in which the United
States, as Dean Acheson unironically proclaimed, was ‘willing to help people
who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live’.
Or, as the current national security adviser, trying to explain Bush’s
recent farewell calls on pro-American dictators in the Middle East, put it,
‘these folks . . . are on board with the freedom agenda and they are
pursuing it in their own fashion.’

Wilson’s rhetorical achievement – which distinguished him sharply from
traditional European practitioners of realpolitik – was to present America’s
strategic and political interests as moral imperatives, and its foreign
interventions as necessary acts of international responsibility. European
leaders periodically stressed their civilising mission, but no one before
Wilson endowed national exceptionalism with such a modern and unimpeachably
noble aspiration as ‘democracy’.

Intoxicated by the moral passions of Wilsonianism, American liberal
intellectuals would work harder than their European counterparts to justify
wars that political leaders promised would make the world safe for
democracy. These sincere believers would also be more vulnerable, when faced
with the collapse of their bold schemes, to the guilt-laden ‘fear that what
we had meant, and what alone could justify it all, was not the meaning and
the justification of those who will decide’ – Lippmann’s words, which
handily summarise the long, tormented mea culpas produced by liberal hawks
after the catastrophe in Iraq.

What neither hard-headed politicians nor their intellectual dupes fully
understood was how the rhetoric of liberalism and democracy had gone down in
the colonised world. Certainly, Wilson, working deep in a world run by and
for white men, could have little sense of the bitterness and disillusionment
felt by his ‘darkie’ admirers. But the excuse of racial and intellectual
seclusion could not be claimed by apparently liberal politicians and
journalists who stridently echoed Wilson’s rhetoric after the collapse of
Communism when the world seemed riper for remaking, more ready to absorb
Western values while fulfilling Western interests, than at any time since
1919.

‘We are all internationalists now,’ Tony Blair declared to the Chicago
Economic Club in April 1999, in the midst of bombing Serbia. ‘In the end,’
he said, ‘values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the
values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then
that is in our national interests too.’ Dazzled by the wealth and power of
fin-de-siècle America (as though returning the compliment after decades of
anglophilia among the American ruling class), Blair and other New Labourites
turned out to be the most eager European consumers of Wilson’s potpourri of
values and interests. Their eloquence proved useful to the most Wilsonian –
but also the most inarticulate – of American presidents, and his cronies.

The victories of the Cold War – and the giddy speculation that history had
reached the ideological terminus of liberal democracy – revived illusions of
omnipotence among an Anglo-American political and media elite that has
always known very little about the modern world it claims to have made.
Consequently, almost every event since the end of the Cold War – the rise of
radical Islam, of India and China, the assertiveness of oil-rich Russia,
Iran and Venezuela – has come as a shock, a rude reminder that the natives
of Delhi, Cairo and Beijing have geopolitical ambitions of their own, not to
mention a sense of history marked by resentment and suspicion of the
metropolitan West. The liberal internationalists persist, trying to revive
the Wilsonian moment in places where Anglo-American liberalism has been seen
as an especially aggressive form of hypocrisy. Increasingly, however, they
expose themselves as the new provincials, dangerously blundering about in a
volatile world.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is Temptations of the West: How to be
Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Beyond.