High-minded Wilson's world peace plan was hamstrung by difficulties

In an address to Congress on January 8 1918, President Wilson, a high-minded Ulster-Scot and Presbyterian, set out his ‘Fourteen Points’ for world peace.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856.

His paternal grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Strabane in 1807. He was named Thomas Woodrow after his maternal grandfather.

Until his early 20s he was known as ‘Tommy’ but in 1881 he reinvented himself as ‘Woodrow’.

He was the third of the four children of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister. He disappointed his parents by refusing to enter the Presbyterian ministry.

Even so he had the appearance of a Presbyterian minister and often sounded like one too.

Woodrow briefly practised law but abandoned the profession to study political science and history and to become an academic.

Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ were a mixture of general principles and specific recommendations. The first six principles were general but the remaining eight were related to specific political and territorial issues.

A number of difficulties and anomalies arose when it came to applying the general principles of the ‘Fourteen Points’, especially the concept of self-determination.

The term ‘national self-determination’ was coined by Lenin and the Bolsheviks and intended to encourage the disruption and break-up of empires in Europe and beyond.

Wilson appropriated the term (usually without the ‘national’ prefix) and for Wilson it would appear to have been a synonym for ‘popular sovereignty’ or ‘the consent of the governed’.

Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, asked a number of pertinent questions: ‘When the President talks of “self-determination” what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area or a community?’

Lansing deplored the fact that Wilson had ever hit on the calamitous phrase: ‘It will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called a dream of an idealist who failed to realise the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force.’

As Margaret Macmillan has accurately pointed out in her book ‘Peacemakers’, ‘Wilson was intolerant of differences and blind to the legitimate concerns of others and thus paid little attention to what he regarded as ‘niggling objections‘ from Lansing.

Lansing wondered what exactly constituted a nation and whether nationhood was dependent on shared citizenship or shared ethnicity.

Did nationhood require self-government, and if so, how much? Could nationhood be accommodated within a larger multinational state?

As the United States was a community predominantly composed of immigrants from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, Wilson’s presumption against multi-ethnic empires might be construed as arrogant and naïve.

What role did religion, language and culture play in all this? For example: did Polish-speaking Protestants in Posen (Poznań in Polish) have more in common with their German co-religionists than with Polish Roman Catholics?

Thanks to the soirées musicales given in the White House by Jan Paderewski (the Polish pianist and composer, politician, and spokesman for Polish independence, who was the prime minister and foreign minister of Poland in 1919),

Wilson was very favourably disposed to Polish self-determination.

A cynic might suggest that an even more pertinent consideration was that Chicago was the second largest ‘Polish’ city in the world after Warsaw.

Those who view Wilson first and foremost as an idealist may be genuinely shocked at how many of his ‘Fourteen Points’ neatly dove-tailed with the electoral interests of the Democratic Party.

Article XIII of Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ provided for ‘an independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant’.

What exactly was meant by ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’? How could a revived Poland be given ‘free and secure access to the sea’?

Since eastern and central Europe was an ethnic and linguistic mosaic, finding territory that was ‘indisputable’ was difficult enough but Poles themselves could not even agree among themselves as to what constituted ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’.

On one hand, those who demanded borders from their widest extent in the past would end up with a state with a great many non-Poles. On the other, those prepared to settle for the Polish heartland would leave many Poles living outside the new state.

As to providing the new Polish state with ‘a free and secure access to the sea’, Danzig, a city which was overwhelmingly German in both population and culture, was the obvious answer.

Since Danzig was 95% German, at Lloyd George’s prompting, it was made an autonomous free city under the auspices of the League of Nations.

This compromise ultimately failed to please either Germans or Poles and was the ruination of Danzig’s prosperity because the Poles created a new port across the bay which deprived the old city of much of its trade.

Eventually Wilson found the Poles tiresome, referring to ‘our troublesome friends the Poles’. When Clemenceau told Wilson that Paderewski had wept at a private meeting he had with the Polish leader about Danzig, Wilson was dismissive: ‘Yes, but you must take account of his sensitivity which is very lively.’

Significantly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill’s Atlantic Charter of August 1941, a general statement of liberal principles on which a post-war international settlement might be based, studiously avoided any of the specific commitments of the kind which had caused Wilson so much embarrassment.

FDR and his advisers were acutely aware of the difficulties in which Wilson had found himself in 1919 as a result of prior commitment to the ‘Fourteen Points’.