The Success and Failure of Woodrow Wilson’s Civic Nationalism

• In Event: Analytical Frames in International History and Politics

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson’s uniquely civic concept of self-determination was a successful domestic ideology that was unable to meet its foreign policy goals. Drawing on Getachew (2019), Stilz (2019), and Manela (2007), I argue that Wilsonian self-determination, America’s governing principle in the Great War, was an iteration of its European source that was successfully refashioned through American liberalism, but ultimately failed when brought into a postwar international community that could not decouple itself from ethnic categories. Contrary to critics, Wilsonian self-determination was an internally coherent philosophy. Yet this coherence produced two tensions, leading to its condemnation following the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. First, the originality of Wilsonian self-determination produced unoriginal outcomes. Wilson proposed a novel nationalism based on non-ethnic categories such as citizenship and participation. These requisites, however, were defined through a progressive American liberalism, where populations had to earn their status as nations. Lurking behind Wilsonian self-determination was an affirmation of independence that, though departing from the ethnic sensitivity of communist regimes, nevertheless issued its own set of nation-hood criteria. The standards conceived to distinguish self-determination from conditional nationalism became yet another set of ‘hoops’ that colonies had to jump through. Second, the civic standards by which national recognition could be denied echoed the very racial categories they were meant to transcend. In denying certain peoples sovereignty, Wilson returned to the particularities of race. Although civic standards were invoked, a non-civic judgment was made to exclude peoples and rebind them in ethnic and racial categories. Wilson’s humanist liberalism of civic participation then revealed, once again, group sensitivities and divisions made along cultural and racial lines.

Author

• Theodore Lai Wenming, Georgetown University