Ronald Steel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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I think it is, because Wilson essentially was arguing that the United States had a great mission in the world, and that mission was to transform the world into an American image, that the values of American society were universal values. What the United States had to do was to help other countries and other societies move toward these goals.
When we look at something that seems to be hardcore politics, like the decision of Woodrow Wilson to take the United Sates into World War I, normally decisions like that are made on balance-of-power grounds, or we have connections to allies, or this vague concept called "national interest." When Wilson took the United States into World War I, his major argument was a philosophical or an ideological one. He said, "We've got to do this to make the world safe for democracy," which is certainly nothing that most congressmen cared about. They were angry because German subs were sinking American ships, or they were sympathetic to Britain, or they were worried that American loans wouldn't get paid back by Britain if Britain lost the war, this sort of thing.
But Wilson always put everything on a higher moral plane, even when he was dealing in power politics. I think that that's very appealing to Americans. I think there is in our national history, in our national character, a belief that the United States represents something very different in the world. Tom Paine said, "We have the power to start the world anew"; this imposes an obligation to help spread these values.
At periods when the United States seems to be very strong and can make a difference, and the sacrifices did not seem so great, Americans are captivated by this missionary role. I think Wilson was very much a missionary in that sense.
Does that tap into our religious tradition, that puritanical tradition and whatever other traditions make up the way we do religion?
There is a strong religious belief of serving a higher cause. It could either be a god or it can be even a notion of a proper form of social organization, or of government. Religion plays a very important role in American life. This is a country where ... isn't it something like 60 or 70 percent of the population declare themselves to be born again? Where virtually nobody would want to be considered as irreligious, where appeals to religion are enormously popular. So this fusion of American idealism with religion is very powerful. The whole expansion of the West, the frontier movement, the enormous expansion of the country in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was described, and still is, as the period of "manifest destiny," which implies a supernatural cause or inspiration for it.
Periodically, American presidents say -- and Wilson always spoke these terms -- "I know that we are on the path that God instructed us," or "God told me to do this and do that." It's striking that President Bush does the same thing today. In most countries, except for Islamic fundamentalist ones, secular leaders would be loathe to do that. They might be embarrassed to do that, and it seems impolitic to do so. Look at France today, where the government has made a major political issue of banning headscarves for Muslim girls in public schools. Whereas in this country, the president wants tax for aid to religious schools. And a significant number of people believe in it, too.
Some of these themes also resonate in popular culture, don't they? That is, the notion of civilizing the barbarians, the sheriff coming into a town and bringing law and order to it, and then departing from the scene?
Yes, that's another very strong theme in America life, that the society that moves into the wilderness and civilizes it. Part of the civilization mission can be religious in inspiration, too. But religion can provide a very powerful justification, either for charitable things or for other things that are not so charitable -- even for exploitation, because you can find religious justifications for racism, for example, if you're looking for it.
And for war.
Or for war, all the time. All religions use that, particularly all monotheistic religions. So we see in Islam today invocations to God continually, but we also see it even in our own rhetoric, too, and even with regard to our what the current administration and the president call the "war against terror."
We'll talk about that in a minute, but let's go back for a minute to Wilson, because he put this package together, and argued for, on the one hand, self-determination -- that is, we would give other people the right of self-determination -- and on the other hand, we would provide collective security so they don't have to worry about aggression across their borders. So these two political concepts were the way he formalized this missionary zeal. Talk a little about that.
Self-determination was a burning issue, particularly at World War I, because the war had started, in part, because of the composition of the Austrian Hungarian empire, which was full of all kinds of people, mostly in Eastern Europe, who felt that their nationality groups were oppressed. The war began when a Serbian nationalist killed the archduke who was visiting and inspecting the empire. So you have in Eastern Europe all these seething nationality groups that wanted their own state. So Wilson made the granting of self-determination to these people a major part of his platform for entering the war.
The only problem was, how do you decide how to draw the borders of anything? You say, "Okay, we'll give the Czechs their own land," or give the Serbs their own land, or give Moldavians their own land, etc., etc. But people don't live in such neat, geographical areas, they spread out all over. Self-determination turned out to be much more difficult to apply in practice than it did in theory. Look at the Middle East today. We're still living with some of the decisions made in Paris at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 about self-determination. Iraq itself is a creation of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire. It was carved up, and three different nationality groups, at least, or ethnic groups, were put in there.
So self-determination, which sounds like a perfectly laudable principle, can be an enormous headache to apply. And also, you can argue that it's not a tolerant solution. It's not a solution and it's not tolerant, because it says that people who have the same something -- same language, same ethnicity (usually it means ethnicity), or same religion -- should all live together. Well, not only are they spread out, but it also implies that people of different nationalities and religions can't live together peacefully. It contradicts the whole history of the United States, which is based on people of different faiths and languages and backgrounds living together peacefully. So this was a contradiction.
It turned out to be a nice rallying cry for people seeking these lands, but an enormous headache for anybody trying to apply it, just as, for example, an enormous headache for the United States today in Iraq. Once we assumed control over Iraq then we're responsible for their ambitions.
The beauty of [the goal of] self-determination is that it allows us to be doing good in the world, and pointing other peoples in the directions of our way of doing government.
Yes, but it isn't doing much ...
No.
It's doing harm, that is the problem.
It is part of the self-deception that we have.
Yes, it seems like a good principle ...
Yes. Now, what about collective security? Because collective security, and Wilson's inability to get that through the Senate, was his downfall.
This emerged from the traditional European political international relations system, which is based upon a system for keeping under control states that grow too powerful, and which become too aggressive. The traditional way of doing so, ever since the middle of the seventeenth century when the state system came to dominate, was through alliances. If one state gets too strong, the weaker ones will join forces to balance it off. For long periods, that system worked pretty well. It worked for a hundred years, more or less, during the nineteenth century, but it all broke down in 1914 with the First World War. So then there was a feeling that there was something wrong with the whole alliance system, that it was unstable.
Wilson, who always believed he had better plans to remake the world, said, "We got to do away with alliances, because they don't provide the peace. We've got to have something ..." that he called collective security, which is, in effect, the principle of NATO, more than the United Nations, that you get all the nations all the world together, and they all agree that they will protect the peace. If any nation offends this peace, some lawbreaker, then they'll all join forces against them. Well, that sounds very nice in theory.
He presented this to the United States Senate, and they said, "You mean automatically we've got to go to war when Albania feels threatened by Serbs?" There was an enormous fight in the Senate, "No, the United States doesn't do that. We've got to have the right to decide what issues we want to get involved in war about." So the Senate turned down the treaty.
And, indeed, we're having the same argument today, too. The majority of countries in the United Nations had a very different attitude toward Iraq and the Iraq War than we did. But never would we say, "Well, the United Nations, therefore, can prevent us from doing this." We give lip service to collective security because it seems like a good thing in itself, and we'll use it -- any powerful state will use it when it works to their advantage, and when it doesn't work, if they're strong enough, they'll ignore it.
Looking at the United State's role in the world, and the power, the global reach it has, you were suggesting earlier that when the Cold War is over and we lose our Soviet adversary, or when we are going to go into Iraq, taking a particular case, and say we're looking for weapons of mass destruction, and in both cases, either the Cold War ends, or in the case of Iraq, we discover there are no weapons, we seem to fall back on these Wilsonian ideas about what we're doing.
Wilsonian ideals sometimes can be a useful refuge, because you can pick and choose among them. You can say, "Well, we like certain Wilsonian ideals," (we the government) "for example, democracy." So that's one of the big programs of American governments, and certainly of the Bush administration, that our problems come from countries in the grip of fundamentalism, let's say, or that are very anti-American. "It comes from the fact that they don't have enough democracy. If only the people could express themselves, then everything would be different. You wouldn't have all these fanatical, evil rulers, like Saddam Hussein. So we're going to promote democracy." Democracy promotion has become a kind of mantra in the Bush administration. It was for Clinton, too, but not quite to this degree.
The notion is that America is a democratic society; it works here, it should work for everybody in the world -- not only in their own society, but internationally, too. This is all very nice, and it's Wilsonianism, sure. But then there are other parts of Wilsonianism that we don't want to deal with. One is self-determination, except where it doesn't pose problems. Another is collective security. Look at the run-up to the Iraq War. We went to the United Nations -- perfunctorily, because we knew there was opposition -- trying to get a majority in the Security Council to approve it. We couldn't do so, [so we] went ahead and [invaded] anyway. So ...
And in Kosovo, we didn't even bother to go to the UN.
No. No, no. So it's one of these things that if you're a powerful enough state, you pick and choose among all these worthy doctrines that you like, and then hold them up for others to observe, in cases where it suits your interest.
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