Abstract
President Woodrow Wilson s legacy once more seemed highly relevant in the post-Cold War world. The principle of national self-determination, at the core of his vision of a new world order, appeared to offer guidance in the international politics of the 1990s. Dilemmas of national self-determination that had plagued Wilson also troubled Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. The resurgence of nationalism after the Cold War raised ethnocultural questions, along with strategic and economic problems, like those that Wilson had faced during World War I and at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Recent U.S. presidents, like Wilson earlier, attempted with their European partners to resolve these dilemmas at an acceptable cost to the great powers. Conflicts that nationalism spawned, both within and among states, still thwarted the creation of a new world order in conformity with Wilson’s ideals.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Dilemmas of National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy,” in The Establishment of European Frontiers after the Two World Wars, eds. Christian Baechler and Carole Fink (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), 21–36. Reprinted by permission of Peter Lang AG.
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Notes
Alfred Cobban, The Nation State and National Self-Determination (London: Collins, 1969), 104.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 81.
Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds., The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925–7), 1: 60–2, 336–7, 360–7.
G. R. Conyne, Woodrow Wilson: British Perspectives, 1912–21 (London: Macmillan, 1992).
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 30, 54.
Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–13.
Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 212.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 119–22, 137, 167;
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 130–1.
Baker and Dodd, Public Papers, 1: 159–78; Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1870–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 263.
Baker and Dodd, Public Papers, 1: 43–59; Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1962), 196–226.
Baker and Dodd, Public Papers, 1: 310–59, 396–415; 2: 1–23. For various theories of nationalism, see John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–131.
For a critique of Wilson’s response to Bolshevism, see Lloyd C Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
David W. McFadden, Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Georg Schild, Between Ideology and Realpolitik: Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995);
David Foglesong, Americas Secret War Against Bolshevism: United States Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Betty Miller Unterberger, The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989);
Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Wilsonian Self-Determination,” Diplomatic History 16 (Winter 1992): 141–8.
David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 67.
Paul Mantoux, The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919), ed. Arthur S. Link with the assistance of Manfred F. Boemeke, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1: 479–80, 496–9; Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition, 11, 51–79, 107–35.
Important studies on Wilson’s peacemaking include Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);
Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986);
and Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
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© 2002 Lloyd E. Ambrosius
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Ambrosius, L.E. (2002). Dilemmas of National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy. In: Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403970046_10
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