AAnievas - International Relations Between War & Revolution_Published

Original Article

International relations between war andrevolution: Wilsonian diplomacy and the makingof the Treaty of Versailles

Alexander AnievasDepartment of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, The Alison Richard Building,7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract The Peace Treaties of 1919 retain a prominent place within the study ofInternational Relations (IR).The theoretical significance of Versailles for IR can hardlybe overstated. For much rests on the question of whether the post-war settlementwas problematic due to its liberal nature or in spite of it. Yet, explanations as to whyVersailles diplomacy was so problematic vary significantly. What were the centralfactors affecting policymaking at Versailles? And what does Paris Peace diplomacy tellIR theory about modern foreign policymaking processes? This article provides a critiqueof standard IR interpretations of Wilsonian diplomacy at Versailles, illustrating howrealist and liberals’ uncritical acceptance of Wilson as the quintessential ‘idealist-liberal’statesman glosses over a core contradiction at the heart of Wilsonian diplomacy:the wielding of power politics to transcend power politics. In doing so, it examines theeffects of the Bolshevik revolution as a paradigm-rupturing event transforming thenature and dynamics of the First World War and the post-war settlement. This tracesthe unique sociological patterns of uneven and combined development thrown up by thewar and the geopolitical problems this created for Wilson and the Allies in forging a newinternational order.International Politics (2014) 51, 619–647. doi:10.1057/ip.2014.26

Keywords: historical sociology; uneven and combined development; Marxism;First World War; Treaty of Versailles; Wilsonianism

Introduction

The Peace Treaties of 19191 retain a prominent place within the study of InternationalRelations (IR), provoking more debate and controversy over the origins, nature andlimits of ‘international order’ than any other major post-war settlement in modernhistory. The theoretical significance of Versailles for IR can hardly be overstated.

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For much rests on the question of whether the post-war settlement was problematicdue to its liberal nature or in spite of it. Historians and IR scholars have longemphasized the fundamental flaws and illegitimacy of the Versailles settlement as acentral factor contributing to the geopolitical instabilities of the interwar years. Yet,explanations as to why Versailles diplomacy was so problematic vary significantly.What were the central factors affecting policymaking at Versailles? And what doesParis Peace diplomacy tell IR theory about modern foreign policymaking processes?Given the many similarities between the two post-war eras, it is productive to enquireinto the conditions and factors that resulted in such different conclusions: theproblematic ‘Versailles system’ as compared to more durable and peaceful interna-tional order after World War II (WWII).

Despite the differing explanations of the ‘Lost Peace’ at Versailles, most interpre-tations stress the problems caused by the unprecedented divergence of policymakers’conceptions of post-war international order. Unlike previous peace settlementsamong the Great Powers such as the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Peace ofUtrecht (1713–1715) and the Congress of Vienna (1815), the Versailles peacemakersheld ‘fundamentally different perspectives about the nature of international politics,significantly diverging diagnoses of the causes of the Great War, and largely incom-patible recipes for constructing the peace’ (Holsti, 1991, p. 178; see Ikenberry, 2001,p. 117). In standard IR interpretations, these conflicting perspectives are associatedwith specific statesmen – Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson – conceived asideal-type representations of the two dominant IR paradigms: realism and liberalism.IR debates over the nature and problems of the peace settlement are thus largelyformulated from this perspective of a ‘realist/idealist’ (or ‘power/utopianism’)dichotomy. Nation-states are conceived as characters in a Greek tragedy: charactersidentified by the ideological attributes of their most prominent policymakers whoseideas and actions reflect IR theories themselves.

In IR interpretations, it is not surprising then that the role of Woodrow Wilson in themaking of the peace figures prominently as what became commonly referred to as‘Wilsonianism’ is synonymous with idealism/utopianism. Despite the generally recog-nized significance of Wilsonian diplomacy at the Paris Peace conference, IR interpreta-tions of Wilsonianism remain devoid of any historically contextualized sociologicalanalysis. The idealism/utopianism framework is not only an entirely inappropriateframework for conceptualizing Wilsonianism in theory and practice, but betrays anumber of deeper methodological and theoretical dilemmas at the heart of realist andliberal international theories. Indeed, a fundamental problem common to both liberalaccolades and realist critiques of Wilson and his foreign policy legacy is their readinessto internalize the idea that Wilson was indeed the great progressive liberal thinker whoseultimate goal was to ‘make the world safe for democracy’. The obvious question is: howtrue a picture of Wilson’s thinking and diplomacy is this? Or, more precisely, what kindof liberal was Wilson? Answering these questions requires the contextualization of histhought in their historical conditions critically defined by an intersocietal dimension.2

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An aim of this article is to take more seriously than IR theory has hitherto thehistorically contextual socio-economic and political origins of Wilson’s thoughtand action. It is not to deny the genuineness of the ideals Wilson proclaimed. Themethod of critique cannot simply be reduced to a case of exposing Wilsonianismas a ‘realist wolf in idealist sheep clothing’ (Anthony, 2008); but, rather, necessitatesa critical reassessment of the historical development and nature of Wilsonianideology taken on its own terms, in its own time. This is a particularly importantpoint for Foreign Policy Analysis. For if one is to take the motivations of actorsseriously, then an accurate understanding of the ideological framework guiding theiraction is fundamental.

The central hypothesis of this article can be stated as such: Wilsonianism as anideology and ‘grand strategy’ of US foreign policy was both the result and intendedsolution to the social and geopolitical consequences of the ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’development of industrial capitalism. It aimed at the ‘geopolitical management ofcombined development’ (Rosenberg, 1996, p. 12), seeking to counter revolutionarystates emerging from patterns of uneven and combined development while reformingtraditional atavistic forms of imperialism into an international order of capitalistcooperation among the great powers. Contrary to his realist critics and (some) liberalproponents, the central guiding principle behind Wilson’s thought and action wasnot, however, an attempt to transcend the anarchic consequences of this staggeredand interactive capitalist industrialization process so much as to ameliorate their mostexplosive elements. For Wilson, this was to be achieved through the construction ofa rule-governed liberal capitalist international order modelled on an idealized notionof the American system itself. Such thinking was based on a unilinear and stagistmodel of social development rooted in nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkingfused with the unique historical experience of US development. This ideology ofAmerican ‘liberal-developmentalism’, as Emily Rosenberg terms it (1982), wascharacterized by a firm conviction in the superiority of the American social systemand a faith in the ability of other nations to repeat its developmental experience.

This article first provides a critique of standard IR interpretations of Wilsoniandiplomacy, illustrating how realist and liberals’ uncritical acceptance of Wilsonas the quintessential ‘idealist-liberal’ statesman glosses over a core contradictionat the heart of Wilsonian diplomacy: the wielding of power politics to transcendpower politics. It goes on to provide an alternative interpretation of Wilson’s diplo-macy through a close textual reading of his writings and speeches contextualizedwithin their changing socio-historical environment. Second, it examines the effectsof the Bolshevik revolution as a paradigm-rupturing event transforming the natureand dynamics of WWI. From this perspective, it scrambles the traditionally assumedhistoriographical periodizations of the Cold War in demonstrating how an‘early Cold War’ derailed any chance for a satisfactory (‘legitimate’) peace treaty,indirectly paving the way for a second global conflagration some 20 years later(see Anievas, 2011).

International relations between war and revolution

621© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748 International Politics Vol. 51, 5, 619–647

Wilsonian Liberalism and IR Theory

An essential continuity of US strategic thinking since WWII has been the imperativeto remake the world in its own image. Central to this has been the distinct belief thatthe flourishing of US democracy, prosperity and security are necessarily connectedwith the maintenance of a liberal-capitalist international order. The origins of thisthinking can be directly traced back to Woodrow Wilson and his injunction to ‘makethe world safe for democracy’. If only in this sense, ‘Wilsonianism’ can be creditedas the fundamental component of post-WWII American foreign policy ideology(cf. Holsti, 1991; Kissinger, 1994; Smith, 1994; Ruggie, 1998; Ninkovich, 1999;Bucklin, 2001; Ikenberry, 2001; Ambrosius, 2002).3

It is then hardly surprising that Wilson(ianism) holds such a prominent placewithin the ‘American discipline’ (Hoffmann, 1977) of IR. Perhaps no other modernpolicymaker is as often evoked as the canonical liberal statesmen than PresidentWilson (see, for example, Waltz, 1959; Russett, 1993; Ikenberry et al, 2009). Hisrole at the Paris Peace Conference in the creation of the post-war international orderremains a central issue in both historiographical and IR debates on the Versaillessettlement. Yet the nature of Wilson’s vision for constructing the post-war inter-national order, as well as the means through which he pursued this vision, has beenan issue of great dispute among historians (see Coogan, 1994; Steigerwald, 1999).This is anything but apparent when approaching these issues through the lens of IRstudies. For, as Michael Cox notes (2000, p. 235), ‘while realists and liberals mightdisagree about nearly everything else, both seem to accept at face value the claim thatWilson was a true enlightenment figure whose ultimate goal was to make the world amore democratic place’. How so?

Liberal–realist convergence

For the new deans of post-war US realism, Walter Lippmann, George F. Kennan andHans J. Morgenthau, Wilsonianism was synonymous with the interwar ‘utopianism’

E.H. Carr so bitterly condemned. Wilson was viewed as the paradigmatic ‘idealist’thinker in American foreign policymaking history: an unworldly man both ignorantand disdainful of the realities of power politics. Wilsonianism was thus a doctrineinherently antithetical to the American ‘national interest’ – a pathological deviationfrom traditional US foreign policy thinking (see Carr, 1939; Lippmann, 1944;Morgenthau, 1950, 1977; Kennan, 1951).

In contrast to realist approaches to Wilsonianism, liberal IR stresses the visionarynature of Wilson’s diplomacy. For Democratic Peace Theorists, Wilson is conceivedas a kind of modern-day prophet expounding Kant’s vision of ‘perpetual peace’. The‘normative basis of Wilson’s vision of world order’, Bruce Russet writes (1993, p. 4),‘grew naturally from his progressive inclinations in domestic politics… his Fourteen

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Points sound almost as though Kant were guiding Wilson’s writing hand’ (see alsoDoyle, 1997). Across a wide spectrum of liberal IR approaches, Wilson’s fight toextend the institutions of national sovereignty and international law is viewed asa decisive step in the progressive realization of a normatively regulated global civilsociety (see, for example, Mayall, 1990; Smith, 1994; Clark, 1997; Reus-Smit, 1999;Jackson, 2000). His legacy in US foreign policy is thus widely praised – a model forhow America should conduct itself in world politics (see also Kegley, 1993; Ruggie,1993; Smith, 1994; Ikenberry, 2001; Ikenberry et al, 2009).

More broadly, Wilsonianism is conceived as a paradigm shift: from the ‘OldDiplomacy’ of European secret treaties, imperialism and balance of power alliancesto the ‘New Diplomacy’ of collective security, open covenants, national self-determination and the creation of a law-based international order predicated upona community of liberal democratic states. On this account, the fundamental problemsof Versailles were not a result of its ‘Wilsonianism’, as realists suggest, but rather aconsequence of Wilson’s inability to fully implement his liberal internationalistpeace programme. Further compounding these problems was the Congress’s sub-sequent rejection of the Versailles Treaty and thus US membership of the Leagueof Nations. Consequently, the United States failed to play a leading and stabilizingrole in the international relations of the interwar years as it retreated into geopolitical‘isolationism’. Wilson’s failure is then overwhelmingly viewed as a failure in politi-cal leadership: a function of the inability of self-organizing political elites to imple-ment a liberal internationalist agenda on an overwhelmingly conservative RepublicanCongress (Holsti, 1991; Ikenberry, 2001; Legro, 2005).

A fundamental problem with these liberal analyses of Wilsonian diplomacy, oneshared by realist approaches, is their apparent willingness to uncritically accept theidea that Wilson was indeed a truly ‘progressive’ liberal thinker whose primary goalwas to ‘make the world safe for democracy’. The key difference between realist andliberal assessments of Wilson(ianism) is that whereas realists critique Wilson forhaving pursued a progressive vision of international order, liberals applaud him. Yet,the obvious question is ‘to what extent is this portrait an accurate one?’ (Cox, 2000,p. 235). Or, more precisely, what kind of a liberal was Wilson? Although liberalinterpretations are correct in linking Wilson’s conception of domestic politics withinternational order, there is a persistent misunderstanding (or one-dimensional under-standing) of what this conception was. Did Wilson’s foreign policy thought andaction conform to the canonical status of liberalism associated with him? If Wilsonis indeed the quintessential liberal statesman IR conceives him as, what then is thesignificance of his diplomacy for liberal IR theory?

Once such questions are penetrated, the idealism/realism-power/utopianism edificeupon which ‘textbook’ IR narratives of Versailles diplomacy are built quicklycrumbles. The reason for this is clear: working within these dichotomous under-standings of Wilsonianism, its relation to the making of Versailles and the interwaryears more generally, conventional IR studies exclude what is key to any enquiry into



the determining role of foreign policy ideologies: their constitutive social powerrelations. For, precisely, what is ‘Wilsonianism’ and liberal internationalismin general for and about? What forms of social relations do they seek to extend,defend and legitimatize? There is, in other words, a need to systematically rethink‘Wilsonianism’ through the social category of capitalism. For liberalism as acomprehensive corpus of thought only arises with, and indeed presupposes, capitalistsocial relations. This crucial context is either uncritically assumed or altogetherexcluded within these IR frameworks (for example, Holsti, 1991; Kegley andRaymond, 1999). Yet only by linking the emergence of Wilsonianism as a foreignpolicy ideology with the development of capitalism as a tendentially global,but internationally fragmented, social system, can one begin to explain its socialconditions of possibility, as well as decipher its social content. From this perspec-tive, Wilsonianism can be interpreted as the flip side of realism, not its inherentnegation.

The liberal confrontation with ‘the international’, as a dimension of humanexistence where the problem of difference reaches its apogee, necessitates so-called‘realist’ policies, exemplified by the historically pervasive use of force and power-politics to extend and maintain capitalist social relations in competition with othercapitalist states. From the ‘so-called primitive accumulation of capital’ Marx tracedin the emergence of capitalist property relations in late seventeenth-century Englandto President Wilson’s many interventions in the Global South to the recent US-ledwars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of state power and ‘brute force’ remains‘economic powers’ integral to the world-historical development of capitalism (Marx,1976, Chapter 26). The reproduction of the liberal state’s own sovereign assumptions(the differentiation of economic and political and the ‘internal’ and ‘external’)depends on the systematic use or threat of force in both its domestic and internationalspheres. Similarly, liberal states employ force in the international sphere, maintaininginternational law and open trading regimes as President Wilson’s many militaryinterventions to uphold the ‘rule of law’ or sanctity of ‘private property’ in the GlobalSouth demonstrate.

In liberal internationalist thinking, as with Wilsonian diplomacy, the imperative torecreate the world in its own image, through forceful interventionism if necessary, isinscribed in its very generative grammar: as it conceptualizes Western liberal (forWilson, American) society as not only the highest stage of human development, butalso as the only cure for anarchy’s perpetual state of conflict. Societies deemedun-liberal and non-democratic are thus conceived as security risks to be dealt withaccordingly, thereby reproducing a heightened security dilemma between liberal andnon-liberal states. Hence, as Beate Jahn notes, the ‘tendency toward interventionism isinseparable from general liberal beliefs in the nature of nonliberal societies’ (2005,p. 180). The inherent unevenness of development, and the societal differences resultingfrom it, thereby confronts liberal internationalism with conditions in which the syste-matic use of force becomes a necessary tool of order-building and maintenance.

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Moreover, the liberal internationalist credentials of Wilson are much moreproblematic than is often assumed within conventional IR approaches, realist andliberal alike. For if Wilson was indeed a liberal-internationalist he was of a veryparticular kind: one who persistently conceived of ‘internationalism’ in terms ofserving narrowly defined US national interests – above all, the pursuit of US globalsupremacy. This then explains the deep continuities between the policies of hisadministration and the succeeding Republican administrations of the 1920s (seeParrini, 1969; Rosenberg, 1982; Costigliola, 1984; Gardner, 1984; Offner, 1986;Ambrosius, 2002; Hannigan, 2002; Cohrs, 2006; Tooze, 2014). For if we are torecognize ‘Wilson for what he was’, Adam Tooze writes, then we realize that he wasmuch less the liberal internationalist that IR approaches have made him out to be than‘an exponent of turn-of-the-century high nationalism, bent on asserting America’sexceptional claim to pre-eminence on a global scale’ (2014, p. 348). This wasa kind of ‘triumphant nationalism’, as President Warren G. Harding put it, whichwas, Tooze goes on to note, ‘as apt a description of the policies of the Republicanadministrations in the 1920s as it was of Wilson’s own administration. Triumphantnationalism was not inward-turning or isolationist. It was by definition addressedto an outside world, but it spoke in terms that were unilateral and exceptionalist’(2014, p. 348; emphasis added).

Obscuring the role of force and violence in the extension and reproduction ofcapitalist relations, standard IR approaches inadequately grasp the social origins andpurpose of Wilsonian diplomacy and the means through which it was pursued.If realism is deficient in appreciating the socio-historical embeddedness of Wilsoniandiplomacy within the US foreign policy tradition, liberal interpretations unreflexi-vely reproduce its presuppositions, thereby failing to explore the inherent limitsand contradictions of its policies. Assuming the combination of American ‘excep-tionalism’ with unilinear and stagist conceptions of social development, liberalIR approaches – like Wilson – conceive the American system as a universal phase ofdevelopment through which all countries must pass. Liberal IR thereby replicatesmany of the contradictions of Wilsonian diplomacy illustrating, in Andrew Hurrell’swords, the ‘easy slippage between liberal internationalism and liberal empire’(2007, p. 264). Is this ‘slippage’ something inherent to liberalism internationalism?Although no definitive answer can be provided here, analysis into the social sourcesand character of Wilsonian ideology should shed some light on these definitive issuesfacing contemporary world politics.

Wilsonianism in social and historical context

So what was the socio-historical content of Wilsonianism? At its most fundamentallevel, Wilsonianism represents both the result and intended solution to the ‘geo-social’ consequences of the uneven, interactive development of US and global



capitalism. Contrary to his realist critics and (some) liberal proponents, the centralguiding principle behind Wilson’s thought and action was not an attempt to transcendthe anarchic consequences of capitalism’s uneven and combined developmentso much as to ameliorate its more explosive elements. For Wilson, this was to beachieved through the construction of a rule-governed and racially hierarchical liberal-capitalist international order modelled on an idealized notion of the US system itself.Such thinking was based on a unilinear, stagist model of social development rootedin nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinking fused with the unique historicalexperience of US development – which, in Hegelian prose, was viewed as the endgoal of history. This ideology of American ‘liberal-developmentalism’ (Rosenberg,1982) was characterized by a firm conviction in the superiority of the US socialsystem and a faith in the ability of other nations to repeat its developmental expe-rience. Such thinking was rooted in Wilson’s own formative experiences of the CivilWar and Reconstruction, that came to fundamentally shape his foreign policiescharacterized by a powerful drive for international order through the creation of aracially hierarchical ‘community of powers’. Here we can examine the interconnec-tion between socio-material forces and ideas by situating Wilson’s world views inthe historical context of America’s uneven and combined development of the latenineteenth century.

Born in Virginia in 1856, Woodrow Wilson was just old enough to experiencethe ‘great American tragedy’ of the Civil War and its sectionalist legacy on the USsocio-political landscape was decisive on Wilson’s political thinking (Thorsen,1988). It instilled in Wilson a powerful drive for establishing order and uneasewith radical change. On the conflict’s eve, the United States was a ‘semi-industrialcountry’ constituted by an industrializing North-eastern manufacturing centre, aslave-based Southern agrarian economy and a vast, relatively unexploited Westernfrontier. The war itself was the result of the rising antagonisms generated by thesedifferential developmental trajectories – a ‘struggle between two social systems’,slavery and free labour (Marx and Engels quoted in Novack, 1976, p. 83).

In this sense, one can conceive of US development as both uneven and combined;an amalgamation of different modes of production within a single ramified socialstructure. The proceeding period of Northern-led Reconstruction perpetuated these‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’, as US society underwent a rapid pro-cess of industrialization/urbanization and nation state-formation within the context ofthe staggered, interactive development of capitalism on a world scale. Spawnedby the consolidation of a nationwide commercial market, expansion of financial mar-kets and the more extensive use of new transportation technologies, ‘by the 1870sAmerica underwent one of the most rapid transformations from an agrarian to anindustrial society ever experienced’ (Agnew, 1987, p. 12). Consequently, the reuni-fied Republic witnessed the compression of different ‘stages’ of development withina particularly concentrated time span. The results were socially and politicallyexplosive as witnessed in the dramatic socio-economic and political dislocations of

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the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century. It was against this backdrop ofprofound socio-political and racial divisions that Wilson came to stress the cause ofnational unity and social order with deeply racist undertones.

For Wilson, the defence of US social order and stability from projects of ‘radical’change at home and abroad was to be achieved through limited and necessarilygradual social reforms designed and implemented by white, ‘enlightened’ techno-cratic elite.4 Gradual reform was a means of buttressing not transforming thedomestic status quo and social-racial hierarchies. In view of the unprecedentedyears of social divisiveness within the United States at the turn of the century, acentral focus of Wilson’s writings and public addresses was the necessity of recrea-ting social order and transcending factionalism. This was to be achieved through therevitalization of America’s political institutions and economic expansionism.To these ends, Wilson sought strengthened executive leadership capable of resolvingantagonistic sectional interests and subsuming class conflict through the forgingof a robust common national consciousness (see Bell, 1972, pp. 17–21).

Wilson articulated an understanding of democracy explicitly formulated to addressthe perceived failings of the US democratic order, which he viewed as a ‘mixedblessing and of limited validity’ (Bell, 1972, p. 14). Democratic orders were, asWilson put it, ‘not so much … a form of government as a set of principles’ attainedby communities through a necessarily gradual, linear organic developmental process.Specifically, US democracy was ‘not a body of doctrine: but a stage of development’,based upon the nation’s superior Anglo-Saxon pedigree. Its ‘process was experience’emerging from the ‘long discipline which g[ave] a people self-possession, self-mastery, the habit of order and peace … the steadiness and self-control of politicalmaturity’ (Wilson, 1908, pp. 103–104; Wilson and Link, 1966, VI, p. 229).5 ForWilson, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon model was its fundamentally elitistnature posited upon the rule of the chosen few of ‘character’. Had the men ‘whocolonized America’ not ‘sprung of a race habituated to submit to law and authority’,Wilson wrote, they could have never ‘taken charge of their own affairs and combinedstability with liberty in the process of absolute self-government’ (1908, p. 103).Wilson’s conception of stagism was thus posited upon both extant socio-political andracial differences.

Presupposing American exceptionalism, Wilson viewed the institutions andvalues of the United States as politically and morally superior to all others. ‘America’represented a higher stage of historical development. Given the opportunity, therest of the world would naturally adopt the US developmental model. It was possiblethen for Wilson to fuse, with perfect internal consistency, US ‘national interests’ withuniversal ones: the two being naturally identical in his view. ‘American principles,American policies’, Wilson claimed, ‘are the principles and policies of forwardlooking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightenedcommunity. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail’ (quoted in Hoff,2008, p. 13). US commercial expansion was thus conceived as acting in the service of



human progress. ‘Lift your eyes to the horizons of business’, Wilson told aSalesmanship Congress in July 1916,

let your thoughts and your imaginations run abroad throughout the world, andwith the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant tocarry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, goout and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable, more happy, andconvert them to the principles of America. (quoted in Levin, 1968, p. 18)

Teleological conceptions of history, American exceptionalism, commercial expan-sionism and Anglo-Saxon chauvinism neatly intertwined in Wilson’s rendition ofthe ‘white man’s burden’ at the heart of his liberal internationalism. As President,Wilson reconstructed racial hierarchy within ‘America’s global mission’ on firmlyliberal-internationalist foundations (Ambrosius, 2007). The Anglo-Saxon powerswere conceived as sitting on top of a pyramid-like global racial hierarchy naturallybestowed with the task of managing the turbulent waters of international politics.A shared commitment to liberty and democracy derived from the Anglo-Saxons’superior racial origins ‘habituated to submit to law and authority’ distinguished themfrom the rest (Wilson, 1908, p. 103).

Such sentiments permeated US public debates in the run-up to the Spanish-American War. A watershed event in the history of US diplomacy, the Spanish-American War marked a ‘revelation on the importance of foreign affairs’ in Wilson’sthinking. Defending the War as ‘just’ and ‘inevitable’, Wilson identified himself with a‘paternalistic imperialism’ (Heckscher, 1991, p. 128).6 This fit with Wilson’s concep-tions of global racial hierarchy, intertwining with his concerns for national revitaliza-tion, social control and commercial expansion. Although the United States had ‘shownthe world enlightened processes of politics that were without precedent’, Wilson wrote,America could not simply ‘give’ the Filipinos self-government. For, as he went on,‘Self-government is not a thing that can be “given” to any people, it is a form ofcharacter … Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure them the preciouspossession’ (Wilson and Link, 1966, XVIII, p. 104). Three years earlier (1900), Wilsonbrought out the more explicitly imperial elements of this thinking, writing:

The East is to be opened and transformed … standards of the West are to beimposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuriesthrough are to be quickened, and made part of the universal world of commerceand of ideas … It is our peculiar duty, as it is also England’s, to moderate theprocess in the interests of liberty: to… teach them order and self-control in themidst of change… the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long agogot out of the strenuous processes of English history. (Wilson and Link, 1966,XII, p. 18)

The significance of Wilson’s racially hierarchical conception of international orderwould be later demonstrated in his truncated employment of the ‘self-determination’

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concept and the establishment of the colonial mandate system under the tutelage ofWilson’s ‘community of power’. For Wilson, then, the world was divided alongsocio-economic, political, cultural and racial stages of development in which thosestates that exhibited a higher form of development (the United States, for example)had the right, if not duty, to intervene in states of a lower stage of development.Taking this extant unevenness for granted, Wilson sought to transform it through theabstract universality of liberal institutions, culture and ideas that could, if properlyrooted through a long process of elite-guided adaptation, populate the world with likestates, thus making the world ‘safe for democracy’. Notably, then, Wilson’s politicalthinking was shot through with implicit assumptions regarding the uneven andheterogeneous nature of development and its geopolitical consequences that Wilsonsought to overcome.

Open Door frontierism

By the turn of the twentieth century, US political and business leaders concludedthat the marketing of America’s increasing manufacturing surpluses was necessaryto: (i) maintain economic growth and domestic prosperity and (ii) circumvent radicalsocio-political and economic reforms at home. In other words, to avoid anysubstantive redistribution of the relative shares of national income, there had to bean absolute increase in its volume. This was only possible if US state managers andcapitalists developed outlets for US goods and services commonly viewed as havingdeveloped in surplus of what could be profitably employed domestically (seeLaFeber, 1993).

An early advocate of Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’, Wilson viewedAmerica’s natural political-economic development as a function of its continualwestward expansion. The ‘meeting point between savagery and civilization’, asTurner called it (1966, p. 3), the Western frontier had been integral to America’sunique reconciliation of liberty and democracy into a project of imperialist expansion.The frontier’s closing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century necessitated USeconomic expansionism as a means to provide markets for the nation’s surplus goods,investment and energies. ‘For nearly three hundred years their [the American people]growth had followed a single law – the law of expansion into new territory’. AsWilson continually reiterated: ‘Our domestic market no longer suffices. We needforeign markets’ (Wilson and Link, 1966, XII, p. 11; XXV, p. 16).

For Wilson, the Philippines and other ‘backward’ countries provided the UnitedStates a ‘new frontier’. The Spanish-American War was thus a means to forge a senseof national solidarity within the United States.7 In ‘Democracy and Education’(1907), Wilson wrote:

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on havingthe world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of



the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessionsobtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if thesovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must beobtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may beoverlooked or left unused. Peace itself becomes a matter of conference andinternational combinations. Cooperation is the law of all action in the modernworld (Wilson and Link, 1966, XVII, p. 135).

There are few more revealing passages illustrating the ambiguities and contradictionsof Wilson’s conception of economic expansionism and its relation to state power andinternational cooperation. After noting the dialectic of (transnational) capitals and(nationally embedded) states, resulting in the employment of state power in theservice of the former, Wilson concludes with an injunction for the necessity ofinternational cooperation. Colonialism and inter-imperialist rivalry thus ultimatelydemanded ‘ultra-imperialist’ responses.

Avoiding the shame and inefficiencies of formal territorial control inconsistentwith narratives of ‘American exceptionalism’, an explicitly colonial strategy of USexpansionism was relatively short-lived. Instead, US policymakers, supported byleading factions of capitalists, soon adopted ‘non-territorial’ forms of expansionismmodelled after Secretary of State John Hay’s famous ‘Open Door Notes’ in 1899–1900. Originally formulated for the Chinese market, but subsequently globalized byWilson, the Open Door stipulated an equality of opportunity for the commerce of allnations. For Wilson and others, the Open Door was viewed as both a key means ofpromoting US interests and creating a world ‘community of interests’, the two beingviewed as mutually complementary. It further sought to reconstruct the internalstructures of societies, populating the world with a multiplicity of formally ‘likeunits’, thereby transforming the existing uneven and combined character of socialdevelopment.

In its pretences to non-territoriality the Open Door concept is unique, if somewhatmisleading. Indeed, its distinctiveness as a spatial concept of accumulation is that itideally presupposes a formally sovereign international system through which atransnational process of capital accumulation is facilitated. In this way, the OpenDoor reflected in ideal-utopian form the structural logic of capitalism’s differentiat-ing and equalizing tendencies. The reconstitution and transformation of statesovereignty under capitalist conditions in no way impinged upon its politicalterritoriality or de facto sovereignty in the juridical sense (see Rosenberg, 1994).Instead, as the Open Door strategy demonstrates, it could actually promote it. Undercapitalism, anarchy and hierarchy are mutually conditioning: one need not beget theother.

Furthermore, in ideological and economic ways, the Open Door was pre-ferable to other accumulation strategies that suffered from the material ineffi-ciencies and ideological discomfitures of formal empire. ‘The brilliance of liberal

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US internationalists in this period, with Woodrow Wilson as their flag-bearer’,Neil Smith writes:

lay in the implicit realization that the wedding of geography and economicsundergirding European capital accumulation was not inevitable… that economicexpansion divorced from territorial aggrandizement dovetailed superbly with USnational interests … US internationalism pioneered a historic unhinging ofeconomic expansion from direct political and military control over the newmarkets. (2003, pp. 141–142)

Given the massive economies of scale, enormous domestic market and advancedmass production techniques characterizing the US political economy by the turnof the twentieth century, state managers and corporate capitalists viewed the globalequalization of trade and investment conditions as necessarily favourable toUS-based capitals. Indeed, Wilson was confident that the extension of the OpenDoor abroad would disproportionally benefit US capital as ‘the skill of Americanworkmen would dominate the markets of all the globe’ (Wilson quoted in Kennedy,1980, p. 299).

This peculiarly trans-spatial, yet territorializing character of America’s ‘imperial-ism of anti-imperialism’ (Williams, 1972) must be further qualified by anotherimportant fact: the Open Door strategy presupposed a crucial moment of forceanalogous to the origins of capitalism itself. The forcible and often violent expro-priation of land from the Native Americans and Mexicans on the North AmericanContinent, the colonial wars and formal occupations in the Philippines (1898–1913)and Cuba (1898–1902, 1906–1909), and annexations of Hawaii and Puerto Ricoall crucially preceded the consolidation of a consistent Open Door strategy. AsGareth Stedman Jones remarks (1972, p. 66), ‘the whole internal history of USimperialism was one vast process of territorial seizure and occupation. The absenceof territorialism “abroad” was founded on an unprecedented territorialism “athome” ’.

The initial moment of force, moreover, prefigured subsequent trajectories of USforeign policymaking. The disintegration of social structures in the Global South,corollary to US attempts to impose market forces and capital relations, came to‘require’ later waves of US interventionism against the ‘nationalist revolutionary’social forces it engendered: thus perpetuating a vicious cycle of revolution andcounter-revolution. In these many ways, Open Door expansionism formed peculiarcombinations of non-territorial and territorial means of control serviced through anuneasy but potent mix of unilateral and multilateral tactics geared towards theconstruction of a ‘liberal-capitalist international order’ (Levin, 1968). Thus, far frommoderating the uneven and combined character of social developments in the GlobalSouth, an unintended consequence of the Open Door was to exacerbate these verytendencies: implanting market forces and capitalist relations onto such societies ininorganic ways, their development took convulsive and destabilizing forms



unhinging traditional social structures. In these ways, US foreign policymakers wereoften the unknowing agents of combined development.

Assuming the Open Door concept, Wilson viewed US economic security asfundamentally tied to the reorganization of the international political economy alongmore cooperative and formally democratic lines. The promotion of the globalizedOpen Door was in turn seen as a means to de-politicize international economicconflicts and secure the adequate socio-economic and political institutions to containsocial pressures accompanying early industrializing countries. ‘Wilsonianism’ was,then, the direct predecessor to US foreign policy thinking of the Cold War era – aunique synthesis of Realpolitik and modernization theory, which sought to employUS power in the service of creating a system of ‘coordinated economic interdepen-dence, based in part on the replication of aspects of the American model of capitalismin the rest of the capitalist world, from which many states could derive positivebenefit’ (Bromley, 2008, p. 9).

Wilsonian diplomacy followed an ‘expansionist-interventionist security logic’posited on the imperative to intervene in transforming the internal conditions ofsocieties abroad for both socio-economic and ‘security’ reasons. This focused on thenecessity to facilitate the ceaseless accumulation of capital perceived as integral to USsocial order and democracy. The security motive, in turn, sought to manage theanarchic consequences of international development as expressed in the revolutionarynationalist movements organically emerging from the uneven and combined patternsof social development in the Global South. The ‘tragedy of American diplomacy’, asWilliam Appleman Williams called it (1972), lay in how these two aims of USpolicymaking continually contradicted each other. The expansionist-interventionistsecurity logic resulted in the destabilization of international order, registered in thewaves of revolutionary nationalist movements following US interventions and thehothouse promotion of these societies in a capitalist direction. These resulted in furtherUS interventionist measures to maintain social order and the rule of law necessary forthe continuing existence of capitalist social relations. The cumulative effects of thesepolicies were to continually exacerbate international disorder and the centrifugaltendencies of political and economic power within the US society that, in their limitedways, the policies had been designed to ameliorate (see LaFeber, 1993).

US interventions into later-developing societies resulted in the grafting ofcapitalist social relations onto their existing (pre-capitalist) institutions, resulting insocially and geopolitically explosive amalgamations of socio-economic and politicalorders. What was at stake for the Wilsonians, then, was the ‘geopolitical manage-ment’ of these resulting combined forms of development as their revolutionaryeffects fed back into the dynamics of the international system. In these ways, theWilsonian imperative to promote the Open Door and its imposition of an abstractliberal universality sought to erase existing conditions of (geo)political and socio-economic unevenness while actually engendering novel forms of uneven andcombined development.

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The Making of a Social Peace?: Wilsonian and Inter-Allied Diplomacy atVersailles

Peace diplomacy as prelude to crisis in IR theory

Most standard IR analyses of the Thirty Years’ Crisis emphasize the fundamentalflaws and illegitimacy of the Versailles settlement as a central conjuncturalfactor contributing to the geopolitical instabilities of the interwar years (Carr, 1939;Morgenthau, 1950; Kennan, 1951; Hinsley, 1963; Clark, 1997; Schweller, 1998).While accounts vary as to why such an unfavourable outcome resulted from the post-war settlement, the few IR studies8 examining the Paris Peace negotiations largelyattribute its flaws to the sharp divergence of interests among the ‘Big Three’ (theUnited States, the United Kingdom and France) and the failure in elite politicalleadership, particularly on the part of President Wilson. In the ‘textbook’ rendition,French and British positions largely prevailed through a series of uneasy compro-mises whereby a diplomatically outmanoeuvred and domestically embattled Pre-sident Wilson acquiesced on a number of his central principles as articulated in theFourteen Points. The result was a Carthaginian peace dressed in Wilsonian garment,scarcely veiling the European victors’ imperial gains. This dictated peace sustainedthe illegitimate status quo international order, nurturing an intense dissatisfactionamong three of the four strongest Continental states (Germany, Russia and Italy),thus sowing the seeds for the next major war.

In the conventional IR literature, the politics of the peace settlement areoverwhelmingly conceived in socially ‘thin’ terms, reducible to military-strategiccalculations and/or abstract-ideological presuppositions. This is most dramaticallyexemplified in IR treatments (or non-treatments) of the Bolshevik Revolution’simpact on the course and outcome of the Paris Peace Conference and Wilson’sresponse to it. The very real threat of communist revolutions ‘spreading’ westwardfrom Russia to the vanquished nations during the peace negotiations scarcelyfigure into dominant IR narratives.9 Missing too are the severity of labour conflictsand social struggles within the victor countries themselves, as witnessed by themass of strikes and violent demonstrations in Britain, France and the United Statesin the immediate post-war period. In the absence of any examination of thesesocial processes, IR accounts of Versailles tend to conceptualize state actionas if it were entirely autonomous from social forces. Foreign policymakingis viewed as determined by discretely conceived geopolitical determinations (the‘balance of power’) and/or domestic regime-types. When social forces are givenexplanatory weight, they are filtered through the narrow prism of partisan poli-tics: unreflexively reproducing Wilson’s own truncated conception of politics(see, for example, Holsti, 1991; Ikenberry, 2001). Yet the class-based dynamics ofrevolution and counter-revolution cut across party politics and transcended nationalborders.10



Narrowly focusing on the strategic-military interactions among sovereign nation-states, both conventional historical narratives and theoretical perspectives largelyexclude these dimensions of modern international order-formation arising from thehistorically pervasive crucible of war, imperialism and revolution. By contrast, thissection aims to demonstrate how revolutions and social conflicts have been not onlycentral factors in the creation of the post-war international order, but also definingfeatures of its social content and purpose. As Wilson’s Press Secretary at Versaillesand official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker put it: ‘The effect of the Russianproblem on the Paris Conference … was profound: Paris cannot be understoodwithout Moscow. Without ever being represented at Paris at all, the Bolsheviki andBolshevism were powerful elements at every turn. Russia played a more vital part atParis than Prussia’ (1922, Vol. II, p. 64).

At Versailles, the Allied-Associated powers spent more time on the Russianquestion than any other issue. Of all the dilemmas facing Versailles policymakers,the social problems of revolution and disorder at home and abroad was most decisivein the making of the Peace. Policymakers were continually unable to ‘reach anunderstanding with the Bolshevik revolution or to crush it’. This largely explainswhy the Versailles produced such a particularly fragile and unstable post-warinternational order, particularly in its creation of such an ‘uneasy stalemate of powerin Eastern Europe’ (Thompson, 1966, p. 8; Stevenson, 1988, p. 237). The dual threatof Bolshevism abroad and socialist revolution at home crucially intersected with theother chief dilemma facing the peacemakers: how to treat the defeated CentralPowers (above all, Germany) and reintegrate them into a stable and prosperousinternational capitalist system. To these issues, we now turn.

Strategies of counter-revolution: ‘The geopolitical management of combineddevelopment’

After the war, Allied statesmen faced a number of seemingly intractable dilemmas.Despite the outcome on the battlefield, fears of German imperial ambitions and therenewal of fierce economic competition in Europe remained. The territorial andeconomic threat of German power loomed particularly large on the French who hadarguably suffered the most in material, financial and human devastations wrought bythe war. At the same time, Allied policymakers were concerned about America’snewfound industrial and financial supremacy, which had dramatically reversedthe traditional debt-creditor relationship between them. Yet of all the dilemmasfacing the Paris peacemakers, the rise of an increasingly radicalized and organizedLeft-wing movement was the most immediately pressing and decisive factor in theforging of the post-war international order. If WWI had ‘transformed the whole ofEurope into a powder magazine of social revolution’ (Trotsky), then the primarychallenge facing the peacemakers was how to extinguish it. Bolshevism represented,

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as Lord Milner called it, ‘the greatest danger of the civilized world’, an opinionshared by the vast majority of high-ranking Allied statesmen. It ‘was a spectre whichwandered into the Peace Conference almost daily’ (H. Hoover) threatening ‘tooverwhelm and swallow up the world of revolutionary chaos’ (Hoover, 1958,pp. 115–116; Milner and later R.S. Baker quotes in Mayer, 1967, pp. 310, 10).

During the Peace proceedings, policymakers were plagued by a barrage of labourstrikes, protests, soldier mutinies and localized uprisings in their own states, whilesimultaneously confronted by communist revolutions in Germany and Hungary(Mayer, 1967, pp. 326–328, pp. 609–611). From the very outset, then, debate amongthe Big Three over intervention in Russia was shaped by ‘extramilitary’ questions.Sharing in anti-Bolshevik consensus, the Allies nevertheless disagreed over theprecise means of containing the Revolution and the form and scope their inter-ventionism would take. Generally speaking, traditional conservatives preferred directmilitary intervention, while the liberal-Wilsonians favoured more limited, indirectforms of interventionism employing combinations of financial-economic aid andcovert action (see Mayer, 1967; Gardner, 1984).11 With some exceptions, their posi-tions remained relatively fluid, adjusting to the changing configuration of interactingdomestic and international forces.

The interlocking of domestic and international dimensions of the ‘Bolshevikproblem’ was extremely contradictory. The threat of international communismchallenged Wilsonian liberals and reformist socialists within the United States andEurope, effectively radicalizing their political rhetoric for a moderate peace settle-ment. At the same time, policymakers sought to ameliorate threats to the existingdomestic order emanating from left labour and socialist movements – themselvesradicalized and encouraged by the Bolshevik revolution – by initiating piecemealsocial reforms paid through reparations and indemnities from Germany. The resultwas a consistent back and forth from a relatively moderate to harshly punitive peacewith Germany, most dramatically exemplified in the persistently wavering ‘pragma-tism’ of Premier Lloyd George. The fused linkages of these domestic and inter-national dynamics in their interconnected temporal and spatial dynamics, filteringthrough the arena of each Allied-Associated power’s domestic politics, provedcrucial for Versailles decision making (see below).

For the Wilsonians, the best strategy of countering social revolution was to containand channel it into Burkean modes of gradualist change buttressed by an open andexpanding international commercial society.12 Intimations of Wilson’s post-warplans for peace were actually articulated before war began. In the early summer of1914, President Wilson’s de facto national security advisor, Edward House, under-took a series of diplomatic missions to Europe on behalf of the administration.During that mission, House met in England with Sir Edward Grey and other leadingBritish elites, to discuss plans for an informal entente among the advanced capitalistcountries to collaborate in the development of the non-industrialized world. Relayingthe meeting’s contents to Wilson, House had proposed that the advanced capitalist



powers such as Britain, the United States and Germany ‘establish a plan by whichinvestors’ would be able to lend money ‘to develop, under favourable terms, thewaste places of the earth’. This would not only reduce the sources of interstateconflict but also represent an advance towards bringing stability and better conditionsto these societies.13

As we have seen, the primary challenge of US foreign policy since the turn of thecentury had been, as Wilson saw it, to expand US capitalism and market relationsglobally while managing its most geopolitically and socially explosive effects.During the war and after, Wilson’s foreign policy thus sought to hold the worldeconomy together under the dual strains of imperial rivalries among the advancedindustrial states and the attendant uneven but hastened capitalist transformationsthrusting Colonel House’s ‘waste places of the earth’ (that is, the Global South) in thedirection of (often socialist) revolutionary nationalism. The chief social substanceof Wilsonian policy was, then, not only the reordering of geopolitical anarchy underthe auspices of rule-based international institutions or the promotion of de factoconstitutional democracies, Wilson’s ‘consent of the governed’. It was, rather, theattempted ‘geopolitical management of combined development’ (Rosenberg, 1996,p. 12), aimed at countering those revolutionary states emerging from patterns ofuneven and combined development while reforming traditional atavistic forms ofimperialism into a Kautskian ultra-imperialist order of international capitalistcooperation among the great powers.

The origin of the First World War was itself rooted in the particularly destabilizingnature of Germany’s own pattern of combined development emerging from theinternationally pressurized character of the Kaiserreich’s dual transformation intoan industrial-capitalist modern nation-state.14 A consequence of the war was, in turn,the collapse of the Russian Tsarist monarchy, which had experienced its own formof uneven and combined development resulting in the world’s first socialistrevolution. Wilson’s foreign policies at Versailles were thus fundamentally shapedby these ‘geo-social’ consequences of combined development that his peace planssought to defuse. US foreign policymaking at Versailles would thus come tointernalize, as Trotsky wrote, the ‘powder magazines of the whole world into thefoundations of her structure; all the antagonisms between the East and the West, theclass struggles of Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all the warsand revolutions’, thereby transforming ‘North American capitalism into the basiccounter-revolutionary force of the modern epoch’ (Trotsky, 1936, p. 8).

With these aims in mind, Wilson’s primary objective at the Peace Conference wasto ensure the establishment of the League of Nations, as well as the inclusion of hischerished Covenant into the Treaty’s structure. All other US peace aims weresubordinate to these overriding objectives, as Wilson viewed US long-term economicand strategic interests as ultimately facilitated by the League framework conceivedby Wilson as a way of institutionalizing peaceful and orderly social and territorialchange: an ‘American-inspired international social contract, guaranteeing a world

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liberal order made safe from traditional imperialism and revolutionary-socialism’

(Levin, 1968, pp. 9–10). This was to be a ‘community of power’, whereby the Anglo-Saxon nations would sit on top the pyramid of socio-political and racial unevenness.

The colonial mandate system established by the League was envisaged by Wilsonas a means of ameliorating inter-imperial rivalries over investment outlets and rawmaterials in the Global South. Under the mandate system, colonies were based upontheir level of development, divided into different classes (‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’). Thisessentially institutionalized the existing unevenness of world development into aformal, racially hierarchical political structure, which, if successful, would eventuallytransform the world into a myriad of ‘like units’. As understood by Wilson, the Allieswould be obligated to administer their areas immediately within the framework of theOpen Door (as for Class ‘B’ mandates) or soon restructure them along these lines.Either way, the eventual result would be to the open floodgates of investment andtrade from the United States and other advanced capitalist states to the formerlyclosed colonial regions (Parrini, 1976).

From Wilson’s perspective, the mandate system would thus function to harmonizefrictions over sovereignty and equalize development between advanced and devel-oping societies. Providing for the ‘indigenous political self-development under thedisinterested tutelage of the advanced countries’ the mandate system, in paternalisticWilsonian fashion, sought to channel revolutionary aspirations into gradualistprocesses of American-inspired orderly change (Levin, 1968, pp. 245–246; Parrini,1976, p. 431). As Article 22 of the Covenant read, the ‘tutelage’ of those peoples ‘notyet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world… should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources,experience or their geographical position can best undertake their responsibility’.15

Self-determination, order and intervention

The eventual reintegration of a reformed German Republic into the community ofliberal capitalist states created by the League was essential for the Wilsonians.Pacifying and rebuilding a strong German economy was not only integral to therevitalization of the world economy, but also in preventing the further spread ofBolshevism (Leffler, 1979, p. 4; Costigliola, 1984, p. 26). At the same time, Wilsonbelieved that the militaristic imperialism of Germany (‘bad capitalist’) requiredpunishment: a conviction paradoxically reinforced by the Bolshevik rise to power.Challenging the totality of the capitalist imperialist system, the Bolsheviks made it allthe more imperative for Wilson to condemn Germany’s action alone as pathologicalrather than symptomatic of capitalism writ large. In this regard, Wilson favoured apunitive (or therapeutic) peace requiring some ‘probationary period’ before Germanycould enter the League of Nations. The perceived necessity of punishing Germanmilitarism was reinforced by the harsh settlement imposed upon the Bolsheviks at



Brest-Litovsk. Wilson’s ‘just peace’ is thus not to be confused with a ‘soft peace’(Levin, 1968, pp. 123–125; Gardner, 1984, p. 161; Offner, 1986, pp. 23–24).

The steady consolidation of Bolshevism as an ideological threat to Wilsonianismalso simultaneously challenged US policymakers to evoke calls for a more moderateand progressive peace settlement than they ever actually considered implementing.Here, the question of Wilson’s use of the ‘self-determination’ slogan becomesparamount as the employed forms of the concept increasingly contradicted itsintended content. Under pressure from the Bolshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet,the Russian Provisional government on 9 April 1917 became the ‘first among thebelligerent governments to call officially for a peace settlement “on the basis of self-determination of peoples” ’. In contrast to ‘textbook’ IR accounts, it was then theBolsheviks, not Wilson, who introduced the concept into the international discourse(see Mayer, 1959, pp. 71–75; Manela, 2006, p. 1331).

After assuming power, the Bolsheviks continued these demands for the right tonational self-determination and the breaking-up of colonial empires as the corner-stones for any peace settlement (see Lenin, 1969). Their message found strongsupport among the anti-imperialist Left within Europe, provoking widespread fearswithin the Allied camp that popular support for the war would be comprised.In averting such an outcome, official Allied pronouncements of war aims tooka decisive leftward turn (Mayer, 1959). Here lay the origins of Wilson’s FourteenPoint speech of 8 January 1918, which was ‘primarily designed to counter theSoviet ideological assault on the bastions of civilization’, while hoping to avert theBolshevik’s from making a separate peace with the Germans (Gardner, 1984, p. 163;Schwabe, 1985, p. 12).

Wilson never used the term ‘self-determination’ in the Address. At this point, hewas against doing so as he still sought to maintain the territorial integrity of theAustro-Hungarian Empire (Ádám, 2004, pp. 12–13). A month later, the Presidentshifted his position further Left explicitly employing the principle in his call for a ‘justpeace’. A central rationale for Wilson’s change of heart were reports from adviserssuggesting the profound impact the Fourteen Point speech had made upon the Leftistparties of the Central Powers. If the President adopted the political slogan favoured bythem, his advisors suggested, then the drift to the Left could be accelerated, paving theway for the overthrow of the Monarchy and thus peace negotiations. Despite Wilson’sreservations about the socialist parties of Europe, the President nonetheless saw thetactical value of his advisers’ suggestions (Schwabe, 1985, p. 18).

When Bolshevism threatened to overwhelm Europe in late October 1918, how-ever, Wilson favoured maintaining the Kaiser in power to ‘keep it [the Bolsheviks]down – to keep some order’, as Wilson told his Interior Secretary. This position wasechoed by the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Secretary of State, Lansing, who continuallyasserted that of the ‘two great evils at work in the world today’ (that is, Germanabsolutism and Bolshevism), the latter was to be feared the most as it was destructiveof law, order and private property. Bolshevism was, as Wilson put it, ‘the negation of

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everything that is American’; a decisive threat to the essence of ‘modern civilization’,which he defined in terms of ‘democracy, capitalism, and Christianity’ (quotes inLevin, 1968, pp. 133–134; Ambrosius, 1990, p. 343; Foglesong, 1995, pp. 44–45).

After December 1917, Lansing’s rampant anti-Bolshevism formed the basis ofthe administration’s policy. For all its ambiguities, the administration’s handling ofthe Russian question set the precedent for future US Cold War policies. WhileWilson originally sought to recover the ‘true’ Russia of the liberal internationalistsorts of the short-lived March Revolution, Lansing and the State Department begantheir search for a ‘strong man’ to reassert domestic order by military dictatorship ifnecessary. In contrast to genuine ‘democratic’ aspirations of the Russian people, theBolsheviks were perceived as the willing or unconscious agents of Germanimperialism. Such conceptions of a foreign-influenced radicalism found clearresonance with contemporary US domestic discourses that almost universally viewedforeign-born radicalism and recent immigrants as conspirators in their own labourunrest (Levin, 1968, p. 197; Gardner, 1984, pp. 144–145, 156, 260; Foglesong, 1995,pp. 85–88). Despite the seeming fluidity of Wilson’s positions during the war andVersailles, a striking continuity can be discerned: whenever the forces of radicalismand revolution threatened stability, Wilson chose to maintain social order overchange.

The self-determination concept initially formulated in socialist discourses asa means of challenging the capitalist-imperialist system was thus appropriated andtransformed by Wilson and other Allied policymakers as means to preserve thissystem. By adopting self-determination as the basis of his own peace programme,however, Wilson ran the risk of promoting social changes he in no way sought and infact hoped to prevent. ‘If Lenin saw self-determination as a revolutionary principleand sought to use it as a wrecking ball against the reactionary multi-ethnic empires ofEurope’, Erez Manela notes, ‘Wilson hoped that self-determination would serveprecisely in the opposite role: as a bulwark against radical, revolutionary challengesto existing orders’ (2006, p. 1333). Secretary Lansing was keenly aware of thepotential perils of Wilson’s tactical utilization of a political slogan intended foropposite ends as his own. In a confidential memorandum of 30 December 1918,Lansing expressed his increasing conviction as to the ‘dangers of putting such ideasinto the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands onthe Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands… The phrase is simply loadedwith dynamite …’ (Lansing, 1971, p. 80).

As with Wilson’s earlier interventionist crusades for ‘democracy’ in Mexico,Nicaragua, Santo Domingo and elsewhere, there soon emerged considerabledissonance between the rhetoric and reality. Although Wilson’s evocation of ‘self-determination’ was interpreted by most national liberation movements in the GlobalSouth as support for their causes, these hopes were quickly dashed. At Versailles,Wilson did little if anything to champion their cause for national sovereignty. Whilehe eventually supported the nationalist aspirations of the central and east European



states, this was only after they declared sovereignty and broke away from theHabsburg Monarchy (cf. Ádám, 2004). Shifts in US policy towards nationalindependence movements thus followed, not led, the emerging consensus amongAllied policymakers to establish a cordon sanitaire against the Bolsheviks.

During the war period of ‘Red Hysteria’, Wilson would, despite his repeatedstatements against intervention in Russia, continually aid anti-Bolshevik forceswith financial and material resources. Finally succumbing to Allied pressures for fullmilitary intervention, Wilson ordered 4000 US troops to Siberia under the humani-tarian pretext of rescuing a stranded Czech legion, who were incidentally fighting theBolsheviks.16 The US military intervention is illustrative of the interlinking ofmilitary-strategic, economic and ideological aspects of Wilson’s diplomacy. It wassimultaneously aimed against German and Japanese expansionism, enhancing USaccess to Russian markets through the maintenance of the Open Door, and the estab-lishment of a non-Bolshevik regime (cf. Levin, 1968; Gardner, 1984; Foglesong,1995).

Both Wilson’s foreign and domestic policies towards the Bolshevik/socialist threathelped tip the balance of social forces at home in a more conservative direction,contributing to the failure of Wilson’s more ‘progressive’ peace plans. During thewar, the Wilson administration enacted a vast campaign of domestic repressionand censorship against various Leftist elements in response to the perceived fears ofBolshevik ideas spreading from Europe to the United States, specifically through theconveyor belt of ‘foreign’ elements within the body politic. Wilson showed particularconcern for Bolshevism sparking ‘immigrant radicalism’ and revolutionary tenden-cies among minority groups (Foglesong, 1995, pp. 36–40). On his way to Paris,Wilson told his doctor that ‘the American negro returning from abroad would be ourgreatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America’. The ‘poison’ of Bolshevismwas, as Wilson put it on another occasion, ‘running through the veins of the world’(quoted in Foglesong, 1995, pp. 42, 40).

During the Paris negotiations, when Wilson most needed support from the liberal-Left in moderating some of the harsher policies of the Allies, many of his most likelysupporters were jailed, weakened through government harassment or alienatedfrom the administration by its own policies. This same dilemma also scuttledWilson’s subsequent fight for Senate ratification of the Treaty (Knock, 1992). It wasnot simply a ‘failure’ of elite leadership that undermined Wilson’s proposals forliberal internationalist post-war order, as mainstream IR narratives suggest. Rather, itwas administration’s own anti-liberal policies.

The effects of the Bolshevik revolution on the direction and conduct of Wilson’sdiplomacy was ultimately contradictory. On the one hand, it radicalized theWilsonian peace discourse beyond anything Wilson and other higher-ranking USofficials wished to implement in policy. On the other hand, it simultaneouslycemented opposing tendencies within the administration for a more punitive peacesettlement against Germany. Moreover, at the Paris conference, the ‘Bolshevik

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question’ imposed a time imperative to negotiate the peace as quickly as possible tostem the revolutionary tide, thereby further facilitating the US delegation to morereadily compromise on the more progressive aspects of their peace conception.Numerous Versailles delegates and commentators recognized this final point at thetime. ‘As a recurrent undertone throughout would run the rumble of Time’s wingedchariot’, Harold Nicholson wrote, ‘incessantly reiterant [sic] would come the motifthis time-pressure … the flames of communism flaring, now from Munich, and nowfrom Buda-Pesth’ (quoted in Thompson, 1966, p. 20).

The ‘time-pressure’ factor emanating from the necessity to re-establish social orderbefore socialism spread further was key to the final compromised form that Versaillestook. In response to criticisms from within the US administration that Wilson wascompromising too much during the negotiations, Colonel House claimed, in terms‘undoubtedly reflecting Wilson’s views’, that ‘if the President had pulled out of theconference, it would have meant revolution in every country in Europe and that thePresident was not ready to take this responsibility’. After news of Belá Kun’s comingto power in Hungary, Wilson stated that he was faced with a ‘race between peace andanarchy’ (quotes in Thompson, 1966, p. 390; Schwabe, 1985, p. 256).

The President’s signing of a compromised peace17 some 3 months later was theresult of widespread fears within the US administration that further delays inconcluding the peace would destabilize the German government, opening the doorto Bolshevik rule or possibly a military dictatorship. Wilson felt that if an uncom-promising line was taken at the conference, ‘he might precipitate domestic politicaldevelopments for his allies and his opponents which could undo everything had beengained in Paris so far’. In other words, Wilson needed a ‘quick peace’ to stabilizeEurope and ‘stop the epidemic of revolution that threatened to spread from Russia tothe Atlantic’ (Costigliola, 1984, pp. 26–27; Schwabe, 1985, p. 295). The ‘series ofuneasy compromises’, as Morgenthau called it, Wilson was forced to make atVersailles including, above all, high reparations, was, then, the direct result of socialand not narrowly defined military-strategic factors. In these ways, the uneven andcombined character of Russian development, refracted through its conjuncturalgeo-social consequences, was a key factor in the making of the Versailles peaceand post-war international order setting the structural conditions for the next war.At the tactical level, then, the Wilsonian search for the Open Door at Versailles wasovertaken by the geopolitical problems associated with Europe’s uneven andcombined development.

Conclusion

The tragedy of Wilsonian diplomacy in the making of Versailles was not so much thebetrayal of a liberal statesman’s moral or idealistic principles, but the squandering of anhistorical moment in which radical emancipatory change was a genuine possibility.



Instead, having ended one war, the European powers and United States begananother. The military conflict between nation-states was now overlaid by a classcivil war operating both within and through the sovereign national-states system.As the ‘secret war against Bolshevism’ (Foglesong, 1995) began almost immedi-ately after the October Revolution turned into a direct military intervention by theAllied-Associated powers, the prospects for a more peaceful European (if notinternational) order receded. The intervention signified the beginning of the ‘first’Cold War that in 20 years would lead to the next global military conflagration.However, in one sense, Wilson’s diplomacy during the war years was much moresuccessful than his realist critics ever gave him credit as he had successfullybrought the United States into war against the Central powers, helping the Alliesdefeat them while greatly hastening the rise of US hegemony. Yet Wilsonnonetheless failed to translate America’s new found economic power into concretepolitical benefits while laying the material and ideological foundations for Europedescent into war some 20 years later.

Wilsonian diplomacy at Versailles well exemplifies the many ways in whichrevolution and counter-revolution have been integral features in the productionand reproduction of international systems, thus challenging the persistent theoreticalseparation of domestic and international politics at the heart of mainstream IR.It demonstrates how the dynamics of international relations have not only beenconcerned with the problems of war and peace, but, fundamentally tied to these, havealso ‘been very much about the management of change in domestic political orders’(Rosenberg, 1994, p. 35). Capturing these fused linkages between revolutions and ‘theinternational’ thus requires a fundamental rethinking of some the core categories of IRtheory itself: from the concepts of ‘national security’ to the ‘balance of power’, theirkey empirical referents necessarily cut across and interconnect with both ‘second’- and‘third’-level images of war and peace (Waltz, 1959), thereby scrambling their hithertoassumed meanings. Rather than beginning with analytically distinct conceptualizationsof discrete spheres of domestic and international politics, which only subsequentlyinterconnect and interact, IR theory would be better reconstructed upon the foundationsof wider macro-processes of socio-historical change such as those captured by theconcept of uneven and combined development.18 Only then might these hardenedcompartmentalizations of a singular world-historical process be reunited into a unifiedtheory capturing what ‘the international’ is really all about. But that is another story.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Josef Ansorge, Tarak Barkawi, Lloyd C. Gardner, andNivi Manchanda for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.I must also acknowledge the generous funding and support provided by theLeverhulme Trust.

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About the Author

Alexander Anievas is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the Department ofPolitical and International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the author ofCapital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’Crisis, 1914–1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and co-author (with KeremNisancioglu) of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism(Pluto Press, forthcoming). Anievas is a member of the editorial collective, HistoricalMaterialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Notes

1 The Peace Treaties included St-Germain (with Austria), Neuilly (with Bulgaria), Trianon (withHungary), Sévres (with Turkey) and Versailles (with Germany). When referring to the ‘Paris PeaceConference’ or ‘Versailles diplomacy’, however, I will be mostly using this as shorthand for theoutcome of all the treaties combined.

2 For an outline of the kind of methodology this entails, see Shilliam (2009, pp. 13–19).3 This is a legacy that has survived in US foreign policymaking to this day. For an examination of therelationship between the Wilsonian tradition and the Clinton administration, see Cox (2000), and forthe contemporary Obama administration, see Anievas et al (2012).

4 On Wilson’s racialized conceptions of social and international order, see Ambrosius (2007).5 On the racial basis of the often evoked ‘self-mastery’ concept in contemporary discourses, seeHannigan (2002, pp. 5–9).

6 For Wilson’s self-identification as an imperialist, see (Wilson and Link, 1966, XV, p. 171; XVI, p. 297).7 For Wilson’s thought on this, see (Wilson and Link, 1966, XV, p. 143).8 As Randall Schweller (2001) has noted, there are surprisingly few substantive studies within IRspecifically examining the making of peace settlements and particularly Versailles (but see Holsti,1991; Ikenberry, 2001; Ripsman, 2002; Dueck, 2006).

9 See, for example, the treatments by Holsti (1991), Ruggie (1998), Kegley and Raymond (1999),Reus-Smit (1999) and Ikenberry (2001).

10 On the trans-partisan character of the debate on US intervention in Bolshevik Russia, see Mayer (1967,pp. 329–337).

11 On Wilson’s interventionist Russian policy forming the basis of post-WWII US ‘modern methods ofcovert action’ combining ‘idealistic publicity, secrecy and circumscribed operations’, see Foglesong(1995).

12 On Wilson’s admiration of Burke’s conservatism, see Wilson and Link (1966, VIII, pp. 318,335, 342).

13 26 June 1914, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (1926, Vol. 2, pp. 264–265).14 On Germany’s combined development and the origins of the First World War, see Green (2012);

Anievas (2013, forthcoming); Rosenberg (2013); Tooze (forthcoming).15 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art22, accessed 27 December 2009.16 By the end of 1918, there were approximately 118 000 Allied troops fighting in the Siberian theatre.17 This compromised peace included, against Wilson’s original aims, a moderately high reparations

settlement and a rejection of Wilson’s freedom of the seas clause while doing little to remove economicbarriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions as stipulated in Wilson’s FourteenPoints.

18 On uneven and combined development’s contribution to this regard, see Rosenberg (2006).



http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art22

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