As Erez Manela points out, this led to a bit of a misunderstanding. In speech after speech, Wilson stressed that the postwar order should consider “the consent of the governed”. America’s brand-new propaganda service dutifully reported them — including to those in the colonial world. Manela, in a daring claim, says no American president before or since was listened to as closely as Wilson. Of course, non-Europeans were not Wilson’s target audience: in fact, he wasn’t really thinking of them at all. Still, they adopted his words as their own: Manela’s account of how differing nationalist movements were inspired by and incorporated Wilson’s liberal imagery in those few months is detailed and, in some odd sense, moving. The thousands of portraits of Wilson requested in China; Egyptian newspapers printing every speech in full with pages of analysis; Korean activists listing the points of comparison between Korea and Poland, Ireland or Czechoslovakia.
It was the defining characteristic of the moment: it was liberal and international. Not only did activists work across boundaries to request that their self-determination be discussed at the Paris peace conference — Lala Lajpat Rai petitioned the US Senate — but they also made their case in terms of a desired change in the international order, stating their national aspirations would only be fulfilled within the framework of a just community of nations. For some, that attitude never went away: Tilak, who Rai believed had internationalised the Indian problem, was described by Gandhi at his funeral as being free of “narrow patriotism”; his “nationalism was international”.
Hamstrung, however, by Republicans in the Senate, and met with obduracy from the representatives of the Japanese and British empires, Wilson found less and less space to manoeuvre at the conference. The Egyptians were sold out first: Wilson recognised Britain’s authority over that country. He gave into the Japanese on the subject of their designs on China. Korean aspirations were not even recognised with a seat at the table.
India was treated more subtly. The maharaja of Bikaner, who apparently spoke little but threw excellent cocktail parties, was India’s representative; he formed little lasting impression except perhaps on a young student activist in Hunan province, who berated Britain for choosing as India’s representative a “clown in a flaming red turban”. It was nevertheless to be a member of the League of Nations. This concerned the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu: it was “inconsistent with the position of a subordinate country”. The Home Rule League, circulating pamphlets promising to “make the world safe for democracy”, was quite happy. Then the British introduced the Rowlatt Act and optimism blew up into violence.
Manela argues that such rebellions, which flared up in the colonial world in 1919, were all linked to the failure to follow through on the promise of the Wilsonian movement. The book’s emotional climax arrives when the reader is presented with the reactions of those who had trusted in Wilson’s vision: the stunned anger in Cairo, the shocked betrayal in Seoul. Lurking in the shadows was the alternative: the new Bolshevik state in Russia, with an equally charismatic leader actually preaching revolution and resistance — one from whom Wilson had, according to Manela, borrowed the phrase “self-determination”. That student activist in Hunan province, Mao Tse-Tung, turned to Leninism that year; the Indian National Congress abandoned moderation; the Egyptian movement turned decisively anti-American; a kitchen attendant in Paris whose letter Wilson did not read became Ho Chi Minh.
Such are the prices of the failure of liberal internationalism; such is the fallout of unrealistic expectations raised by idealistic presidents — or prospective presidents? — on anti-Americanism, of a gap between rhetoric and action. Manela seems to have chosen not to discuss this directly, but the feel of roads not taken pervades the text. Wilson himself, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of disappointment he feared, suffered a stroke: his last speech was on India’s League membership: “for the first time, that great and voiceless multitude, that throng hundreds of millions strong in India, has a voice among the nations of the world.”
There is little work discussing links between countries in the global south before the 1950s. Nehru’s third-worldism did not emerge in vacuum; each nation’s freedom movement was inspired by the same things. Whenever the national narratives those movements created are in conflict, books like this remind how they emerge from and create a common historical context.
