A BRIEF HISTORY OF LOST CHANCES

For a brief few months in 1918-19, the world looked to America with hope in a manner it has never done so since. As the victors of World War I met in Paris to determine the fate of the vanquished, and the map of Europe was being redrawn, the hundreds of millions across the globe who lived in subjugation to Old World empires expected that the energetic, liberal titan of the New, untouched by the original sin of colonialism, would redeem them. The messiah of the moment was Woodrow Wilson, the scholar-president; his Fourteen Points calling for a just world order were on every lip. American power, he seemed to say, should be used benignly, to promote liberalism worldwide — a belief subsequently labelled “Wilsonian” in an often-quoted and frequently misapplied taxonomy of US foreign policy.

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.

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