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By Root 807 0

the United States was much more powerful than it had been in 1914. Then it had possessed a minuscule army and a middle-sized navy; now it had over a million troops in Europe alone, and a navy that rivaled Britain’s. Indeed, Americans tended to assume that they had won the war for their European allies. The American economy had surged ahead as American farmers and American factories poured out wheat, pork, iron and steel for the Allied war effort. As the American share of world production and trade rose inexorably, that of the European powers stagnated or declined. Most significant of all for their future relations, the United States had become the banker to the Europeans. Together the European allies owed over $7 billion to the American government, and about half as much again to American banks. Wilson assumed, overconfidently as it turned out, that the United States would get its way simply by applying financial pressure. As his legal adviser David Hunter Miller said, “Europe is bankrupt financially and its governments are bankrupt morally. The mere hint of withdrawal by America by reason of opposition to her wishes for justice, for fairness, and for peace would see the fall of every government in Europe without exception, and a revolution in every country in Europe with one possible exception.”21

In that meeting on the George Washington, Wilson also talked briefly about the difficulties that lay ahead with the nations emerging from the wreckage of central Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and many more. They could have whatever form of government they wanted, but they must include in their new states only those who wanted to be there. “Criterion not who are intellectual or social or economic leaders but who form mass of people,” a member of his audience wrote down. “Must have liberty—that is the kind of government they want.”22

Of all the ideas Wilson brought to Europe, this concept of self-determination was, and has remained, one of the most controversial and opaque. During the Peace Conference, the head of the American mission in Vienna sent repeated requests to Paris and Washington for an explanation of the term. No answer ever came. It has never been easy to determine what Wilson meant. “Autonomous development,” “the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments,” “the rights and liberties of small nations,” a world made safe “for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions”: the phrases had poured out from the White House, an inspiration to peoples around the world. But what did they add up to? Did Wilson merely mean, as sometimes appeared, an extension of democratic self-government? Did he really intend that any people who called themselves a nation should have their own state? In a statement he drafted, but never used, to persuade the American people to support the peace settlements, he stated, “We say now that all these people have the right to live their own lives under governments which they themselves choose to set up. That is the American principle.” Yet he had no sympathy for Irish nationalists and their struggle to free themselves from British rule. During the Peace Conference he insisted that the Irish question was a domestic matter for the British. When a delegation of nationalist Irish asked him for support, he felt, he told his legal adviser, like telling them to go to hell. His view was that the Irish lived in a democratic country and they could sort it out through democratic means.23

The more Wilson’s concept of self-determination is examined, the more difficulties appear. Lansing asked himself: “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?” It was a calamity, Lansing thought, that Wilson had ever hit on the phrase. “It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize