Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [14]
Initially, he did not want to break up the big multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary and Russia. In February 1918, he had told Congress that “well-defined” national aspirations should be satisfied without, however, “introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe, and consequently of the world.”24
That led to another series of questions. What was a “well-defined” nationalism? Polish? That was an obvious one. But what about Ukrainian? Or Slovak? And what about subdivisions? Ukrainian Catholics, for example, or Protestant Poles? The possibilities for dividing up peoples were unending, especially in central Europe, where history had left a rich mix of religions, languages and cultures. About half the people living there could be counted as members of one national minority or another. How were peoples to be allocated to one country or another when the dividing lines between one nation and another were so unclear?
One solution was to leave it to the experts. Let them study the history, collect the statistics and consult the locals. Another, more apparently democratic solution, which had been floating around in international relations since the French Revolution, was to give the locals a choice through a plebiscite, with a secret vote, administered by some international body. Wilson himself does not seem to have assumed that self-determination implied plebiscites, but by 1918 many people did. Who was to vote? Only men, or women as well? Only residents, or anyone who had been born in the disputed locality? (The French firmly rejected the idea of a plebiscite on their lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on the grounds that the vote would be unfair because Germany had forced French speakers out and brought in Germans.) And what if the locals did not know which nation they belonged to? In 1920, when an outside investigator asked a peasant in Belarus, on the frontier where Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians all mingled, who he was, the only answer that came back was “I am a Catholic of these parts.” What do you do, asked American experts in Carinthia in the Austrian Alps, when you have people “who do not want to join the nation of their blood-brothers, or else are absolutely indifferent to all national questions”? 25
At the end of 1919, a chastened Wilson told Congress, “When I gave utterance to those words [that ‘all nations had a right to selfdetermination’], I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.” He was not responsible for the spread of national movements looking for their own states—that had been going on since the end of the eighteenth century—but, as Sidney Sonnino, the Italian foreign minister, put it, “the War undoubtedly had had the effect of over-exciting the feeling of nationality. . . . Perhaps America fostered it by putting the principles so clearly.”26
Wilson spent most of his time in the meeting with his experts on the matter closest to his heart: the need to find a new way of managing international relations. This did not come as a surprise to his audience. In his famous Fourteen Points of January 1918, and in subsequent speeches, he had sketched out his ideas. The balance of power, he told the U.S. Congress in his “Four Principles” speech of February 1918, was forever discredited as a way to keep peace. There would be no more secret