One-hundred years ago, almost to the date, Woodrow Wilson put the old wine of self-determination into a new bottle in such a way that the remaining 20th Century and also the 21st continue to still reverberate. Presenting his 'Fourteen Points' to the US Congress in his State of the Union address, Wilson helped post-World War I peacekeeping by proposing to make the League of Nations the vehicle. Governance of this sort, conducted previously through the Concert of Europe, for example, turned out to be too restricted in length, breadth, and depth at a time of imperial clout, but that helped Wilson's broad-ranging vision be heard and heeded across an equally wide segment of the world.
This is not to say the League of Nations was the medicine that the doctor not only ordered but also pinned any cure upon. It was instead what the Model-T was to automobile evolution in the first-half of the 20th Century, a prototype, in this case of global governance. Of course, it floundered where it began, in Europe, but it was partly fated to that culmination when its 'founding father', Wilson's, proposal was abandoned by his country, the United States. Learning from the many mistakes, its follow-up attempt, the United Nations, still manages to stand on its own two feet. Obviously tottering with membership exponentially climbing beyond the chart, global governance nevertheless held on against so many other odds, diversifying methods and instruments, but mostly becoming a part and parcel of everyday conversation.
More important is the central idea behind global governance. Sovereignty may be the name for it, but how it began under that explosive 'self-determination' label supplies one strand to measure its fate a century after its most famous advocate brought it into the global lexicon.
When he articulated it, Wilson directly and specifically addressed extant empires, ranging from Austro-Hungary's and the Ottomans' in Europe and Asia Minor to Great Britain's and France's global empires. That his own country emerged from such a trapping in 1776 served to inspire many intellectuals in colonised societies across the world, as if demanding US championship of their cause. Wilson's call would have its immediate impact in Europe, where the nation-state was born almost three centuries before: Austro-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey were dismantled by the post-World War I Paris Peace Conferences, while India and a string of African French colonies had to wait a generation or more longer.
Dismantling empires posed an unresolved problem, indeed, complicating matters as if to thwart any such outcome. This was the nationality problem. The Treaty of Westphalia sanctified statehood in terms of nationality, and since that was the medium and mode, it spawned problems not just in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, but even across Europe. Neither the Austro-Hungarian nor Turk empires could be dissolved into 'nation'-based states since certain nationalities, especially the larger ones, wanted to control the minorities: Turks wanted to control the Armenians and Kurds, among others. So too was the case of the Slavs over Bosnians and Croats. In short, dissolving the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires produced some vexing problems: Yugoslavia's 1990s dissolution produced the most savage European moments since World War II, out of which Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia had to be carved out in the 1990s. Next-door Czechoslovakia also had to be reduced, albeit peacefully, to the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia; while, Turk consolidation almost eliminated the Armenians and disseminated the Kurds into at least five different states. Iraq and Syria continue that same struggle today, to convert artificial state-nations into nation-states, with Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds creating differently coloured but mostly incompatible constellations in each.
India further illustrates what is at stake. Its well-known story began when the 1947 independence created two major states, each congested with too many nationalities to give any sense of stability. Bangladesh's split from Pakistan became South Asia's Damoclean Sword, just as Africa's thornier tribal yardstick not only presents an alternate and more complicated statehood platform, but also predicts far more volatile outcomes.
Whatever peace the nation-state brought to West Europe, cannot be replicated elsewhere. This is the net result of rallying behind 'self-determination' slogans. Self-determination need not be nationalistically-driven. Since self-determination, as a call for freedom, rallies multiple nationalities simultaneously, how to tame the competing nationalistic surges behind the self-determination crusades becomes the sine qua non of state survival.
If Wilson's self-determination calls remain open-ended still, the book on empires cannot be fully closed. From the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the McMahon Line, we see divisions backed by armies to such an extent that global security hinges upon them. Self-determination has been snuffed or subjugated, nationalist fires refuse to taper, and even consummated nationalism, as in Spain, hovers close to another type of a cleavage, based on ethnicity.
Self-determination may be more problematic a label and reality now than when Wilson elevated its call; but had he, or someone else, not risen to the occasion, perhaps the 20th Century may have been far more bloody than it turned out to be. If the 30-odd sovereign members of the League of Nations had not multiplied to the near-200 UN members today, we would have the perpetual war Thomas Hobbes warned us about; and even if empires had broken down, dictators ruling state-nations would have infested every continent to as abysmal a low point as any colonial identity could.
It is for that reason that a salute is due to the man who stood out to alert a far wider world of the basic human right being absent. When we consider human rights issues today, behind the teeming millions still not relishing them, the figure of Woodrow Wilson stands tall: he helped motivate everyone to mould a more natural collective identity, but also to institutionalise it in some way. He set the example by drifting from his own country in order to push the nail home after 1918. Ultimately, by not following his 1918 lead, the United States had to re-do the entire ball-game during World War II at Dumbarton Oaks and other locations. Yet, once ensnared, self-determination literally opened a Pandora's box of human rights that we must now disseminate.
That he stood up from an isolationist premise redoubles his doubly noteworthy contribution. As a forerunner of US internationalism, though that status produced its own conflicts, and quite a host of them, the United States still remains one of the most crucial champions of human rights and self-determination today as they enter their second century of inducing individuals to maximise their own rights and values opens up. It is a salutary moment in a tribally-torn 21st Century when an individual identity-search has far outpaced its nationality-based counterpart.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.