Of course, Wilson wasn’t the sole architect of that global catastrophe. But unlike the incompetents, cynics and partisans who populate Andelman’s account, Wilson entered (and won) the war on behalf of his Fourteen Points, which promised freedom and self-government for every people. Instead, the treaty, enabled by his naivet?, betrayed those ideals and laid the groundwork for another world war, followed by 50 years of imperial chess. And the victims whose self-determination Wilson signed away at Versailles represent, to Andelman, the nails in his coffin.
Why did he do it? For a fantastical notion called the League of Nations—a precursor to the United Nations that he hoped would prevent future wars. Wilson understood it was a hard sell—why should the winners surrender any sovereignty?—so he knowingly allowed the Allies to make greedy (and colonial) territory assignments, guessing that his deference would buy enough good will to make the League real. Once it existed, he assumed, it would simply fix the mistakes of Versailles. Wilson, Andelman is careful to note, wasn’t the grand puppeteer behind badly drawn borders, but he was a willing bystander.
In accordance with the Fourteen Points, many nations should have gotten a state; each chapter tackles a case where they didn’t. There were Jews, whose abandonment by the British left them unable to migrate to Palestine in large numbers, and thus vulnerable to extermination. There were Arabs (serially double-crossed by the British and French), whose self-proclaimed representatives were enthroned in made-up countries like Iraq. There were Vietnamese, whose case—drawn from the Fourteen Points and eloquently argued by a young dishwasher who hadn’t yet changed his name to Ho Chi Minh—was tragically ignored. And so on.
Predictably, the League of Nations was never going to right these wrongs. In fact, the U.S. Senate wouldn’t even approve its creation, and without American muscle it had no real power. Around the globe, the mistakes of Versailles then began to multiply. Maps that had been drawn strategically to divide coal mines and ports rendered states with indefensible borders and irredentist minorities: ethnic Germans in Poland, for example, clamored noisily to rejoin the fatherland until Hitler’s panzer divisions granted their wish just two decades later.
Meanwhile, native peoples—from Algeria to China—subjugated by Allied colonies after Versailles furnished inviting targets for communist insurrections throughout the century. And in outposts like Saudi Arabia, where revolutionaries failed to eject Western-friendly despots, anticolonial feelings often turned anti-Western. Wilson hoped the 117,000 American dead in World War I would fertilize the seed of democracy; instead, Andelman says, they produced Al Qaeda.
Versailles isn’t the monocausal explanation for today’s woes that Andelman thinks, but it was certainly instrumental. He’s on much firmer ground showing how realpolitik in Paris set the stage for 20th-century cataclysms while Wilson—who, as the Allies’ conscience, had a special responsibility to intervene—watched idly. It’s also unclear why Andelman selects some players but omits others, such as the Kurds, to name just one ethnic group whose mistreatment in 1919 keeps them in the news today.
Still, although it took 80 years, most nations that wanted statehood from the Paris conference—Israel, Slovakia, Ireland, among many others—now have it. And Wilson’s argument for national self-determination is no less compelling today in Darfur than it was in postwar Poland.
But have we outgrown the nation-state? World War II showed that ethnic self-government isn’t always good (its flaws still echoed in Balkan genocides as recently as 10 years ago). This realization has pushed European leaders toward the EU, whose rules theoretically limit the bad things they can do. Andelman has nothing to say about this postnational movement (to be fair, it’s hardly irreversible, and nation-states elsewhere in the world are stronger than ever), but you might call it Wilsonian blowback. Given his love for the League of Nations, Wilson would have liked the irony.
