The Wilsonian Moment

By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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Words carry power more than they are ascribed. This is especially true with words that emanate from major diplomatic events. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies held their breath, waiting to see how their fates would be decided.

Ho Chi Mihn, a Vietnamese nationalist, even traveled all the way to Paris to try to meet the key architects of the Peace Conference of 1919, only to fail to meet any one of the interlocutors. The rest is history, as they put it. Humiliated and slighted, Ho Chi Mihn launched a war against the French and subsequently American occupiers in Indo China, leading to the deaths and displacement of millions.

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was afflicted by a stroke too. But he persisted with his diplomatic endeavor, by not returning to Washington DC for a good several weeks.
Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for “a free, open minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims”, giving equal weight to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. These words acquired their own weight by virtue of the anticolonial energy that was simmering across various corners of the world.

Among those nations that paid close attention to Wilson’s words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of four disparate non-Western societies, Egypt, India, China, and Korea. This is an impressive book in the sense that the historian Erez Manela captured the dynamics of all four countries.

That spring, Wilson’s words ignited political upheavals in all four of these countries. This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader “Wilsonian moment” that challenged the existing international order. By this token, the world was already more interconnected than one cared to admit. A pebble thrown into the pond of Paris was enough to create a ripple to various parts of Asia.

Using primary source material from America, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage.

The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others, were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time. It also paved the way for the rise of Korean leaders like Park Chung Hee who ruled with an iron hand, who nevertheless ensured the economic growth of Korea too.

The importance of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and Wilson’s influence on international affairs far from the battlefields of Europe cannot be underestimated. Now, for the first time, one can clearly see just how the events played out at Versailles sparked a wave of nationalism that is still resonating globally today.