By Brig. Gen. John S. Brown

Our soldiers have made enormous sacrifices trying to achieve effective and popularly supported governance for the Iraqi and Afghan peoples. An underlying premise has been integrated multiethnic democracies as an end state. It may be of interest that our arguably most idealistic president and army considered constructing multiethnic democracies from mutually hostile peoples to be too hard.

President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly committed the United States to World War I as a war “to make the world safe for democracy.” In Wilson’s day multiethnic states were, by and large, tyrannies forcibly held together by tsars, emperors, sultans and the like. Democracy requires a strong sense of community, most easily developed in relatively homogenous nations, as England and France were then, or in nations with a prolonged history of voluntary association, like Switzerland. To Wilson America was not so much multiethnic as it was a “melting pot,” wherein national origins effectively vanished within a generation or two as a result of the integrative effects of education, labor requirements and “the American spirit.” There was no extended geographical footprint associated with European immigration into the United States. Ethnic communities were intermingled enough to speed assimilation along. The Army, rapidly expanding to three million strong in World War I, proved a powerful force for integration. Officers, imbued with the idealism of the Progressive Era, strained to make good citizens as well as good soldiers out of conscripts hastily assembled in units without regard to their ethnic origin—if Caucasian. The social philosophy of the era had not yet embraced racial integration with similar fervor.

Throughout vast regions of war-torn Europe and Asia, unlike America, ethnicity had long-standing geographical definition, and no mechanisms existed to mitigate the alienation of peoples long held in governance by force. Allied leaders concluded that if democracy were to succeed in central and eastern Europe, heretofore subject peoples would have to go their own separate ways. British Prime Minister Lloyd George was first to openly espouse this philosophy of national self-determination, opining that “government with the consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement in this war.” In a January 8, 1918, address to Congress, Wilson expanded considerably upon this ideal with his celebrated “Fourteen Points.” Nine of these points detailed specifics.

Poles, Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians and Slovenes were to be accorded the nationhood they had so long been denied. Russia, Serbia, Rumania, Montenegro and Belgium were to be liberated. The ancient provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were to be restored to France. The Italian frontier was to be aligned with nationality. Non-Turkish nationalities in the Ottoman Empire were to be afforded autonomous development. Colonial claims were to be adjusted in the interest of subject peoples. Although not directly mentioned in the Fourteen Points, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were ultimately to benefit from Wilson’s plan by gaining independence as well.

Underlying the enthusiasm for relatively homogeneous nations was a premise dating at least as far back as The Federalist, essays written in defense of the Constitution in 1787-1788. Democracy flourishes when issues and advocacies are diverse and mutable enough to encourage ongoing debate, compromise and negotiation. A party that has lost on one issue can hope to win on another or, with a few realignments, perhaps revisit the one it has lost. Conversely, when society polarizes around a single issue, room for negotiation dwindles and the persistently losing side has little alternative to force if its views are to prevail. Many in Wilson’s day remembered when slavery had become such an intractable issue—and the war that followed. It seemed unlikely that long abused subject peoples would get beyond ethnicity as a voting determinant if forced into multiethnic democracies. It seemed better to set ethnicities—“nations”—apart, allowing diverse issues other than ethnicity to rise and enrich the political debate within each.

Where ethnic and communal loyalties were in question, plebiscites would decide. To the Allies’ credit, they followed through with the plebiscites they proposed, and even allowed some contested regions that chose to remain German to do so, despite the passions aroused by the war. Germany emerged shorn of its empire but ethnically homogeneous and substantially intact. In other areas other plebiscites carried ethnic communities into the nations of their choice. The Austro-Hungarian Empire dismembered into its constituent nationalities, and a number of former Tsarist subject peoples were liberated. The American Army, occupying its fragment of the Rhineland, proved supportive of German democracy, assuring continuity of government, enforcing law and order, distributing food supplies and acting as a brake on French vengeance through the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission.

The Fourteen Points were enlightened in their vision but flawed in their execution. Too often national self-determination became an excuse for ethnic cleansing. After the Treaty of Lausanne, for example, the Greeks and Turks “exchanged”—drove out—hundreds of thousands of each other’s countrymen. The new nations squabbled over territory, in many cases absorbing ethnic minorities themselves. Yugoslavia was more of a concession to Serbian expansion-ism than recognition that there truly was a “South Slav” identity. Britain and France may have been democracies at home, but were empires abroad. Germany’s overseas empire and a number of Ottoman holdings—including Iraq and Syria—fell under their control with little regard for the ethnic self-determination of the Fourteen Points. Most damaging, the United States authored the grand design and then stepped back into political isolationism. Without American support, nascent democracies fell to economic unrest, strongmen and external threats one by one. Evidence that the idea could have worked lies in the vibrant popular democracies of Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and others today.

Were Woodrow Wilson to contemplate contemporary Iraq, he would probably recommend letting the Sunni, Shia and Kurds go their own ways, and confirming the boundaries of each community by plebiscite. He would respect whatever internal sentiments emerged to bind the three peoples together, but would have little sympathy for notions that they should be bound together to suit the preferences of foreign nations. Iraqis would have to decide for themselves the compass of the community that inspired their loyalty. Democracy can thrive only where such a sense of community exists.


Recommended Reading:

Bailey, T. A. Woodrow Wilson and the Peacemakers (New York: Macmillan, 1947)

Coffman, Edward M. The War to End Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)

Levin, N. G. Jr. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: American Responses to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)