ussama makdisi

BOOK REVIEW The Great Illusion: The Wilsonian Moment in World History

Erez Manela. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiv + 331 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth).

In the Middle East, as in many other parts of the world, disappointment with the United States is based on an intense and obvious gap that separates noble American rhetoric and far more callous policies. The language of freedom, democracy, and human rights have long been a hallmark of American foreign policy; so too has been the cynicism of U.S. presidents and policymakers during the Cold War and today. In a remarkably lucid and readable book, Erez Manela reminds us not only how this noble U.S. foreign policy rhetoric originated during what he refers to as the Wilsonian moment but also how, unlike later U.S. presidents and policymakers, Wilson himself was a tragic, rather than simply cynical, gure. Far more importantly, Manela admirably focuses on how peoples across the worldspecically in Egypt, India, China, and Koreaat rst embraced and then were disillusioned by Wilson but how they also elaborated ideas of self-determination and anticolonial nationalism in a manner never envisioned or intended by Wilson. Manelas book is that rare thing in good history writing: it is concise and well-argued, the kind of book that you nish knowing not only what you just read but its obvious importance to the world around you. It is also that very rare thing in U.S. diplomatic history, for the book not only covers what Wilson thought and said but also how people around the world interpreted his thoughts and actions. As much as this account is solid diplomatic history, it is equally a major contribution to a still largely inchoate eld known as America and the world. That Manela uses Arabic sources is to his credit and that he empathetically and intelligently brings across Indian, Korean, and Chinese perspectives reveals the paucity of standard diplomatic histories that only engage with American or Western perspectives yet ostensibly narrate histories that unfold in the non-Western world. The book is divided into three parts. Part One revolves around the gure and language of Wilson himself. Part Two narrates the internationalization of Wilsonian ideasin chapters devoted to Egypt, India, China, and Korea, respecDiplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (January 2009). 2009 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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tively. Part Three takes up the story of how the liberal national movements in these countries is at rst disillusioned and then angered by Wilsons inability, or more accurately his indifference, to their ultimate fates. This liberal anticolonialism, Manela shows, fails. But it gives way to a much more powerful and radical nationalism that ultimately leads to decolonization. One is left not only with a remarkably similar tale of a yawning gap between American rhetoric of freedom and an American desire to actually fulll the promise of this freedom in various parts of the world but also with a remarkably similar tale of liberal nationalists who willingly believed and then were savagely disillusioned by the Wilsonian moment. Manela begins his account by sketching Woodrow Wilsons rhetoric against a backdrop of a deeply racist United States. He demysties Wilson. From the very outset of the book, Manela draws attention to the profound ambivalence, if not to say blatant contradiction, at the heart of a Wilsonian rhetoric of freedom and self-determination. For one, Wilson supported the colonization of the Philippines. He was imbued with racist and paternalistic attitudes towards nonWestern peoples and also, of course, toward blacks in the United States. But he was also a Christian man who believed in the eventual improvement and liberation of people at the behest of more advanced and civilized Anglo-Saxons. Wilson allowed segregation in various U.S. government departments. Yet for all the aws of his temperament and of the age in which he lived, Wilson, Manela is keen to point out, was not static in his views. Rather, he gradually adopted more enlightened views on questions revolving around the emancipation of the colonized and the suffrage of women. Overall, the portrait of Wilson drawn by Manela illustrates a man who envisioned American leadership of the world but who actually knew very little about other parts of the world. It also sets the stage for the heart of the book, which is not at all about Wilson himself but about how an ideal of self-determination that came to be identied with Wilson traveled across the world and about how it is interpreted and reworked. This book is less about Wilsons dream than about those in Egypt, India, China, and Korea who were desperate to believe in him. The First World War, of course, launched Wilsonian idealism onto the wider world. Manela demonstrates how Wilson eventually got to the principle of self-determination and how, in an age of telegraph and a propaganda unit authorized by Wilson and created by George Creel and known as Committee on Public Information (CPI), this principle made its way across the world. In some places like Egypt and India, the CPI operated indirectly; in others such as China it operated directly. American government agents bought foreign journalists and planted stories, and, in doing so, helped create an incredibly potent image of the United States as the leader of a free world and of Wilson as the embodiment of that freedom. Manela makes, in this context, an important and often overlooked point. No matter how carefully one searches Wilsons famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918 for the term self-determination, one will not nd it. Wilson did not coin the term; Lenin did. But it was Wilson, and not Lenin, who

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during and immediately after the First World War captured the imagination and shaped the political vocabulary of liberal third-world nationalists. That is because the United States was far more powerful and effective in its propaganda than the Bolsheviks who were as yet consumed with internal consolidation. Leading right up to Versailles, Wilsons rhetoric became bolder, even if his commitment to decolonization remained in Manelas words hedged and equivocal (p. 41). Therein lies the ensuing tragedy that unfolds with astonishing similarity and, for the reader of the book, depressing predictability among colonized or semicolonized peoples who put their faith in Wilson. The Americans had raised hopes, but they had very little intention of fullling them. The most interesting and novel aspect of the book is in the narrative that Manela writes of faith and disillusionment in several different locales joined together in a single Wilsonian moment. As Manela shifts the focus on Wilson away from America and away from decidedly eurocentric accounts of this periodbe it Arno Mayers classic Wilson vs. Lenin or Margaret Macmillans more recent Paris 1919the book introduces the reader to legendary liberal nationalist leaders unfamiliar to most historians who x their gaze only on America or Europe: Saad Zaghlul of Egypt, Lala Lajpat Rai of India, Kang Youwei and Gu Weijun of China, and Syngman Rhee of Korea among others. All these menand the book focuses almost exclusively on men in the public eyeput their faith in Wilson. And all these men were disappointed as Wilson and the U.S. delegation at Versailles proved unable, but even more so, unwilling to do much in the face of a ferocious British and French determination to aggrandize themselves at the worlds expense. The details in each case differ to be sure. In Egypt, for example, the American missionaries were quite anxious in the face of the emergence of an Egyptian national movement and were determined to maintain a discriminatory legal regime overseen by the British. In Korea, however, American missionaries were far more sympathetic to the anti-Japanese nationalist movement. In India and China there were erce critics of European imperialism who refused to be taken in by Wilsonian rhetoric. In Egypt, as well, the American diplomats revealed their prejudice and incomprehension of the nationalist movementwhich they likened to Bolshevism much to the delight of British imperial ofcials. In China, however, the American minister in Beijing, Paul Reinsch, who helped found the American Political Science Association, was far more intelligent and prescient. He urgently warned Wilson that his rhetoric was dangerous because if disappointed the Chinese would become an enemy (pp. 11112). But what Reinsch seems to have missed is what Manela underscores: in many countries chang under European and Japanese colonialism, there was a cause, which would later be called decolonization, which was in search of a vocabulary that Wilson provided. All these sovereign nations in waiting demanded a place at the peace conference table. The Chinese and Korean delegations even boasted Americaneducated Ph.D.s. It was all to no avail. They were severely disappointed, for the

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issue was not the ability to communicate effectively across cultures but a far cruder calculus of power. China was humiliated in favor of Japan. It was granted a status of a minor power alongside Greece and below Serbia and Belgium (p. 115). Korea, which the United States had already betrayed in 1905 by recognizing the Japanese occupation (in return for Japanese recognition of the U.S. control over the Philippines), was once again sacriced at the altar of expediency and great power diplomacy. And in all these nations there was a revolutionary upheaval when expectations were dashed. These also were crushed. Egypt had its revolution of 1919as it called its unprecedented mobilization of men and women, Muslims and Christians, against British colonialismbrutally crushed, and the controversial British protectorate recognized by the United States. India had its hopes for liberation dashed by General Dyer at the Amritsar massacre. Korea had its March 1 movement also crushed. Wilson and the United States, in effect, abandoned these peoples to their fates. Only in the aftermath of the failure of liberal anticolonialism, and the retreat of America before the shadow of its own rhetoric, would Lenins star rise and would liberal nationalism be replaced, almost inevitably, by a far more potent and radicalized nationalism, one that would not ask for liberation but would seize it in the face of concerted Western resistance. What had begun with men, almost literally hat in hand asking Wilson to live up to his own ideals, metamorphosed into the likes of Gandhi, Nasser, and Mao. The heart of the thesis lies in Manelas insistence that there was a profound gulf between Wilsonthe tragic historical gure who reected the vicissitudes of his time and the Wilsonian moment that enveloped nations and people across the globe during and immediately following the First World War. Wilson may have betrayed his own principles, but the principles themselves remained valid, writes Manela (p. 149). To his credit, Manela sets the stage for each national story cogently and pays sufcient attention to particularity. Inevitably, however, the authors intense focus on Wilson gives the inadvertent impression that liberal nationalists in Egypt, India, China, and Korea had no other sources of inspiration. More signicantly, the most controversial aspect of the Wilsonian moment in the Arab Middle East came not in Egypt but in Palestine, where Arab and Jewish national movements struggled against one another. Wilson was instrumental in the sending of what became known unofcially as the King-Crane commission, which was dispatched to the region to investigate how the native populations in Palestine, among other places, wanted to determine their own future. Much to the dismay of the Zionist movement, it recommended a curtailing of Jewish colonization of Palestine because Zionism was contrary to the aspirations of the native majority. The European powers, in any event, ignored its recommendation as did the U.S. administration itselfyet another failure of the Wilsonian moment and of Wilson himself. It is a real pity that Manela chose to sidestep the issue entirelyKing-Crane gets mentioned only once in passing, on page 128 in a chapter on Korea. Given his straightforward and candid analysis throughout

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the book, surely Manela could have provided a new perspective on this story. Much the same, of course, could be said about the case of Armenia, which, unlike Palestine, was actively considered as a possible mandate under American tutelage. The authors undue caution when dealing with the most controversial aspects of the Wilsonian moment in the Middle East notwithstanding, Manelas laudable goal was not to write within the connes of national or regional histories but to evoke what he calls convincingly the transnational networks (p.13) that made up a global moment of faith in America and its subsequent, equally global, disillusionment with it. The Wilsonian Moment breaks important new ground. It is an excellent piece of history. The tragedy it invokes is not simply that Wilson misled himself and others but that others also misled themselves.