u s s a m a m a k d i s i

BOOK REVIEW

The Great Illusion: The Wilsonian Moment in World History

Erez Manela. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins ofAnticolonial 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 withthe United States is based on an intense and obvious gap that separates nobleAmerican rhetoric and far more callous policies. The language of freedom,democracy, and human rights have long been a hallmark of American foreignpolicy; so too has been the cynicism of U.S. presidents and policymakers duringthe Cold War and today. In a remarkably lucid and readable book, Erez Manelareminds us not only how this noble U.S. foreign policy rhetoric originatedduring what he refers to as the “Wilsonian moment” but also how, unlike laterU.S. presidents and policymakers, Wilson himself was a tragic, rather thansimply cynical, figure. Far more importantly, Manela admirably focuses on howpeoples across the world—specifically in Egypt, India, China, and Korea—atfirst embraced and then were disillusioned by Wilson but how they also elabo-rated ideas of self-determination and anticolonial nationalism in a manner neverenvisioned or intended by Wilson.

Manela’s book is that rare thing in good history writing: it is concise andwell-argued, the kind of book that you finish knowing not only what you justread but its obvious importance to the world around you. It is also that very rarething in U.S. diplomatic history, for the book not only covers what Wilsonthought and said but also how people around the world interpreted his thoughtsand actions. As much as this account is solid diplomatic history, it is equally amajor contribution to a still largely inchoate field known as “America and theworld.” That Manela uses Arabic sources is to his credit and that he empatheti-cally and intelligently brings across Indian, Korean, and Chinese perspectivesreveals the paucity of standard diplomatic histories that only engage with Ameri-can or Western perspectives yet ostensibly narrate histories that unfold in thenon-Western world.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One revolves around the figure andlanguage of Wilson himself. Part Two narrates the internationalization of Wil-sonian ideas—in chapters devoted to Egypt, India, China, and Korea, respec-

Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (January 2009). © 2009 The Society for Historians ofAmerican 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 inthese countries is at first disillusioned and then angered by Wilson’s inability, ormore accurately his indifference, to their ultimate fates. This liberal anticolo-nialism, Manela shows, fails. But it gives way to a much more powerful andradical nationalism that ultimately leads to decolonization. One is left not onlywith a remarkably similar tale of a yawning gap between American rhetoric offreedom and an American desire to actually fulfill the promise of this freedom invarious parts of the world but also with a remarkably similar tale of liberalnationalists who willingly believed and then were savagely disillusioned by the“Wilsonian moment.”

Manela begins his account by sketching Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric againsta backdrop of a deeply racist United States. He demystifies Wilson. From thevery outset of the book, Manela draws attention to the profound ambivalence, ifnot to say blatant contradiction, at the heart of a Wilsonian rhetoric of freedomand self-determination. For one, Wilson supported the colonization of thePhilippines. He was imbued with racist and paternalistic attitudes towards non-Western peoples and also, of course, toward blacks in the United States. But hewas also a Christian man who believed in the eventual improvement and libera-tion of people at the behest of more advanced and “civilized” Anglo-Saxons.Wilson allowed segregation in various U.S. government departments. Yet for allthe flaws of his temperament and of the age in which he lived, Wilson, Manelais keen to point out, was not static in his views. Rather, he gradually adoptedmore enlightened views on questions revolving around the emancipation of thecolonized and the suffrage of women. Overall, the portrait of Wilson drawn byManela illustrates a man who envisioned American leadership of the world butwho actually knew very little about other parts of the world. It also sets the stagefor the heart of the book, which is not at all about Wilson himself but about howan ideal of self-determination that came to be identified with Wilson traveledacross the world and about how it is interpreted and reworked. This book is lessabout Wilson’s dream than about those in Egypt, India, China, and Korea whowere desperate to believe in him.

The First World War, of course, launched Wilsonian idealism onto thewider world. Manela demonstrates how Wilson eventually got to the principleof self-determination and how, in an age of telegraph and a propaganda unitauthorized by Wilson and created by George Creel and known as Committee onPublic Information (CPI), this principle made its way across the world. In someplaces like Egypt and India, the CPI operated indirectly; in others such as Chinait operated directly. American government agents bought foreign journalists andplanted stories, and, in doing so, helped create an incredibly potent image of theUnited States as the leader of a free world and of Wilson as the embodiment ofthat freedom. Manela makes, in this context, an important and often overlookedpoint. No matter how carefully one searches Wilson’s famous Fourteen Pointsspeech of January 1918 for the term “self-determination,” one will not find 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 imaginationand shaped the political vocabulary of liberal third-world nationalists. That isbecause the United States was far more powerful and effective in its propagandathan the Bolsheviks who were as yet consumed with internal consolidation.Leading right up to Versailles, Wilson’s rhetoric became bolder, even if hiscommitment to decolonization remained in Manela’s words “hedged andequivocal” (p. 41).

Therein lies the ensuing tragedy that unfolds with astonishing similarity and,for the reader of the book, depressing predictability among colonized or semi-colonized peoples who put their faith in Wilson. The Americans had raisedhopes, but they had very little intention of fulfilling them. The most interestingand novel aspect of the book is in the narrative that Manela writes of faith anddisillusionment in several different locales joined together in a single Wilsonianmoment. As Manela shifts the focus on Wilson away from America and awayfrom decidedly eurocentric accounts of this period—be it Arno Mayer’s classicWilson vs. Lenin or Margaret Macmillan’s more recent Paris 1919—the bookintroduces the reader to legendary liberal nationalist leaders unfamiliar to mosthistorians who fix their gaze only on America or Europe: Saad Zaghlul of Egypt,Lala Lajpat Rai of India, Kang Youwei and Gu Weijun of China, and SyngmanRhee of Korea among others. All these men—and the book focuses almostexclusively on men in the public eye—put their faith in Wilson. And all thesemen were disappointed as Wilson and the U.S. delegation at Versailles provedunable, but even more so, unwilling to do much in the face of a ferocious Britishand French determination to aggrandize themselves at the world’s expense.The details in each case differ to be sure. In Egypt, for example, the Americanmissionaries were quite anxious in the face of the emergence of an Egyptiannational movement and were determined to maintain a discriminatory legalregime overseen by the British. In Korea, however, American missionaries werefar more sympathetic to the anti-Japanese nationalist movement. In India andChina there were fierce critics of European imperialism who refused to be takenin by Wilsonian rhetoric. In Egypt, as well, the American diplomats revealedtheir prejudice and incomprehension of the nationalist movement—which theylikened to Bolshevism much to the delight of British imperial officials. In China,however, the American minister in Beijing, Paul Reinsch, who helped found theAmerican Political Science Association, was far more intelligent and prescient.He urgently warned Wilson that his rhetoric was dangerous because if disap-pointed the Chinese would become an enemy (pp. 111–12). But what Reinschseems to have missed is what Manela underscores: in many countries chafingunder European and Japanese colonialism, there was a cause, which would laterbe called decolonization, which was in search of a vocabulary that Wilsonprovided.

All these sovereign nations in waiting demanded a place at the peace con-ference table. The Chinese and Korean delegations even boasted American-educated 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 farcruder calculus of power. China was humiliated in favor of Japan. It was granteda 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 recog-nizing the Japanese occupation (in return for Japanese recognition of the U.S.control over the Philippines), was once again sacrificed at the altar of expediencyand great power diplomacy. And in all these nations there was a revolutionaryupheaval when expectations were dashed. These also were crushed. Egypt hadits revolution of 1919—as it called its unprecedented mobilization of men andwomen, Muslims and Christians, against British colonialism—brutally crushed,and the controversial British protectorate recognized by the United States. Indiahad 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 theirfates. Only in the aftermath of the failure of liberal anticolonialism, and theretreat of America before the shadow of its own rhetoric, would Lenin’s star riseand would liberal nationalism be replaced, almost inevitably, by a far morepotent and radicalized nationalism, one that would not ask for liberation butwould seize it in the face of concerted Western resistance. What had begun withmen, 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 thethesis lies in Manela’s insistence that there was a profound gulf betweenWilson—the tragic historical figure who reflected the vicissitudes of his time—and the “Wilsonian moment” that enveloped nations and people across theglobe during and immediately following the First World War. “Wilson mayhave 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 payssufficient attention to particularity. Inevitably, however, the author’s intensefocus on Wilson gives the inadvertent impression that liberal nationalists inEgypt, India, China, and Korea had no other sources of inspiration. Moresignificantly, the most controversial aspect of the “Wilsonian moment” in theArab Middle East came not in Egypt but in Palestine, where Arab and Jewishnational movements struggled against one another. Wilson was instrumental inthe sending of what became known unofficially as the King-Crane commission,which was dispatched to the region to investigate how the native populations inPalestine, among other places, wanted to determine their own future. Much tothe dismay of the Zionist movement, it recommended a curtailing of Jewishcolonization of Palestine because Zionism was contrary to the aspirations of thenative majority. The European powers, in any event, ignored its recommenda-tion as did the U.S. administration itself—yet another failure of the Wilsonianmoment and of Wilson himself. It is a real pity that Manela chose to sidestep theissue entirely—King-Crane gets mentioned only once in passing, on page 128 ina 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 Americantutelage. The author’s undue caution when dealing with the most controversialaspects of the Wilsonian moment in the Middle East notwithstanding, Manela’slaudable goal was not to write within the confines of national or regionalhistories 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 pieceof history. The tragedy it invokes is not simply that Wilson misled himself andothers but that others also misled themselves.

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