Americans watching Serbia’s aggression also are watching the presidential candidates’ responses to it. Margaret Thatcher, who favors airstrikes and weapons for Bosnia, says to Americans, “This is mainly a great moral question. And if there is one country in the world which came to life on a moral basis, it was America.” Our foreign policy has indeed been intermittently influenced by the fact that our nation’s founding document affirms the universal validity of certain truths that are “self-evident,” meaning clear to minds unclouded by superstition and ignorance. So Americans constantly feel tugged in two directions. One is to keep clear of quarrels that arise from superstitions and primitiveness rooted in ancient social soil. But we relish our role as bearers of a bright torch lit by our Founders.
Bosnia’s sorrows are occasioning another installment in the argument between America’s foreign policy “moralists” and “realists.” The moralists ask, “Do we or do we not believe in self-determination?” Realists respond, “Be careful how you use those words. Serbians say they are fighting for self-determination and could invoke the ghost of a moralist, Woodrow Wilson.”
Pat Moynihan, in his forthcoming book “Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics,” says ethnicity makes the world go ‘round. And bleed. This is a nasty surprise, not least to all the advanced thinkers who knew, just knew that modernity would mean the eclipse of ethnicity. The “liberal expectancy” was that ethnic attachments would weaken, even disappear. Such attachments are (or so the theory was) anachronistic, primitive, transitional-echoes of mankind’s infancy. Also mistaken was the Marxist prediction that all preindustrial components of identity-cultural, religious, racial-would be superseded by social class.
Didn’t happen. The breaking of nations by ethnic fragmentation dominates world polities today. Many an ethnic group thinks it is a “self” entitled to “self-determination.” The Nineteenth Century was a century of consolidations. The United States bound a continent together by steel rails and a strong central government. Germany unified. Italy did, too. But given the centrifugal forces loose in the late Twentieth Century, Moynihan wonders: Would Germany or Italy unify today? Might Bavaria and Tuscany and other … what? “peoples”? … seek “self-determination”?
Americans injected into the discourse of diplomacy the idea that “self-determination” is a universal “right.” Before the First World War ended Woodrow Wilson told a cheering session of Congress that “self-determination” is “an imperative principle of action.” But self-determination by what sort of entities? Wilson said, “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent.” He was sowing dragon’s teeth. He seemed to assume that the phrases “nation state” and “a people” are synonyms, or that these entities are coterminous. But in many cases they were not; are not. Ask the Serbian “people” living in, and carving up, the state of Bosnia.
Six of Wilson’s Fourteen Points concerned self-determination. There was to be, for example, “autonomous development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary” and also of “other nationalities under Turkish rule.” Peoples, nationalities. And ethnicity. Wilson, says Moynihan, revised the rules of international society “to accommodate, indeed to legitimize and even hallow the principle of ethnicity.” But ethnicity is not the same thing as nationality, so the principle of ethnicity disrupts the game of nations. The world would be calmer if history had caused ethnic groups to coincide neatly with national boundaries. But the distribution of peoples does not always fit political borders, particularly when those borders have been drawn by diplomats confident of their ability to tidy up the world and make it rational. Rationalism in politics is risky; when combined, as in Wilson’s statecraft, with moralism, it is downright dangerous.
One man worried about it. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” Wilson, said Lansing, “is a phrase-maker par excellence,” but when he speaks of self-determination, “what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area or a community?” While Wilson was enunciating this “imperative” principle, a German corporal, recovering from a gas attack, was planning a political career. And on September 26, 1938, the former corporal said, “[A]t last, nearly twenty years after the declarations of President Wilson, the right of self-determination for these three and a half million [Germans] must be enforced.” So spoke Hitler as Czechoslovakia was dismembered. A nation was sacrificed for the “self-determination” of a “people”–Sudeten Germans.
Lansing had seen such trouble coming. The “undigested” phrase “self-determination” is, he had said, “simply loaded with dynamite … It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives … What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered!” Undeterred, FDR and Churchill affirmed, in their Atlantic Charter of August 1941, the rights of “peoples.” And the U.N. Charter endorses self-determination of “peoples.” The Serbs and Kurds and others have been listening.
In 1915 Walter Lippmann wrote, “When you consider what a mystery the East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in something like its true proportions.” But just two years later Lippmann, just 28 years old, was an earnest arranger. He was working for the Inquiry, a small, secret group serving Wilson. From the New York offices of the American Geographical Society it planned a rearrangement of the world that would make the Twentieth Century rational. Ronald Steel writes:
“The Inquiry, working from maps and piles of statistics, attacked the question of frontiers by drawing up charts showing the concentration of national groups within Europe. Lippmann then coordinated these charts and lists with national political movements to determine how these ethnic entities could be granted self-determination without triggering new European rivalries. Then he correlated this blueprint with the secret treaties-deciding which territorial changes were acceptable and which defied justice and logic. Once the Inquiry team … had matched the aspirations of the ethnic groups with the geography and economics of each region, Lippmann organized the conclusions into…”
Enough. Has there ever been quite such a spectacle of naivete and hubris? Soon Wilson was off to the Versailles peace conference. A member of his delegation sent home a letter containing one of the most telling vignettes of this century:
“We went into the next room where the floor was clear and Wilson spread out a big map (made in our office) on the floor and got down on his hands and knees to show us what had been done. Most of us were also on our hands and knees. I was in the front row and felt someone pushing me, and looked around angrily to find that it was [Italian premier] Orlando, on his hands and knees crawling like a bear toward the map.”
What were they working on? Perhaps that soon-to-be-born state, Yugoslavia. Perhaps on the basis of the Inquiry’s work. Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat at the conference, wrote to his wife, “But, darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men [Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau] cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake.” Thus was rationality arranged for the Middle East.
The aged Oliver Wendell Holmes once said to the young Lippmann, “I don’t want any of this onward-and-upward stuff. You young men seem to think that if you sit on the world long enough you will hatch something out. But you’re wrong.” Actually, much has been hatched from the well-meaning overreaching of people unwilling to leave bad enough alone. With steady hands they would redraw maps on the basis of ethnic data. But the principle of ethnicity that Wilson (in Moynihan’s word) “hallowed” got out of hand. Again, Moynihan: “Fascism, Italian, then German, was much about ‘blood.’ The Second World War was as much a pogrom as anything else, and far the greatest incidence of violence since has been ethnic in nature and origin.” (Not counting–why not? –blacks attempting an “ethnic cleansing” of Koreans from South-Central Los Angeles.)
Bosnia, showing the disintegrative force of ethnic strife, may be an archetype of our foreign policy preoccupations for years to come. So: Does George Bush or Bill Clinton have a Wilsonian itch to fix the world? Clinton’s moderately aggressive pronouncements regarding force on Bosnia’s behalf may be partly an attempt to solve a Democratic Party problem. Since the Tet offensive of 1968, Democrats have seemed unwilling to countenance force in the service of foreign policy. Be that as it may, Clinton also is the nominee of Wilson’s party. Bush is unclear about Bosnia, as about most things, but he has Wilson’s sort of WASP moralism and Wilson’s penchant for glistening abstractions (“new world order”).
Americans wonder: Does our possession of the military capacity to strike at evil (such as Serbia’s) confer a duty to do so? Does our failure to act make us complicit in evil? Those are serious questions, but so are these: Bombing Serbian mortars might make Americans feel good, but is catharsis a suitable reason for military action? Would limited military intervention reform Serbian behavior? The Balkans are not a promising laboratory for a therapeutic foreign policy. Must we intervene to “teach” other would-be aggressors that aggression does not pay? Desert Storm was, in part, such a tutelary policy. Serbia evidently was not paying attention.
The Cold War is history and history itself has been declared at an end, but the world is still too much with us. So as we sift the cinders and ashes of so many of this century’s good intentions, let us fix in mind the cautionary examples of Lippmann with his charts and statistics and Wilson on his hands and knees. Realism is not an alternative to moral action. Rather, realism is a moral duty-the duty to know what we do not understand and cannot do. If we do not know those things, we will find ourselves in Pandaemonium. Which, Moynihan reminds us, is the name Milton gave, in “Paradise Lost,” to the capital of Hell.
