World Order (35 page)

In keeping with this view, when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated. International peace required “
the destruction of every arbitrary power
anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual impotence.” A rules-based, peaceful international order was achievable, but because “
no autocratic government could be trusted
to keep faith within it or observe its covenants,” peace required “
that autocracy must first be shown
the utter futility of its claims to power or leadership in the modern world.”

The spread of democracy, in Wilson’s view, would be an automatic consequence of implementing the principle of self-determination. Since the Congress of Vienna, wars had ended with an agreement on the restoration of the balance of power by territorial adjustments. Wilson’s concept of world order called instead for “self-determination”—for each nation, defined by ethnic and linguistic unity, to be given a state. Only through self-government, he assessed, could peoples express their underlying will toward international harmony. And once they had achieved independence and national unity, Wilson argued, they would no longer have an incentive to practice aggressive or self-interested policies. Statesmen following the principle of self-determination would not “
dare … attempting any such covenants
of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna,” where elite representatives of the great powers had redrawn international borders in secret, favoring equilibrium over popular aspirations. The world would thus enter

an age … which rejects
the standards of national selfishness that once governed the counsels of nations and demands that
they shall give way to a new order of things in which the only questions will be: “Is it right?” “Is it just?” “Is it in the interest of mankind?”

Scant evidence supported the Wilsonian premise that public opinion was more attuned to the overall “interest of mankind” than the traditional statesmen whom Wilson castigated. The European countries that entered the war in 1914 all had representative institutions of various influence. (The German parliament was elected by universal suffrage.) In every country, the war was greeted by universal enthusiasm with nary even token opposition in any of the elected bodies. After the war, the publics of democratic France and Britain demanded a punitive peace, ignoring their own historical experience that a stable European order had never come about except through an ultimate reconciliation of victor and defeated. Restraint was much more the attribute of the aristocrats who negotiated at the Congress of Vienna, if only because they shared common values and experiences. Leaders who had been shaped by a domestic policy of balancing a multitude of pressure groups were arguably more attuned to the moods of the moment or to the dictates of national dignity than to abstract principles of the benefit of humanity.

The concept of transcending war by giving each nation a state, similarly admirable as a general concept, faced analogous difficulties in practice. Ironically, the redrawing of Europe’s map on the new principle of linguistically based national self-determination, largely at Wilson’s behest, enhanced Germany’s geopolitical prospects. Before the war, Germany was surrounded by three major powers (France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary), constraining any territorial expansion. Now it faced a collection of small states built on the principle of self-determination—only partially applied, because in Eastern Europe and the Balkans the nationalities were so jumbled that each new state included other nationalities, compounding their strategic weakness with ideological
vulnerability. On the eastern flank of Europe’s disaffected central power were no longer great masses—which at the Congress of Vienna had been deemed essential to restrain the then-aggressor France—but, as Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George ruefully assessed, “
a number of small states
, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamoring for reunion with their native land.”

The implementation of Wilson’s vision was to be fostered by the construction of new international institutions and practices allowing for the peaceful resolution of disputes. The League of Nations would replace the previous concert of powers. Forswearing the traditional concept of an equilibrium of competing interests, League members would implement “
not a balance of power
, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” It was understandable that after a war that had been caused by the confrontation of two rigid alliance systems, statesmen might seek a better alternative. But the “community of power” of which Wilson was speaking replaced rigidity with unpredictability.

What Wilson meant by community of power was a new concept that later became known as “collective security.” In traditional international policy, states with congruent interests or similar apprehensions might assign themselves a special role in guaranteeing the peace and form an alliance—as they had, for example, after the defeat of Napoleon. Such arrangements were always designed to deal with specific strategic threats, either named or implied: for example, a revanchist France after the Congress of Vienna. The League of Nations, by contrast, would be founded on a moral principle, the universal opposition to military aggression as such, whatever its source, its target, or its proclaimed justification. It was aimed not at a specific issue but at the violation of norms. Because the definition of norms has proved to be
subject to divergent interpretations, the operation of collective security is, in that sense, unpredictable.

All states, in the League of Nations concept
, would pledge themselves to the peaceful resolution of disputes and would subordinate themselves to the neutral application of a shared set of rules of fair conduct. If states differed in their view as to their rights or duties, they would submit their claims to arbitration by a panel of disinterested parties. If a country violated this principle and used force to press its claims, it would be labeled an aggressor. League members would then unite to resist the belligerent party as a violator of the general peace. No alliances, “separate interests,” secret agreements, or “plottings of inner circles” would be permitted within the League, because this would obstruct the neutral application of the system’s rules. International order would be refounded instead on “
open covenants of peace
, openly arrived at.”

The distinction Wilson made between alliances and collective security—the key element of the League of Nations system—was central to dilemmas that have followed ever since. An alliance comes about as an agreement on specific facts or expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests are, the more cohesive the alliance will be. Collective security, by contrast, is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case.

Alliances grow out of a consciousness of a defined common interest identified in advance. Collective security declares itself opposed to any aggressive conduct anywhere within the purview of the participating states that, in the proposed League of Nations, involved every
recognized state. In the event of a violation, such a collective security system must distill its common purpose after the fact, out of variegated national interests. Yet the idea that in such situations countries will identify violations of peace identically and be prepared to act in common against them is belied by the experience of history. From Wilson to the present, in the League of Nations or its successor, the United Nations, the military actions that can be classed as collective security in the conceptual sense were the Korean War and the first Iraq War, and came about in both cases because the United States had made clear that it would act unilaterally if necessary (in fact, it had in both cases started deployments before there was a formal UN decision).
Rather than inspire
an American decision, the United Nations decision ratified it. The commitment to support the United States was more a means to gain influence over American actions—already in train—than the expression of a moral consensus.

The balance-of-power system collapsed with the outbreak of World War I because the alliances it spawned had no flexibility, and it was indiscriminately applied to peripheral issues, thereby exacerbating all conflicts. The system of collective security demonstrated the opposite failing when confronted by the initial steps toward World War II. The League of Nations was impotent in the face of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the Italian attack on Abyssinia, the German derogation of the Locarno Treaty, and the Japanese invasion of China. Its definition of aggression was so vague, the reluctance to undertake common action so deep, that it proved inoperative even against flagrant threats to peace. Collective security has repeatedly revealed itself to be unworkable in situations that most seriously threaten international peace and security. (For example, during the Middle East war of 1973, the UN Security Council did not meet, by collusion among the permanent members, until a ceasefire had been negotiated between Washington and Moscow.)

Nevertheless, Wilson’s legacy has so shaped American thinking that
American leaders have conflated collective security with alliances. When explaining the nascent Atlantic Alliance system after World War II to a wary Congress, administration spokesmen insisted on describing the NATO alliance as the pure implementation of the doctrine of collective security.
They submitted an analysis
to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tracing the difference between historic alliances and the NATO treaty, which held that NATO was not concerned with the defense of territory (surely news to America’s European allies). Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty “is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting ‘balance of power’ but to strengthen the ‘balance of principle.’” (One can imagine the gleam in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s eyes—an astute student of history, he knew far better—when he presented a treaty designed to get around the weaknesses of the doctrine of collective security to Congress as a measure to implement them.)

In retirement, Theodore Roosevelt deplored Wilson’s attempts at the beginning of World War I to remain aloof from the unfolding conflict in Europe. He then, at its end, questioned the claims made on behalf of the League of Nations. After armistice was declared in November 1918, Roosevelt wrote,

I am for such a League provided
we don’t expect too much from it … I am not willing to play the part which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then forthwith eaten by the wolves.

The test of Wilsonianism has never been whether the world has managed to enshrine peace through sufficiently detailed rules with a broad enough base of signatories. The essential question has been what to do when these rules were violated or, more challengingly,
manipulated to ends contrary to their spirit. If international order was a legal system operating before the jury of public opinion,
what if an aggressor
chose conflict on an issue that the democratic publics regarded as too obscure to warrant involvement—for example, a border dispute between Italy’s colonies in East Africa and the independent Empire of Abyssinia? If two sides violated the proscription against force and the international community cut off arms shipments to both parties as a result, this would often allow the stronger party to prevail. If a party “legally” withdrew from the mechanism of peaceful international order and declared itself no longer bound by its strictures—as with Germany’s, Japan’s, and Italy’s eventual withdrawal from the League of Nations, the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, or in our own day the defiance of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty by proliferating countries—were the status quo powers authorized to use force to punish this defiance, or should they attempt to coax the renegade power back into the system? Or simply ignore the challenge? And would a course of appeasement not then provide rewards for defiance? Above all, were there “legal” outcomes that should nonetheless be resisted because they violated other principles of military or political equilibrium—for example, the popularly ratified “self-determination” of Austria and the German-speaking communities of the Czechoslovak Republic to merge with Nazi Germany in 1938, or Japan’s concoction of a supposedly self-determining Manchukuo (“Manchu Country”) in 1932 carved from northeastern China? Were the rules and principles
themselves
the international order, or were they a scaffolding on top of a geopolitical structure capable of—indeed requiring—more sophisticated management?

T
HE “OLD DIPLOMACY”
had sought to counterbalance the interests of rival states and the passions of antagonistic nationalisms in an
equilibrium of contending forces. In that spirit, it had brought France back into the European order after the defeat of Napoleon, inviting it to participate in the Congress of Vienna even while ensuring that it would be surrounded by great masses to contain any future temptations to aggrandizement. For the new diplomacy, which promised to reorder international affairs on moral and not strategic principles, no such calculations were permissible.