Sovereignty, Rhetoric, and World Order: Woodrow Wilson’s Self- Determination

Abstract

This thesis elucidates Woodrow Wilson’s unique rendering of the concept of “self-determination,” examining how Wilson made the concept his own, and how this unique rendering has been obscured by certain conventions and characterizations that predominate in the scholarly literature. I demonstrate that Wilson’s self-determination was less sensational, more limited, and more instrumentalist than is typically acknowledged in the literature—while also being richer in articulation than prevailing interpretations suggest. I situate Wilson’s self-determination within Wilson’s larger persuasive project, a broader rhetorical and political framework which reflected who he was trying to persuade of what, showing that Wilson’s conceptualization of self-determination was inseparable from his efforts to persuade people of his interpretation of the First World War, of the peace settlement that followed, and of the League of Nations as the institutional embodiment of a new world order. This framework was prior to, superordinate to, and much more important to Wilson than was any standalone notion of self-determination. In this way, and contrary to standard accounts, I argue for an image of Wilson’s self-determination that was neither Wilson’s priority, nor summative of his worldview, and neither intrinsically democratic, nor, in its essence, about nationality. And yet in the way Wilson deployed the concept within his larger persuasive project, I argue for an image of Wilson’s self-determination that remains a key to understanding the basis of his vision of a new world order—an order constructed upon the limitations intrinsic to the concept of sovereignty. In this regard, I show that Wilson’s largely unexamined theory of sovereignty is essential to understanding better the significance of his conceptualization of self-determination—not only did Wilson here employ the phrase “self-determination” much earlier than is recognized in the literature, but this earlier usage also offers a corrective to the often-misunderstood distinction between self-determination and the closely associated notions of “the consent of the governed” and “self-government,” and it illuminates his later views on sovereignty in relation to the League of Nations and his vision of world order.