Few principles of international law and morality are more basic than the right of a people to national self-determination. The American and French revolutions proclaimed this principle and inspired millions of people to throw off foreign rule and domination in its pursuit. Even as the European states and the United States were acquiring empires around the globe during the nineteenth century, they were also integrating their disparate populations under the banner of increasingly strident and aggressive forms of national self-assertion. Napoleonic France, which had spread the infectious virus of nationalism among the European peoples whom it conquered, contributed decisively to the creation of a united Italy and Germany.
The principle of self-determination was expanded, paradoxically, not only to include the creation of new states but to underwrite claims to empire, reflected in Germany’s and Italy’s imperial designs variously manifested in Europe, Asia, and Africa in imitation of their European rivals. The failure of the Europeans to contain these virulent forms of egoistic nationalism in their own relations or to prevent their spread to the peoples of their far-flung empires finally plunged all into a world war.
World War I effectively strengthened, not diminished, the force of national self-determination in world politics. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points rested on a conception of international politics that hinged critically on the purported stabilizing effects of applying the principles more broadly than ever before. Wilson argued, and the Versailles Treaty affirmed, that World War I was caused by authoritarian governments seeking to oppress their own and foreign peoples.
If previously suppressed national peoples were granted their own states, their legitimate claims for the redress of their frustrated demands for self-determination would eliminate a principal cause of war. Wilson also assumed that, once this principle was applied to the peoples of Europe, democratic government and peace.........
