Wilsonianism, or Wilsonian idealism, is a certain type of foreign policy advice. The term comes from the ideas and proposals of President Woodrow Wilson. He issued his famous Fourteen Points in January 1918 as a basis for ending World War I and promoting world peace. He was a leading advocate of the League of Nations to enable the international community to avoid wars and end hostile aggression. Wilsonianism is a form of liberal internationalism.
Principles
Common principles that are often associated with Wilsonianism include: Advocacy of the spread of democracy. Anne-Marie Slaughter writes that Wilson expected and hoped "that democracy would result from self-determination, but he never sought to spread democracy directly." Slaughter writes that Wilson's League of Nations was similarly intended to foster liberty democracy by serving as "a high wall behind which nations", especially small nations, "could exercise their right of self determination" but that Wilson did not envision that the United States would affirmatively intervene to "direct" or "shape" democracies in foreign nations. Conferences and bodies devoted to resolving conflict, especially the League of Nations and the United Nations. Emphasis on self-determination of peoples. Advocacy of the spread of capitalism. Support for collective security, and at least partial opposition to American isolationism. Support for open diplomacy and opposition to secret treaties. Support for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas. Belief that the foreign policies of democracies are morally superior because the people under democracies are inherently peace-loving.
Historian Joan Hoff writes, "What is 'normal' Wilsonianism remains contested today. For some, it is 'inspiring liberal internationalism' based on adherence to self-determination; for others, Wilsonianism is the exemplar of humanitarian intervention around the world,' making U.S. foreign policy a paragon of carefully defined and restricted use of force." Amos Perlmutter defined Wilsonianism as simultaneously consisting of "liberal internationalism, self-determination, nonintervention, humanitarian intervention" oriented in support of collective security, open diplomacy, capitalism, American exceptionalism, and free and open borders, and opposed to revolution.
According to University of Chicago political theorist Adom Getachew, Wilson's version of self-determination was a reassociation of an idea that others had previously imbued with different meanings. Wilson's version of self-determination "effectively recast self-determination as a racially differentiated principle, which was fully compatible with imperial rule."
Wilsonian moment
The Wilsonian moment was a time in the wake of the First World War in which many of those in the colonised world hoped that the time had come for the pre-war world order, which placed the Western powers at the top and marginalised the majority of the rest of the world, to be demolished and non-European nations would be given their rightful place. Erez Manela is a key historian of the Wilsonian moment, having produced work on the topic which include case studies on the Wilsonian moment in Egypt, Korea, China, and India. He aimed to address the fact that the significance of Wilsonianism in Asia and Africa had received little attention from scholars. The reaction in the colonised world was largely the result of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech on 8 January 1918, in which Wilson advocated the formation of a "general association of nations", "for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike". He declared in a subsequent speech to the United States Congress on February 8, 1918, that in the post-war peace settlement "national aspirations must be respected" and people could only be governed "by their own consent". Self-determination was not "a mere phrase" but an "imperative principle of action".