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John Paul Newman, Volker Prott. The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1732–1733, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy369
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Extract
Wilsonianism is perhaps the least theorized and (although this does not always logically follow the preceding observation) the least well understood ideology of mass mobilization in the twentieth century. Too often reduced to a handful of stereotypes supposedly flowing from the character and political idealism of its architect, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the Wilsonian perspective as conceived at the end of the First World War was detached, donnish, and above all naïve about the putative postwar international order, a naïveté quickly and rudely disabused by postwar realities. Notions of Wilsonian idealism and the inherent likelihood of its failure have recently been challenged by historians such as Zara Steiner (cited in the book under review) and others. They have shown that the Versailles settlement itself, despite its shortcomings, satisfied a much higher proportion of European peoples (leaving aside for the moment the implications of the peace in the modern Middle East) than the order of the prewar period, and that were it not for the economic and political crises of the interwar period, Wilsonianism might have provided the basis for a long-lasting peaceful international order.
