The French and Indian War (1754 to 1763) didn’t change the way power was distributed among the major European powers, and it didn’t change the way they interacted with each other. But WWI did change the concepts which nations used to view themselves and to view other nations.
It seemed, perhaps, that the First World War exposed, or caused, the collapse of a centuries-old monarchical system in a number of European nations, and brought about “democracy” in many of them, as well as a new self-concept of what it means to be a nation.
Different parties use the word ‘democracy’ in various ways and with divergent definitions, so it is worth asking exactly what is meant by that word in various times and places.
Certainly, at the end of hostilities in November 1918, and at the treaty signing in 1919, and into the early 1920s, it seemed that democracy was taking root and blooming in Europe.
Quickly, however, this hoped-for freedom seemed to exhibit a fragility: Russia’s first free government under Kerensky lasted less than a year before falling to Lenin’s socialist thugs; Italy fell to Mussolini’s Fascists; several years later, Hitler’s national socialists grabbed power in Germany.
As energetically as it had begun, the movement toward democracy seemed to collapse in numerous places. Yet Europe did not resume the old monarchies. Instead a nightmarish series of totalitarian dictatorships would dominate the next few decades. One historian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, writes:
The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First off, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch — Emperor Franz Joseph — and America by a democratically elected President — Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.
Why did, in certain countries, the move to democracy get derailed and redesigned into dictatorship? Was there some germ of totalitarianism in this movement?
Given that Woodrow Wilson has a figurehead status, as Hoppe mentions above, it may well be that his schemes included a tragic flaw which would ultimately yield the bitter fruit of political oppression instead of the anticipated liberty.
Wilson had been reelected to the presidency in 1916 under the slogan, “he kept us out of the war.” The voters wanted either peace or isolationism, but they did not want to be part of WWI. Yet, as federal judge Andrew Napolitano writes, that would change quickly:
In April 1917, only a few months after Wilson’s election, however, America had declared its entry into the war. What had happened so that America’s peace candidate and the people who elected him were suddenly mobilizing for war, in one of the greatest historical turnarounds of all time?
Wilson’s reelection slogan would manifest itself to be utterly insincere. His clear goal was to bring the United States into the war. Wilson was not interested in the war itself, but in the powers which would be granted to him as a wartime leader. He imagined that he’d use those extra powers to reshape American society, so that at war’s end, a different nation would emerge.
Not content with redesigning the United States, Wilson also planned to redesign the world. Only by being a part of the war could he have a hand, he thought, in shaping the postwar world.
The truth is, Wilson was never the pacifist he had portrayed himself to be. Rather, his peace platform was a well-devised strategy to get himself elected president. In reality, he had goals on an international scale, which were his top priority, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish them, even if that meant lying about war and then conniving to enter it.
Events conspired against Wilson. In Europe, he was not able to shape the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and several other postwar treaties, to his liking. While he did have a chance to engage in some nation-building, the international framework remained largely the product of the European negotiators.
Inside the United State, the voters were quick to reject both Wilson’s “League of Nations” and his heavy-handed regulation: the election of Warren Harding was a rejection of Wilson. Harding’s major goals were deregulation and returning maximal liberty to the ordinary citizen.
Wilson was a major force behind introducing modern democracy into Europe. His version of democracy, however, was actually driven by his anti-democratic desire to give the government ever increasing control over ordinary citizens, and to have the “League of Nations” take control away from a nation’s voters.
In sum, the version of democracy which Wilson sought to institute in Europe contained inside itself the seeds of a very anti-democratic movement. Thus young democracies soon fell in Italy, Russia, and Germany.
