Woodrow Wilson’s explanation that America had to enter the war to “make the world safe for democracy” must be understood as mere sloganeering. He was not interested in expanding individual political liberty, domestically or abroad.
Given Wilson’s heavy-handed penchant for social engineering, one might suppose he harbored kind sentiments toward the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This, however, was not the case.
While Wilson may have admired and emulated a central European doctrine in which the state controls the individual, he found Habsburg empire repugnant because it was a multi-ethnic amalgamation. Wilson was a strong believer in the nation-state, and to fuel Wilsonian nationalism, an ethnic state was needed.
This explains his delight with reassembling a sovereign Poland.
The Austro-Hungarian empire, by contrast, was a potpourri of Czechs, Hungarians, Austrians, Slovaks, and a few other groups. Wilson felt that such an impure mixture could not generate authentic nationalism.
When WWI started, the U.S. Civil War was still a living memory (Wilson was born in 1856). Wilson, trying to reconcile his racist southern roots with the Northern Republican victory of 1865, interpreted the war’s end as a lesson about centralized control. In order to be on the winning side, he felt, one needed to limit the rights and freedoms of individuals.
His father had owned slaves, and those slaves served young Wilson as he grew up. Looking back, he asserted that slavery was not a moral crime, but had merely been an economic system which had outlasted its usefulness.
The dynasties of Europe displeased Wilson, not because they limited the political liberties of their subjects, but because they lacked his systematic and scientific approach to managing the lives of citizens. Wilson was an early representatives of what Alexei Marcoux and others have come to call “technocratic authoritarian paternalism.”
The ethnic nation-state was, Wilson felt, better than a multi-ethnic empire for reasons of scientific management. But Wilson was the president of a multi-ethnic country. He hoped to resolve this tension by instituting various racial policies. Historian Eric Foner writes:
Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of liberty.” His administration imposed full racial segregation in Washington and hounded from office considerable numbers of black federal employees.
Wilson’s racism, however, is only a small part of his broader political vision. This becomes visible in his efforts to redraw the map of the world at Versailles:
Meanwhile, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 sacrificed the principle of self-determination - ostensibly the Allies’ major war aim - on the altar of imperialism, so far as the world’s nonwhite peoples were concerned. Nation-states were created for Eastern Europe, but not for what Wilson's advisor Colonel Edward House called the “backward countries” of Asia and Africa.The result was a feeling of deep betrayal that affected everyone from W. E. B. Du Bois, who had traveled to Paris to plead the cause of colonial independence, to ordinary black Americans. Du Bois was forced to conclude that Wilson had “never at any single moment meant to include in his Democracy” black Americans or the nonwhite peoples of the world.
Not a competition between liberty and tyranny, Wilson’s engagement in WWI was a competition between hereditary dynastic authoritarianism and the above-mentioned technocratic authoritarian paternalism.
Wilson rejected royalty’s claim to rule while asserting his own right to rule. In his estimation, he simply knew better, and knew more. He did not oppose authoritarianism. He simply wanted a different type of authoritarianism. As scholar Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:
World War I began as an old-fashioned territorial dispute. However, with the early involvement and the ultimate official entry into the war by the United States in April 1917, the war took on a new ideological dimension. The United States had been founded as a republic, and the democratic principle, inherent in the idea of a republic, had only recently been carried to victory as the result of the violent defeat and devastation of the secessionist Confederacy by the centralist Union government. At the time of World War I, this triumphant ideology of an expansionist democratic republicanism had found its very personification in then U.S. President Wilson. Under Wilson’s administration, the European war became an ideological mission - to make the world safe for democracy and free of dynastic rulers. When in March 1917 the U.S.-allied Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and a new democratic-republican government was established in Russia under Kerenski, Wilson was elated. With the Czar gone, the war had finally become a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil. Wilson and his closest foreign policy advisors, George D. Herron and Colonel House, disliked the Germany of the Kaiser, the aristocracy, and the military elite. But they hated Austria. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has characterized the views of Wilson and the American left, “Austria was far more wicked than Germany. It existed in contradiction of the Mazzinian principle of the national state, it had inherited many traditions as well as symbols from the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); its dynasty had once ruled over Spain (another bete noire); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth (who had a monument in New York City), and morally supported the monarchical experiment in Mexico. Habsburg - the very name evoked memories of Roman Catholicism, of the Armada, the Inquisition, Metternich, Lafayette jailed at Olmuetz and Silvio Pellico in Brünn’s Spielberg fortress. Such a state had to be shattered, such a dynasty had to disappear.”
Wilson didn’t care about making the world safe for democracy. He was a racist, but racism is only one dimension of his vision for ruling.
By means of WWI, and especially by means of postwar treaties and arrangements, Wilson hoped to reshape the world along the lines of scientific management. ‘Taylorism’ or ‘scientific management’ was an attempt to rationalize industrial production. Wilson hoped to expand that principle beyond the factory, and to impose it upon the world.
