![]() In May 1916 he supported the proposal of the League to Enforce Peace, which sought to create an international organization entrusted with resolving conflict once the war was over. While in 1914-1915 he presented himself somewhat abstractly as the guardian of the values of peace, 1916 and the first months of 1917 were marked by his increasingly international engagement, an active neutrality of sorts in the pursuit of an ideal. The Construction of a Figureįrom August 1914 to April 1917, as neutral America was observing the ravages of the European war, Wilson built his image of a man of peace during the speeches and position-taking he directed to the American and European peoples. The magic nevertheless worked in the aftermath of the war. In this sense, the Wilsonian moment was based more on rhetoric than the American president’s actual policy. His detractors maintained that unlike the image he projected of himself, he never deduced his actions from his principles but rather the other way around, using the latter to justify the former. This man, torn between the reality of politics and his idealism steeped in an almost religious conception of global affairs, rarely rose to the height of his own ideals. In fact, Wilson himself was not as Wilsonian as is often believed. A significant portion of the president’s ideas regarding peace echoed arguments that had already emerged in liberal internationalist and some socialist circles in Europe and the US, which he skillfully made his own and associated with his name. From the fall of 1918 to the spring of 1919, Wilson generated an immense wave of hope, one that European peoples greatly needed at the time. The aftermath of the First World War was marked by a Wilsonian “moment” in which the man and his ideas assumed an unprecedented glory in Europe and the world. ![]() His ideas thus spoke equally to European conservatives and reformists. He represented the traditional values of diplomatic rhetoric-law, morality, and justice-but also promoted new notions in international relations, such as the right of self-determination, democracy, the primacy of humanity over national interests, and the establishment of new frameworks for diplomacy via a community of powers rather than a balance of power. One man embodied this hope, US President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924). The new Europe that would emerge from the conflict would have to do away with the inadequate diplomatic practice-the Concert of Europe-that had led to the war, and definitively prevent its return. In 1918, after four years of a war that tore apart the continent, swept aside centuries-old empires, and ruined the traditional orders of societies, Europeans were hoping for new solutions.
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