The Wilsonian Moment

"Erez is indeed a tenured professor in the Harvard History Department, a status not easily attained. He reached it remarkably quickly, on the basis of a good topic and unusual linguistic skills. Right. Erez came to Yale with Chinese and Arabic, plus Hebrew (he grew up in Israel), and several European languages as well. His dissertation was interesting because it focused on the macro-implications of a micro-moment. The ‘moment’, incorporated in the title of his book, was Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech of January of 1918, in which he called, among other things, for self-determination – the right of people to determine their own forms of government. He did so for both realistic and idealistic reasons. The realism had to do with trying to undermine the appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had just taken place, as well as that of Germany and its allies, with whom the US was now at war. The idealism lay in the fact that Wilson believed in what he said – without giving much thought to how widely it should apply. Although aimed at the Russians and the Germans, copies of the speech went all over the world. No historian had assessed the consequences of this, however, until Erez started working with Egyptian sources, from which he learned that the Egyptians – still under the informal control of the British – had been very much excited by what Wilson had said. So I suggested to Erez, since he did have Chinese, that he see if there were parallel reactions in China. There were indeed, in the form of student protests against the assignment to the Japanese, by the World War I victors, of a sphere of influence in China. One of those students, as it happened, was the young Mao Zedong. That got us to thinking about other national liberation movements: had the Fourteen Points speech influenced British-controlled India, for example, or Japanese-controlled Korea? The answer was yes, and fortunately the sources for both countries were in English – Gandhi, of course, spoke it fluently, and Syngman Rhee, the most influential Korean exile at the time, had been educated at Princeton. So Erez constructed a four-part comparative study – the reaction to Wilson in Egypt, China, India and Korea – thereby giving us a new view of a familiar topic: the book is really about the Wilsonian origins of what, years later, we call the ‘third world’. So, as with the work of Hal and Lorenz, I’ve had to rewrite my lectures."