Memorandum to Woodrow Wilson

By Henry Grunwald

I hope this reaches you at whatever resort exists in heaven (or the other place) for former Presidents of the U.S. Not knowing how closely you watch events in the world you left behind, I want to bring you up to date on the consequences of an ideal you so energetically championed: national self- determination. Today it is militantly invoked in many places, from the former Yugoslavia to the former Soviet republics, including North Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. (You don't know where those new states are? Well, very few people do.) Rival claims to the same land have led to bloody battles, and the U.S. is apt to be involved. Your present successor in the White House has pledged 25,000 troops to help keep the peace in Bosnia. When you proclaimed the right to self-determination, it sounded noble and progressive, although not everyone cheered. Your own Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (you never did like him) predicted that the concept would lead to unfulfillable expectations and large-scale violence. "What a calamity," he wrote, "that the phrase was ever uttered!"

In fairness, you did not invent the idea -- nationalism had become a religion, but you gave it a mighty push, resulting in new maps that were not much more logical than the old ones. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, was followed by new constructs -- Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia -- containing as many disparate and often hostile peoples. Hence today's tribal conflicts. All too often, a mistreated minority achieves independence and then mistreats other minorities in its midst or tries to "rescue" its brethren who live on the other side of a national frontier. Thus self-determination for one people becomes aggression against another.

Before the international community recognizes a people's claim to sovereignty, at least two factors should be kept in mind. One is economic viability, which is often missing. The other is history, including the questions of whether a people has a clear national tradition and has been independent in the past. Without condoning the brutality of your old friends the Serbs, it can be said that we acted prematurely in recognizing some of the former republics of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia. This recognition transformed a civil war into an international conflict. America is surely the last country in the world to deny captive peoples the right to go their own way. But the process has got out of hand. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (you know about the United Nations; it's close to what you hoped the League of Nations would be) puts the problem precisely: "If each minority will ask for self-determination, rather than 184 nations around the world, we may have 500 to 1,000 countries, and that is not in the interests of peace or economic development."

What to do? We now frequently resort to United Nations peacekeeping forces, quite an astonishing innovation, which you yourself visualized. But even if the U.N. had more manpower (a kind of international Foreign Legion might be a good idea) and more unified decision-making power, it would be hard to impose peace from the outside. Looking toward long-term solutions, a whole intellectual cottage industry has sprung up that should delight your academic heart. One of the more intriguing proposals involves divorcing nationality from territory. For example, Russians living outside Russia in the former Soviet republics might retain their Russian citizenship, with its rights and privileges, without being repatriated. There also have been suggestions for "national home regimes." Practical or not, such schemes are worth looking at, for they indicate the almost desperate need to develop a more flexible conception of sovereignty.

The European Union is struggling with just such issues: how to balance national sovereignty against the demands of a larger federal structure. Despite recent setbacks, the Union remains the most promising model for the future.

Mr. President, America has an obligation to make up for the dubious legacy of self-determination. We should stand for a less simplistic ideal. Such an ideal does exist -- community, more broadly defined than it is in the tribalism now rampant. We should champion this not in the name of Wilsonian altruism (if you will pardon me ) but for very pragmatic reasons. The nation- state, the tribe writ large, today is often too big to cope with local problems and yet too small to function adequately in the global marketplace. The values of blood and soil are retrograde. They are also powerful, and they will not recede easily. But the U.S. should not give in to them, even if that sometimes means standing against the tide. The desire to belong -- to family, clan, nation -- may be part of human nature, but it need not take an exclusive and aggressive form. The U.S. should not automatically give its blessing to almost any movement under the banner of self-determination. We should perhaps go back to the Enlightenment's understanding of self-determination, namely, the autonomy of the individual. For such ideas to make a dent in peoples' minds will take long, slow and patient effort. But America should begin. Mr. President, if you have any astral influence on the powers in Washington, I hope you will guide them in that direction.