6 - The Wilsonian Revolution: World War One

Summary

Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

Winston Churchill (1901) (quoted in Canfora 2006: 113)

The world must be made safe for democracy.

Woodrow Wilson (1917) (Fried 1965: 308)

INTRODUCTION

The consequences of the Great War were felt long after the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918. The course of the war and its outcome would decisively shape democracy's emergence in international relations. When hostilities commenced there was certainly little thought about the war being waged for democracy, or any other great idea for that matter. The nature of the conflict would alter dramatically as a result of two events in 1917: the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States into the war. The manner in which US President Woodrow Wilson defined the war in reference to democracy, followed by the defeat of the Central Powers, would prove pivotal in the normative and political rehabilitation of the concept. One of its most important outcomes was the completion of a process that had commenced with the American Revolution, as popular sovereignty supplanted monarchy as the dominant form of state legitimacy. This also confirmed democracy's remarkable ideational transformation into a normatively acceptable, and for many a desirable, method of government. ‘After 1919 democratic values were increasingly accepted as a kind of ideological equivalent to the coin of the realm,’ James Mayall observes, ‘even if circumstances prevented it from being minted in most parts of component of democracy was heavily contested, and would remain so, the evaluative side of the concept had completed its remarkable shift from negative to positive.

The magnitude of the shift that had taken place in how democracy was perceived can be appreciated through comparing the Versailles peace conference with its predecessor, the Congress of Vienna. When international society was rebuilt in Vienna, it was explicitly constructed against the popular doctrines that had emerged from revolutionary France. Yet little more than a hundred years later, the statesmen in Versailles worked through the consequences of fighting and winning a war meant to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Carl Schmitt observed the significance of this shift: ‘The development from 1815 until 1918 could be depicted as the development of a concept of legitimacy: from dynastic to democratic legitimacy.