Written for War and Peace: International Relations since 1914 (History 162B), UC Berkeley, Spring 2022. A response paper written as a letter to President Wilson.

Dear President Wilson,

Armed with a century’s worth of hindsight, I hope to humbly assist in the fulfillment of the grand and noble vision that lies at the heart of the League of Nations. My advice is focused on the reappraisal of three overarching ideals that appear to have guided your reasoning astray. First, your treasured ideal of national self-determination that Mazzini so vehemently espouses is a poisoned chalice. Placing it central to the League’s workings will orient peace-making around the throbbing and volatile beat of nationalism. The perceived objectivity and scientific rigor of such a determination is deceptive, originating from an ignorance of the immense ethnic complexities of Eastern Europe, and bears the heavy price of providing fertile ground for the breeding of immense hostility and instability in Europe and beyond.

Second, although tempting, the pursuit of vindictive policies that seek to punish and humiliate Germany and the Austrian-Habsburg Empire should be heavily discouraged. The psychological force of humiliation and defeat is a powerful energizing force that is readily harnessed by right-wing extremist groups. A crucial step towards a harmonious and integrated world order would be extending an invite to Paris to all sides of the war and establishing mechanisms of consensus and compromise to produce a genuine ‘peace without victors’.

Third, allow the League to embody a truly international society of brotherhood and accept the inclusion of the racial equality clause championed by Japan in the League’s covenant. Doing so moves Japan towards Western liberal values and enables the League to be firm about China’s sovereignty over Shantung. Moreover, since the clause is agreed upon by the majority of member-states, upholding the decision enshrines a radical and democratic system of decision making as opposed to the usual random and neurotic exercise of power by elite statesmen. By deemphasizing the principle of nationality and avoiding the pitfalls of vengeance, you take the gales from the sails of the emergent violence-drenched ideology of Fascism. Without the perfusion of nationalist rhetoric and lacking the fuel of militant discontent, fascism as a movement would have remained at the fringes, never developing into the formidable force it became in Germany and Italy. By engaging with Japan and granting the right to be viewed as an equal, you render her less likely to feel alienated and pursue an isolationist-expansionist policy. An immense tragedy befalls the world in 1939, a World War that surpasses the horror of ‘war to end wars’. This tragedy has its root in Paris twenty years prior with the seed lying in the paradoxes of the League. As an experiment in international governance it relied on amplifying nationalism, as an exemplar of justice it preached vengeance, and as a proponent of a democracy it practiced oligarchy. It is crucial to avoid such a paradoxical descent into disillusionment for the League to truly be capable of realizing its aims of an international family of societies.