20th/Raffel

PRESIDENT WILSON’S FOURTEEN POINTS SPEECH (1918)

Historical Context: The United States was a reluctant belligerent in the Great War, and the Wilson administration did its best to remain neutral. Finally, however, in response to entreaties from the Allies and a renewed German U-boat campaign, the United States declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917. When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, he said, “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to server. We desire no conquest, no dominion…. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.”

On January 8, 1918, President Wilson went before Congress to enunciate what he considered the basic premises of a just and lasting peace. The Fourteen Points, as the program came to be called, are important for several reasons. First of all, they translated many of the principles of Progressivism, into foreign policy. Notions of free trade, open agreements, democracy and self- determination were mere variants of domestic programs that reformers had been supporting for two decades. Second, the Fourteen Points constituted the only statement by any of the belligerents of their war aims. They became the basis for German surrender, and the criteria by which to judge the peace treaty.

Most important, where many countries believed that only self-interest should guide foreign policy, in the Fourteen Points Wilson argued that morality and ethics had to be the basis for the foreign policy of a democratic society. While later U.S. governments have not always shared that belief, many American presidents have agreed with the Wilsonian belief in morality as a key ingredient in foreign as well as domestic policy.

Task: Please read one of Wilson’s 14 points. With your group, please paraphrase the point you have been assigned and make an illustration that summarizes it on the board.

FOURTEEN POINTS SPEECH

The program of the world's peace, therefore, is our program; and that program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants [agreements/treaties] of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

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II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

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III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

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IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments [weapons] will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

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V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

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VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

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VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

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XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants [agreements] for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

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