The Wilson-Smuts Synthesis: Racial Self-Determination and the Institutionalization of World Order A thesis submitted by Scott L. Malcomson in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in International Relations Tufts University Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy January 2020 Adviser: Jeffrey W. Taliaferro ©2019, Scott L. Malcomson 1 Table of Contents I: Introduction 3 II: Two Paths to Paris. Jan Smuts 8 Woodrow Wilson 26 The Paths Converge 37 III: Versailles. Wilson Stays Out: Isolation and Neutrality 43 Lloyd George: Bringing the Empire on Board 50 Smuts Goes In: The Rise of the Dominions 54 The Wilson-Smuts Synthesis 65 Wilson Undone 72 The Racial Equality Bill 84 IV: Conclusion 103 Bibliography 116 2 I: Introduction When President Woodrow Wilson left the United States for Europe at the end of 1918, he intended to create a new structure for international relations, based on a League of Nations, that would replace the pre-existing imperialist world structure with one based on national and racial (as was said at the time) self-determination. The results Wilson achieved by late April 1919, after several months of near-daily negotiation in Paris, varied between partial success and complete failure.1 Wilson had had other important goals in Paris, including establishing a framework for international arbitration of disputes, advancing labor rights, and promoting free trade and disarmament, and progress was made on all of these. But in terms of his own biography and the distinctive mission of U.S. foreign policy as he and other Americans understood it, the anti- imperial and pro-self-determination goals were paramount. How he arrived at those goals, how he negotiated for them in Paris at the end of the First World War, and how he mostly failed to achieve them, is the core narrative of this thesis. The main reasons for this failure have to do with imperialism, primarily British imperialism, as it presented itself to Wilson in 1919, and with the ideas about race, nationalism and sovereignty then prevalent in the British imperial Dominions and the United States, especially the idea that national sovereignty and white sovereignty might be the same thing. The Paris negotiations were largely a British-American affair; their results were disproportionately shaped by British-imperial and American views and interests. It was a curiosity of the negotiations that the main intellectual authors of the League of Nations were not from the victorious Allied powers of France, Britain, Japan and Italy, which 1 This was before his unsuccessful effort, begun in July 1919, to convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the Paris Peace Treaty, of which the establishment of the League of Nations was a part. The factors that led to defeat in the Senate were only distantly related to the problems Wilson faced in the January-April period. 3 had done the bulk of the fighting, or indeed from Europe or Asia at all, but from the United States and colonial South Africa: Wilson and Jan Smuts. General Smuts is not a well-known figure today, but at the time he was renowned as a thinker, a politician, and a man of action, and Wilson and Smuts, both supporters of racial segregation as well as political liberals, were the dominant forces in envisioning the League as well as key players in the intense negotiations between December 1918 and May 1919 over the League covenant. In particular, they shaped, as no one else did, the notions of national and racial self-determination during those negotiations, and the postwar relationship between those notions, liberal internationalism, and imperial power. I will argue that racial self-determination was a central concept for both Wilson and Smuts, in part as a result of their personal experiences of state construction and national self- fashioning within what Belich calls “the Anglo-world”2 and Vucetic “the Anglosphere.”3 I will further argue that this was part of an internationalizing of aspects of British colonial (mainly South African and Australian) and eX-colonial (U.S.) political economy, or the abstraction of those aspects into models for universal experience. Given that the 1919 negotiations provoked “more debate and controversy over the origins, nature and limits of ‘international order’ than any other major post-war settlement in modern history,”4 it is to be hoped that this re-examination of Wilson and Smuts will help us better understand why early 20th-century liberal internationalism took the forms it did.5 2 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (OXford: OXford University Press, 2009). See also Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3 Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 4 AleXander Anievas, “International relations between war and revolution: Wilsonian diplomacy and the making of the Treaty of Versailles,” International Politics 51 (2014), 619. 5 This thesis then can be seen as influenced by the “historiographical turn” (Duncan Bell’s phrase) in international relations. See Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); David Long and Brian C. Schmidt, eds., Imperialism 4 The argument below touches on multiple scholarly themes. Its main contribution is in shedding new light on how specific conditions in the early 20th-century U.S., Britain and the self- governing, “white”-dominated British Dominions decisively shaped the codification and articulation of a liberal international order in the covenant of the League of Nations. It therefore complements the work of Belich, Bell6, Mazower7 and others on reimagining the relationship between political liberalism and empire, in particular the British empire; recent work by Morefield8, Manela9, Getachew10 and others on Wilsonian ideas as viewed from outside the community of the Great Powers; and works by Tooze11 and MacDonald12, for example, that are perhaps best described as global political economy. and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 6 Duncan Bell Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), esp. ch. 8, and The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 7 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, from 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012) and No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolution of IR at Its Centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, eds., Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and Beyond Asia (London: Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, ed., International Relations and Non-Western Thought. Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (London: Routledge, 2011). 8 Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (OXford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (OXford: OXford University Press, 2007). See also Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 10 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 11 Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931 (New York:Viking, 2014). 12 James MacDonald, When Globalization Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana (New York: Farrar, Straus and GirouX, 2015). I can only agree with Bell that “[p]olitical economists, in particular, are due greater attention,” as is political economy itself as a generator of powerful cultural-ideological norms. Bell, Reordering the World, 368-369. 5 In terms of International Relations as a field or discipline, the argument below is closer in spirit to those of Bell, Hobson13, Acharya, Buzan and Vitalis14. These authors have sought to recover the ways in which racial consciousnesses of various kinds, especially the white supremacist kind, shaped the purpose and methods of International Relations, at least in the anglophone academy. They have equally drawn attention to the roots of post-1919 International Relations in an understanding of the state and politics that was profoundly shaped by imperialism, and not infrequently mobilized to advance it. These scholars, together with several already cited and some precursors like Olson and Groom15, form an identifiable revisionist school within International Relations that pivots on altering the disciplinary views of imperialism and race, including by reframing the discipline’s own historiography. That is one aspect of the analysis below, although some of these authors tend to focus not so much on race as racism — or “‘Scientific’ Racism” in the case of Acharya and Buzan — and not so much on imperialism itself as on exposing the imperial will to power. By contrast, the goal here is to comprehend race and empire as they were understood by Wilson, Smuts, and the other major players in the League drama. Their own understandings are key to analyzing their successes and failures, in particular Wilson’s failure (it was also Smuts’s) to translate his genuine beliefs in post-imperialism and self-determination into a resilient international order. Racism is one portion of human thought and feeling that has to do with race, but if it is the worst part it is not also the largest one or even the most important in terms of extent and variety of effects.