Wilson's Fourteen Points

JAN 08 1918 · 12:00

President Woodrow Wilson addresses a joint session of Congress, the setting in which he delivered the Fourteen Points on 8 January 1918. Place: Joint session of the United States Congress, Capitol, Washington Figures: Woodrow Wilson, US President · Colonel Edward House, his adviser · The Inquiry, a 150-strong team of academics drafting policy at the New York Public Library An American Program for a European Peace Wilson addresses Congress with a fourteen-point program for the postwar world. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at. Absolute freedom of the seas. Removal of economic barriers. Reduction of armaments. Adjustment of colonial claims with attention to the interests of the populations concerned. Evacuation of Russian, Belgian, French, Romanian, Serbian, and Montenegrin territory. Self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. An independent Poland with access to the sea. And, in the fourteenth point, a general association of nations. The Points are drafted largely by Colonel House and The Inquiry, a body of academics convened in September 1917 to design the American peace. They are issued, deliberately, before any Allied conference has agreed war aims. Wilson means to set the terms of the settlement from outside the European system, by making them the visible American precondition for American participation. What Versailles Keeps and Loses The Central Powers accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for armistice in October and November 1918. The German army lays down arms expecting the Points to govern the settlement. At Versailles (see [[treaty-of-versailles-1919]]), Wilson trades most of his program for Clemenceau's and Lloyd George's signatures on the fourteenth: the League of Nations. The remainder survives ideologically. Self-determination becomes the legitimating principle of the interwar successor states, of decolonization after 1945, and of every secessionist case from Bangladesh to Kosovo to South Sudan. The first sustained American attempt to redesign the European Westphalian system from outside it fails as a settlement and succeeds as a vocabulary. Video: Indy Neidell on Wilson's 8 January 1918 address to a joint session of Congress and the doctrine of self-determination it placed on the international agenda.