The Pursuit of Self-Determination - 26 February 1999

Here is a scene that could not be imagined if it had not happened. The place: Paris, the spring of 1919 after the end of the First World War.

A spacious, not to say palatial, room - not surprising since it is in the Palace of Versailles. Half a dozen grown men, close to 60, are on their hands and knees poring over and pointing at and arguing over a great map.

The chief map maker, that's just about literally what he was, is the President of the United States - Mr Wilson. A slim, upright, austere man - clean cut features, glasses, striped pants, black tail coat, stiff collar, stiff chin, stiff demeanour. "More like a bishop than a diplomat," one delegate said. Some called him the Reverend Woodrow Wilson.

He was, however, the prime mover - the headmaster - of this conference. What were they doing, these old crawling men? Well the map was so large it was easier to spread it on the shining floor and the best way to scrutinise it was to get down on all fours.

Barely six months earlier while the exhausted British and French and Germans were dragging out their last days of misery in the trenches or slaughter on no-man's land President Wilson was, in the haven of Washington, already laying the principles on which the peace treaty would be based. He called them the 14 points.

And when he sailed into Europe after the four-year nightmare was over he was welcomed with hysterical acclaim by the French people as Moses about to lead us all into the promised land.

"We had just concluded," President Wilson said, "the war to end all wars."

So what those kneeling men were doing was literally re-drawing the map of Europe. Just how drastic that would be was made clear one fine spring morning when the leader of the British delegation - the prime minister no less - David Lloyd George, a poor Welsh boy brought up in a village shoemaker's shop - announced to the conference that the ancient royal houses of the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns were no more and consequently he, we, had abolished the great Austro-Hungarian Empire.

So what would happen to all its vassal countries and provinces? That was what the dignified old codgers on their hands and knees were about to decide.

The Balkans - Slavonic peoples - included eight or 10 - what to call them? - tribes who'd like to become nations. So first the chief delegates - the United States, Britain, France, Italy - incorporated the southern Slav states into a kingdom.

It united, on paper, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, giving top dog status to Serbia - a gesture we never knew would promise trouble ahead in 70, 80, who knows how many more years. Anyway they called the kingdom Yugoslavia.

Now how about the western provinces of the old empire? That was a more complicated problem when it came to tribes or new nations.

This was to be a republic. It would comprise seven million Czechs, two million Slovaks, 700,000 Hungarians, 450,000 - wait for it - Ruthenes and three and a quarter million Germans. It would be named Czechoslovakia.

Practising self-government. Which, who, what was the 'self'? There were a dozen problems as difficult as those that grew from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There was, by the way, one old man who didn't get down on the floor - I'm not sure he was even at the hands and knees meeting. He was the Prime Minister of France. A compact little old man with a ferocious white moustache and a temper to match: Georges Clemenceau in his 80th year. And he knew better than anyone that one and a half million Frenchmen had died on their own soil and the survivors had seen half the country pulverised into a treeless bog.

He didn't need to explore or argue with anybody - France wanted the French frontier - her border - to extend to and along the Rhine from now and forever more. She also wanted Germany stripped of all her colonies and that happened but France did not get her boundaries extended to what, she swore, was a minimum safe reach into Germany.

At the end, the day the peace treaty was signed, the great generalissimo Marshall Foch of France - who'd been the supreme allied commander at the end of the war - he twirled his spruce moustache in contempt and said: "This is not a peace treaty, it's a 20 years armistice." He was not alive to know he was exactly right.

I've gone into the scene in that conference room in Paris because you could make it the first scene in a true and disastrous documentary film about Bosnia, Kosovo and the history and problems of Serbia and of how and why we seem to be fated to have never-ending enmities erupting into civil wars between, what we've come to call, minorities inside a country.

It seems to me it's our perpetual problem. But it has a noble cause.

Let's go back first to President Wilson, there, in the calm of Washington DC towards the end of the First War, but while the fighting was still going on. Composing his master plan for the peace. Writing out, like the oracles or a new scripture, his 14 points.

The first part of the document is very eloquent, very moving, and I dare to say looked over today quite unbelievable. Here are the opening phrases of the general principles on which the treaty is to be based:

There shall be "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at ... no private understandings of any kind", all diplomacy "shall proceed always frankly and in public view".

The removal of "all economic barriers ... among all the nations consenting to the peace", "national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with national safety".

There shall be "open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims" on the principle that "in determining sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight".

Which planet and what sort of people was this written for? Surely not for this Earth and the human beings we know as its inhabitants.

To say 'Let's have all dealings between 50-odd nations completely frank and open, let's not quarrel about our economics, let's all stop making all weapons of war all at once.' This is a sublime example of what can be called begging the question - which means taking for granted as having happened what you dearly want to happen.

It's a vision of Utopia. Most certainly not a plan for negotiation.

How come the warring nations accepted this when Wilson offered it? Because the British and the French were exhausted from four years of slaughter, over 20 million casualties.

But this was the idealistic preface. Wilson was specific enough when he got down to who should get what. Old Clemenceau said: "One day he talks like Lord God, the next like Lloyd George."

But unlike the French and the British leaders Wilson knew absolutely nothing about war or the realities of peace-making once wars were over. It's worth, I think, for a moment recalling the origins of this extraordinary man who, for some months, in 1919 held Europe and the map of Europe and its future in his hands.

Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia. His father a strict Presbyterian minister. He himself was intended from his earliest boyhood to be a scholar and became one. His next to last stop before the White House was the presidency of Princeton.

His one sharp contact with life and reality outside scholarship was the fact that he was 10 years old when the Civil War ended and he grew up in a wasteland of impoverished Southerners being treated as beaten aliens in their own country.

It was from this sympathetic experience that he had later what he came to think of as a revelation. It came to him during that last year of the First War. He would go to Europe, he would dictate a peace based on a new principle which would do away with the wickedness of empires and the enslavement of small countries.

He called it self-determination - the right of countries big and small to govern themselves. Well, of course, what could be more just, what nobler aim to pursue? We're still at it.

However, when Woodrow Wilson got down on his hands and knees over that map it must have been the first time it struck him that all small countries, perhaps most small countries, do not contain just one nationality as in the old days - England full of Englishmen, France of Frenchmen...

Surely an enormous doubt must have swept over him when he saw that giving self-determination to the new created nations of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia didn't really say how the nationals inside - the Slovaks and the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovians, Croates, Germans - were going to govern themselves, which one day they might want to do.

And that day has come with a vengeance. It is, in fact, the main problem of American and Nato foreign policy.

How can self-determination for a small country offer self-determination for every ethnic tribe inside it without creating another flock of nations all trying to live on the same ground? In the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the two Irelands, it's a question nobody has yet answered.

When Woodrow Wilson was aboard ship on the way to bring the great peace to Europe along with him was his secretary of state, a career officer and level-headed negotiator named Robert Lansing.

One day, having gone to his cabin, he looked over, yet again, the president's 14 points. The president's favourite phrase stuck in his throat and it greatly disturbed him.

Lansing wrote down in his journal: "The more I think about the president's declaration of the right of self-determination the more convinced I am that it is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the peace conference - what misery it will cause."

One year later President Wilson, although lying in the White House paralysed by a stroke, asked for Lansing's resignation.

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