Unlikely Bedfellows: Lenin, Wilson, and National Self-Determination as the Imposition of Political Personhood

• In Event: Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Theory

Abstract

This essay elaborates a shared conception and practice of self-determination during and after the First World War. Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson played pivotal roles in theorizing post-war geopolitics, where the “principle” of self-determination was to enjoy a new international prominence. By early 1917, the Bolshevik stance on self-determination fused around the “right to secession.” In contrast, Wilson understood the “principle of self-determination” as a promise to the “consent of the governed.” Current scholarship often highlights the contrast between the Bolshevik and Wilsonian interpretations of self-determination as a precursor to the Soviet-American divide in international order.
I offer an alternative account of the Wilsonian and Bolshevik notions of self-determination found, not in their ideological differences but in their shared belief that self-determination was a principle to be applied to mold and legitimate peoples before those peoples could enjoy political autonomy. Both figures theorized accounts of self-determination that required external powers to decide who “the people” were in accord with their respective ideological and geopolitical interests. Consequently, these unlikely bedfellows precipitated the early 20th century’s stark departure from 19th-century nationalist understandings of self-determination.
I elucidate their joint departure from the belief that self-determination required the self-initiated formation of the political identity of the nation. Further, I contend that the ensuing contestation over self-determination in the era is most aptly described as a series of clashes over who had the authority to impose their definitions of "the people" upon those collectives seeking political autonomy in the wake of the First World War.

Author

• Anthony Dean Norton, University of California, Los Angeles