Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe by Wolff Larry;

Author:Wolff, Larry; [Wolff, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6. The National Theater in Zagreb as centerpiece of Wilsonov Trg (Wilson Square). Before the war it was called University Square. It was Wilson Square from 1919 to 1927. It was subsequently renamed first for King Alexander of Yugoslavia and eventually for Tito. Today it is the Republic of Croatia Square.

Both Wilson and Lloyd George agreed that the Slavs constituted a potential threat to Italy, based on their backwardness. If Germany was better organized and educated, and Russia less so, then the Slavs of Eastern Europe who lay in between them geographically might have been mapped onto a civilizational incline of greater and lesser development. On the whole, however, Wilson seemed to believe that the Slavs in general were more closely aligned with Russian backwardness, which, in Lloyd George’s political schema, put them all at risk for either tyranny or anarchy, each Slavic state a potentially unstable and volatile element in the geopolitical Wilsonian settlement. The triggering mechanism would be Slavic “discontent,” which Wilson now urgently sought to reduce and avert.

Armed with a map (which he had received from Bowman) Wilson attempted to prove to the Italians that the territories they claimed were ethnographically Slavic, not Italian:

I have before me an Italian map published before the war, that of Marinelli, which would be sufficient to contradict the Italian argument; it shows that, aside from the southern portion of the island of Cherso and the island of Lussino, there are Italian elements only on some isolated points. What discourages me is that, when Italy has made proposals, they dissolve as soon as one tries to be precise.96

Wilson with a map in his hand, confident in his own precision, seemingly unaware that his maps were powerfully shaped by his own sympathies, would never understand the Italian perspective on islands like Cherso and Lussino (Cres and Lošinj under their South Slavic names), which he himself was only just now discovering on the map. In 1770, an Italian naturalist, Alberto Fortis, had visited these Adriatic islands and written about them as objects of Venetian imperial administration. Like Herder, Fortis contributed to the Enlightenment’s understanding of the wider Slavic world.97 Wilson was only beginning to understand that mapping the Slavic world, both geographically and ethnograpically, was not necessarily a matter of scientific precision but often existed within the volatile domain of culture and mentality, shaped by a long historical legacy. He did not always understand how his own attempted interventions fit with earlier perspectives on Eastern Europe.

Colonel House in Paris expressed the opinion that “Italy has gone mad,” while Herron in Switzerland took a strong public position in favor of Italy—which led to Wilson’s renunciation of his impassioned friend: “I am through with him,” the president announced to House.98 If the Italians were no longer Wilson’s friends, then the friends of the Italians were also no longer Wilson’s friends. “The Italians must realize, furthermore, that they can not have what they want without the consent of the United States,” Wilson commented. “If their only preoccupation is to save their pride, they are throwing themselves into an impasse.

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