On 8 January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) read out his Fourteen Points programme before both Houses of the US Congress, in which he outlined nothing less than a new world political order. Indeed, many of the ideas set out here were later incorporated into the various peace treaties of the Paris Peace Conference. The points concerning territorial reorganisation implied the definitive end of the system of the balance of power amongst the great powers in Europe: Belgium, Montenegro, Romania, Russia and Serbia were to be demilitarised and restored; Alsace-Lorraine was to be returned to a liberated France; and the Italian border was to be ‘rectified’ in accordance with the principle of nationality. Poland was to be re-established as a state, and the right to self-determination of the peoples of the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire was to be upheld.

Following the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia on 7 November 1917, the Bolsheviks needed room for manoeuvre to pursue their domestic political objectives and therefore entered into armistice negotiations with the Central Powers. Leo Trotsky (1879–1940) hoped that by adopting a long-term negotiating strategy, he could buy time to spread Bolshevik propaganda and, ultimately, bring the revolution to Germany. The peace negotiations dragged on following the armistice agreed on 15 December 1917 and, for their part, offered the German Supreme Army Command the opportunity to penetrate deeper into Russian territory and further expand the ‘Eastern Empire’ it had already begun to establish.

Against this backdrop, Wilson saw the need to take action against the Central Powers in the short term, whilst in the long term formulating an alternative to the political ideas of the newly emerging Soviet Russia. The new order set out in the Fourteen Points programme was based on the ideas of democratisation on the one hand and the equality of nations on the other. According to Wilson’s vision, the latter was to be guaranteed by the League of Nations, a ‘society of nations’, which was to be established.

Point 13 of the Fourteen-Point Programme provided for the establishment of an independent Polish state with free access to the sea, the territorial extent of which was to be determined by the ‘areas indisputably inhabited by Polish populations’. A state defined in this way would have comprised only Congress Poland and Western Galicia, a prospect with which, given Poland’s historical development, hardly any Polish politician was prepared to be satisfied. From the autumn of 1918 onwards, the struggle over the demarcation of borders led to conflicts or even war with almost all neighbouring states: with the Czechs and Slovaks in the south, the Germans in the west, and the Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians in the east.

During the peace negotiations in Paris, the Chairman of the Polish National Committee, Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), put forward his vision of a ‘Piast state’, which, in addition to Congress Poland and Western Galicia, was to encompass historic Greater Poland, including Poznań/Poznań and extend eastwards roughly to the 1772 border. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Poland was granted the Grand Duchy of Posen (with the exception of peripheral areas) and the greater part of West Prussia. Danzig/Gdańsk was placed under the supervision of the League of Nations as a Free City. Following referendums in 1920, Ermland remained part of Germany, whilst Upper Silesia was partitioned in 1921. Whilst the course of the western border was ultimately determined by the victorious powers, Poland, led by Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), waged war in the east over the territories of the kresy (the historical eastern territories of Jagiellonian Poland). Whether as Polish territory or in the form of an Eastern European confederation, Polish influence was to be re-established as far as the borders of 1772. With the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921, the Polish border shifted far to the east.

In the space of a few years,Poland had evolved from the idea of an ethnically homogeneous state, as set out in the Fourteen-Point Programme, into a state with an extremely heterogeneous population: alongside the German minority in the west, there were numerically significant Jewish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities.

The multi-ethnic state of Austria-Hungary is addressed in Point 10 of the Fourteen-Point Programme. It states that the peoples of Austria-Hungary should be granted the ‘freest opportunity for autonomous development’. This is couched in less far-reaching terms than the concept ofthe ‘right of peoplesto self-determination ’, which was frequently used in connection with demands for statehood. However, the speech of 8 January 1918 did not yet send a clear signal to the Habsburgs that the end of their multi-ethnic empire had come. Autonomy for the peoples living there was also conceivable within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy. Over time, however, Wilson changed his vocabulary and his political approach. This was closely linked to the events of the final year of the war and the positions of the various Allies, partners and adversaries.

Paradoxically, Germany, the enemy in the war, offered the USA some points of reference regarding the right of peoples to self-determination: It was the Germans who, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), demanded that Russia grant independence to Poland, Finland, Estonia, Livonia and Ukraine. However, in early 1918 the Germans still saw themselves as a great power capable of winning the war and were not prepared to negotiate seriously with Wilson over his ideas. Conversely, Wilson could not tolerate a Europe in which states were independent de jure but de facto dependent on Germany.

The Bolsheviks, too, proclaimed ‘the right of peoples to national self-determination’, but this was more of a tactical manoeuvre and meant little more than an intermediate step on the path to a stateless society. For their part, the British and French had lost credibility in the eyes of the peoples striving for independence, when, in late 1917, Russia published secret documents in which the Entente’s political and economic objectives in the territories of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires were clearly revealed.

Against this backdrop, with its Fourteen Points programme, the USA appeared to the European peoples – who until then had lived within the borders of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires – as the only trustworthy protective power. Wilson was able to rely on their support in implementing his vision – but in return he had to make far-reaching commitments which resulted in the break-up of those empires.

In fact, unlike in the case of Poland, the Fourteen Points did not provide for explicitly defined statehood for the Czechs and Slovaks, but rather for autonomy within the Habsburg Empire (Point 10). Under the leadership of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), Edvard Beneš (1884–1948) and Milan Rastislav Štefáník (1880–1919), the idea of an independent Czechoslovak state had developed during the war whilst they were in political exile in Western Europe; the Comité d’Action Tchèque à l’Étranger declared the establishment of such a state to be its political objective on 14 November 1915. Although the ‘liberation of the Czecho-Slovaks’ soon became a catchy international slogan, it was not until mid-1918 that France, Great Britain and the USA officially gave their consent. With this backing, and against the backdrop of the power vacuum that had emerged in the Habsburg Empire during the final months of the war, the Czechoslovak National Council pre-empted the armistice and proclaimed the Czechoslovak Republic in Prague/Praha on 28 October 1918.

The idea of the right of peoples to self-determination did not necessarily lead to an ethnically-based nation-state order in Europe. In particular, the states of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe were home to various minorities, for whom, however, provisions for the protection of minorities had been drawn up on the basis of the peace treaties. The Germans in the Bohemian lands (according to the results of the 1910 census), numbering around three million compared with some nine million Czechs and Slovaks, constituted a significant minority, settled mainly in the areas along the borders of the Czechoslovak Republic. Since Czechoslovakia – not least for economic reasons – did not relinquish these territories, whilst the Central Powers, for their part, were too weakened to champion the cause of the German Bohemians, the latter took action themselves, citing the Wilson Programme. On 29 October 1918, one day after the proclamation of the Czechoslovak state, they responded by establishing – “on the basis of the universally recognised right of peoples to self-determination”^[1], they proclaimed the province of German Bohemia and declared it to be part of German Austria. In a memorandum addressed to Wilson, they demanded ‘justice’ from the peace negotiations, arguing that it could not be ‘the will of any person with a legal mind to tear the Germans of Bohemia away from their people and subject them to a foreign people’.^[2] As a defeated party in the war, however, Austria-Hungary – to which the German-Bohemian delegation was attached – was unable to put forward its own claims at the peace negotiations. The Treaty of Saint-Germain confirmed that the German-populated territories would remain part of the Czechoslovak state.

• Manfred Alexander: Sources on German-Czech Relations from 1848 to the Present Day. Darmstadt 2005 (Sources on Germany’s Relations with its Neighbours in the 19th and 20th Centuries 12).
• Joachim Bahlcke: History of the Czech Republic. From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Munich 2014 (Beck’sche Reihe 2797), pp. 87–91.
• Włodzimierz Borodziej: A History of Poland in the 20th Century. Munich 2010 (European History in the 20th Century).
• Patrick O. Cohrs: ‘American Peace’ – a ‘democratic peace’? Wilson and the search for a new world order after the First World War. In: Jost Dülffer, Gottfried Niedhart (eds.): Peace through Democracy? The Origins, Impact and Criticism of an Interpretative Framework. Essen 2011 (Contributions to Historical Peace Research 15), pp. 73–103.
• Jost Dülffer: The Debate on the Right to Self-Determination and the Peace Settlements following the World Wars of the 20th Century. In: Jörg Fisch (ed.): The Division of the World. Self-determination and the Right of Peoples to Self-determination. Munich 2011 (Publications of the Historisches Kolleg 79), pp. 113–139.
• Eva Hahn, Hans Henning Hahn: Expulsion in German Memory. Legends, Myths, History. Paderborn 2010, pp. 126–129.
• Herfried Münkler: The Great War. The World 1914–1918. Berlin 2013, pp. 653–674.

• avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp (Transcript of the congressional address; part of Yale Law School’s Avalon Project)
• www.loc.gov/resource/mss46029.mss46029-480_0018_0618/?sp=344 (Shorthand transcript by President Woodrow Wilson; in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress)

[1] Proclamation of the state of ‘German Bohemia’ by the German members of the Bohemian Parliament on 29 October 1918, in: Alexander (ed.): Sources, p. 116.

[2] Patrick Gschwend: ‘German-Bohemian Appeal to President Wilson in January 1919’. In: Radio Praha ‘Anno dazumal’, broadcast of 12 January 2010. URL: www.radio.cz/de/rubrik/anno-dazumal/deutschboehmischer-appell-an-us-praesident-wilson-im-januar-1919 (accessed 29 October 2021).

Berit Pleitner: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen-Point Programme. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32699 (accessed 29 October 2021).