Memorandum to Woodrow Wilson

I hope this reaches you at whatever resort exists in heaven (or the other place) for former Presidents of the U.S. Not knowing how closely you watch events in the world you left behind, I want to bring you up to date on the consequences of an ideal you so energetically championed: national self- determination. Today it is militantly invoked in many places, from the former Yugoslavia to the former Soviet republics, including North Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. (You don't know where those new states are? Well, very few people do.) Rival claims to the same land have led to bloody battles, and the U.S. is apt to be involved. Your present successor in the White House has pledged 25,000 troops to help keep the peace in Bosnia. When you proclaimed the right to self-determination, it sounded noble and progressive, although not everyone cheered. Your own Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (you never did like him) predicted that the concept would lead to unfulfillable expectations and large-scale violence. "What a calamity," he wrote, "that the phrase was ever uttered!"

In fairness, you did not invent the idea -- nationalism had become a religion, but you gave it a mighty push, resulting in new maps that were not much more logical than the old ones. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, was followed by new constructs -- Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia -- containing as many disparate and often hostile peoples. Hence today's tribal conflicts. All too often, a mistreated minority achieves independence and then mistreats other minorities in its midst or tries to "rescue" its brethren who live on the other side of a national frontier. Thus self-determination for one people becomes aggression against another.

Before the international community recognizes a people's claim to sovereignty, at least two factors should be kept in mind. One is economic viability, which is often missing. The other is history, including the questions of whether a people has a clear national tradition and has been independent in the past. Without condoning the brutality of your old friends the Serbs, it can be said that we acted prematurely in recognizing some of the former republics of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia. This recognition transformed a civil war into an international conflict. America is surely the last country in the world to deny captive peoples the right to go their own way. But the process has got out of hand. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (you know about the United Nations; it's close to what you hoped the League of Nations would be) puts the problem precisely: "If each minority will ask for self-determination, rather than 184 nations around the world, we may have 500 to 1,000 countries, and that is not in the interests of peace or economic development."