In December 1905, an Annamite (Vietnamese) student based in Japan wrote an appeal to the Vietnamese students elsewhere. ‘All powers, all profits are in the hands of the masters with the blue eyes, the red barbarians. And we, the yellow race, are subjected by force to demoralization, to complete degradation.’ From such depths, he wrote, ‘We have formed an organization.’ At that time there were 600 Vietnamese students in Japan. For this reason, the organization’s aim was simply to ‘prepare the population for the future’. And the appeal came because the students were curious, ‘Have you created any organization for this purpose in your region?’

Japan’s defeat of Russia in the wars of 1904–05 emboldened Asian anti-colonial activists. ‘We regarded the Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East’, said Sun Yat-Sen. An Asian power had defeated an European one; it could be done. But this was not simply an Asian story. When the Ethiopians sent the Italians home in the 1896, a similar frisson travelled across the African world. The Spanish-speaking world, too, had its goad. Resistance from the Philippines to Cuba to Spanish rule, and then to the attempt by Washington to supplant Madrid’s writ, played its own magical role in the consciousness of the people of Latin America.

The question of colonial rule was, therefore, already on the table by the early 1900s. Matters of social reform and revolution came more firmly onto the agenda after the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–07 Persian Revolution, the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the 1911 Chinese Revolution, and the 1911 Mexican Revolution. The spirit of revolt was heavy in the air. It was clear what these movements were against, but less clear what they were for. After taking Mexico City, Pancho Villa retreated: ‘This ranch is too big for us, it’s better back home.’ There was no programme for social transformation. That would have to come over the next few decades.

Anti-colonial nationalism has its origins in the myriad struggles of the peoples of the world. They fought against colonial rule and against the theft of their wellbeing, and in those struggles sharpened their sense of why they must be free. What they would do with that freedom was an open question. Later, that space would be filled by bourgeois nationalists and by Marxists, whose mutual disagreements provided fertile ground for the production of what I have elsewhere called the Third World Project.

To suggest, even parenthetically, that it was in Woodrow Wilson’s position on self-determination that one can see the origins of anti-colonial nationalism, as Erez Manela does, is not credible to me. It is certainly true that Wilson’s pronouncements had an electric effect in the colonial world: movements and their intellectuals that had for a generation found themselves isolated from the ‘West’, were now given not so much an ally as someone whose words resonated with them. Here Manela is right – that the speeches provided inspiration – but he does not underscore that this was typically an additional spur to those already given over to anti-colonial politics. He looks carefully at the nationalists in China, Egypt, India, and Korea to show how Wilson’s words had an important effect. The catalogue that he provides is a useful antidote to those who have no patience for the ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ dynamics of world history. None of these four nationalist movements was isolated from the currents that swept the planet, but what I am trying to suggest is that Wilsonism was not their major unifying factor; that can be sought in the elements of anti-colonial nationalism itself, which would lead by Bandung to the Third World Project.

Wilson certainly provided an opportunity for the anti-colonial nationalists. Manela reads their words as if Wilson inspired them, gave them courage, as it were. That is one interpretation, but it is not sufficient. It is more likely that Wilson’s words provided the anti-colonial nationalists with the opportunity to show up European colonialism by what appeared to be North American anti-colonialism. It was a weapon more easily wielded by those people whose colonial overlords were European. It is not surprising, therefore, that Manela ignores Latin America, whose own experience with the United States prevented any such opportunistic usage of Wilson. Santiago Iglesias, Juan Justo, and José Carlos Mariátegui had an altogether more cynical sense of Wilson’s agenda.

Indeed, that is perhaps the weakest part of Manela’s book: the absence of any rigorous analysis of Wilson’s own imperial ambitions. In 1912, Wilson went to the Virginia General Assembly to bemoan the problem of American overproduction and to suggest that ‘if we are not going to stifle economically, we have got to find our way out into the great international exchanges of the world’. He was confident that the ‘skill of American workmen would dominate the markets of all the globe’. His liberal messianism was closely wedded to the demands of the American monopoly firms. Wilson told the Detroit businessmen,

An analysis of such statements alongside the 14 Points might have allowed Manela to ground his analysis of Wilson. It would certainly have provided the basis for us to understand why Wilson’s own liberal evangelism died such an early death.

There is no doubt that Wilson articulated a novel set of principles. But there was no programme for his principles. The 14 Points were idealistic. They exceeded the capacity of the institutions at his command. The US government could not go beyond the Europeans. A better representative of US institutions than Wilson was Hampson Gray, the US consul general in Egypt. ‘Nearly all Britons in Egypt’, he wrote, ‘attribute present chaotic conditions here to what they describe as pernicious American theory of self-determination.’ Wilson’s rashness had its effect; or at least the Egyptian nationalists were using Wilson effectively. This was dangerous to European interests, and ultimately to Americans ones as well. Wilsonian ideas were only useful if they would provide more space for American business against European colonial monopolies; it would be useless for both if the Egyptians or the Chinese began to dictate the terms of the future. That was grasped firmly by Gray, and, eventually, by Wilson. It was after all Wilson (with Herbert Hoover as his head of the US Food Administration) who began to use the US agricultural surplus as an ideological weapon (this was so in Germany, to shore up the fledgling regime of Friedrich Ebert against the challenge of the Spartacus League). His meteor crashed very soon; it was limited by itself – that is to say, by the close association of the US political machine with its ambitious titans of the economy. This is not something that detains Manela, which is why he has no explanation for the collapse of the short-lived Wilsonian Moment.

By late 1919, even those who had either put their faith in Wilson or used Wilson’s words found themselves disappointed. The Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai echoed the views of many when he turned his attention to Russia. The fall of the Tsar, he wrote, ‘has given birth to a new order of society aglow with the spirit of a new and elevated kind of internationalism’. China’s Mao, then a young man, saw the European leaders as ‘a bunch of robbers’ who ‘cynically championed self-determination’. Mao, too, turned to Russia. Lenin’s USSR, in this period, did not have the same kind of institutional limitations as Wilson’s USA. The Communist International met for the first time in March 1919, and it snubbed Versailles and Wilson. They were not relevant to it. It charted a different course that went through the Baku Conference of the Toilers of the East (1920) to the Third Comintern meeting in the summer of 1921. That was its high point. It too would be dampened, by 1928, by the turn within, by the doctrine of building ‘socialism in one country’. But, even as the USSR turned away, the ideological basis of proletarian internationalism took hold of those who had once been moved by or who used Wilson’s 14 Points. They met in Brussels in 1928 under the auspices of the League Against Imperialism, a gathering that set them up to meet in Bandung in 1955. But that is another story.