Fourteen Points

introductionUnited States President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points were delivered during an address to the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918. Wilson intended the Fourteen Points to serve as a plan to end World War I and establish a lasting peace. In his fourteenth point, Wilson suggested the creation of an association of nations to facilitate the sovereignty and independence of all nations based upon self-determination, a proposal that led to the formation of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Fourteen Points encouraged a number of nationalist leaders, including Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, to attend the Paris Peace Conference and present petitions for autonomy and independence.

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view.

We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The programme of the world's peace, therefore, is our programme; and that programme, the only possible programme, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.

XII. The turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the Imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to war, which this programme does remove. We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this programme that impairs it. We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peaceloving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world,—the new world in which we now live,—instead of a place of mastery.

FOURTEEN POINTS

FOURTEEN POINTS. Nine months after the American declaration of war on Germany, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress on 8 January 1918, to declare America's terms of peace. Briefly, they were as follows: (1) "open covenants of peace openly arrived at"; (2) freedom of the seas; (3) freedom from trade barriers; (4) reduction of armaments; (5) impartial adjustment of colonial claims; (6) evacuation of Russian territory and Russian self-determination; (7) evacuation and restoration of Belgium; (8) evacuation of France and restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France; (9) readjustment of Italian frontiers; (10) autonomous development for the peoples of Austria-Hungary; (11) readjustments in the Balkans; (12) autonomous development for the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman Empire and the opening of the Dardanelles; (13) restoration of an independent Poland with access to the sea; and (14) establishment of a general

association of nations. The Allied Powers refused to agree to Wilson's terms until the German government began peace negotiations on the basis of the fourteen points in October 1918. After Col. Edward M. House, Wilson's chief foreign policy adviser, warned Britain and France that the United States might make a separate peace with Germany, the Allies accepted the fourteen points on 4 November 1918—with the reservation that they did not accept a blanket principle of freedom of the seas and with the further caveat that they demanded financial compensation from Germany for wartime damages. After Germany's formal surrender one week later, the fourteen points became the legal basis for the ensuing treaty of peace.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clements, Kendrick A. The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bernadotte E.Schmitt/a. g.

See alsoGermany, Relations with ; House-Grey Memorandum ; League of Nations ; Treaties with Foreign Nations ; World War I ; andvol. 9:The Fourteen Points .

Fourteen Points (1918). President Woodrow Wilson's statement of January 1918 was the most important on war aims advanced during World War I. Based on his anti‐imperialist “Peace without Victory” formula of the previous year, Wilson made his address owing primarily to the revolutionary upheaval that had seized Russia. By the end of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky had pulled their ravaged homeland out of the war, thus permitting Germany to transfer huge numbers of troops to the western front. They also published the Allies' secret treaties (signed by the czarist regime) for parceling out territory after victory. The Bolsheviks then summoned the soldiers of both the Allied and Central Powers to lay down their arms and repudiate plans for conquest. Because many liberal and socialist groups among the Allies had already begun to question the continuation of the carnage, it fell to Wilson to remove the suspicions hanging over their cause and explain why the conflict was any longer worth fighting.

The president argued that German militarism must be crushed, first, in order to create a new and better world. He then outlined the American peace program. Seven of the points dealt with territorial readjustments, including the “unembarrassed opportunity” for Russia to shape its own destiny. The others were characteristically Wilsonian—open covenants openly arrived at; free trade; self‐determination; disarmament; impartial adjustment of colonial claims; freedom of the seas; and a league of nations.

Wilson's progressive response to the Bolshevik challenge provided the ideological cement that held the Allied coalition together for the remainder of the war. The Fourteen Points also set the public agenda for the Paris Peace Conference, but became a source of controversy when they were only partially fulfilled in the Treaty of Versailles.
[See also League of Nations; World War I: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

Arno J. Mayer , Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1959.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.

Thomas J. Knock

Fourteen Points Programme presented (January 1918) by US President Woodrow Wilson for a just peace settlement of World War I. In general, the programme required greater liberalism in international affairs and supported the principle of national self-determination. It made useful propaganda for the Allies, and was the basis on which Germany sued for peace in 1918. Some points found expression in the Treaty of Versailles, others were modified or rejected at the peace conference. The 14th Point laid the basis for the League of Nations.

http://state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/51.htm