Giuseppe Bottaro

Internazionalismo e democrazia nella politica estera wilsoniana   

215

Maggio-Agosto 2007

Anno LXXII    n. 2

Summary - During the first world war the President of the United States Woodrow Wilson placed the problem to imagine a new international order founded on the self-determination of the people, the spread of democracy, the free international commerce and a world-wide organization of the states - the League of Nations - able to conserve peace in a global context. Wilson , pushed from deep religious motivations, supported the doctrine that the American participation in the conflict meant to make the first step in order to end all wars forever and expressed a vision of international politics devised from the philosophers of enlightenment and the liberal thought in eighteenth and nineteenth century. The program that his administration predisposed between the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918 expressed the will to diffuse in the European states the ideals of liberal-democracy and self-determination of the people, but it was revealed an utopia since it did not consider the complexity of the European situation. The wilsonian dream of a better future founded on freedom and lacking in conflicts between the nations had, however, its full achievement just in the Fourteen Points, and the consequent constitution of the League of Nations .