The Good Friday Agreement and the Road to Self-Determination

A century ago it was the zeitgeist: nationalism, the rights of small nations, self-determination. US President Woodrow Wilson stated the last of these was one of the objectives of the First World War. The pursuit of those aims by nationalist movements led to the breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires. However, the victorious empires, British and French, remained intact and resisted those aims.

Across Europe and the Middle East, it was left to the British and French (after congress rejected Wilson’s foreign policy) to draw lines on maps carving out new states and partitioning old ones with scant regard to the wishes of inhabitants