Point five of President Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles said that “questions of sovereignty interest of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined”. This means that the colonies taken from the defeated Central Powers after the war should hand over control to whichever country the populations of those countries preferred. Point five would require nations that have shown to have an imperialistic nature to reject their claim on these colonies and work together with the interests of the populations living in these colonies. Realistically most of these populations did not want to be colonies at all but independent countries. Apparently this outcome had not occurred to Wilson when he wrote the treaty. The failure of self-determination eventually led many countries to embrace communism.

Self-determination was all the talk at the Paris peace conference but it turned out to be all talk. In reality the people of Eastern Europe were to mixed to draw boundaries along ethnic lines. France wanted a barrier against Russia and Germany and the new borders left ethnic minorities within nations they had little in common with. These borders would lead to greater conflicts in the future. The minorities in colonized lands numbers were so small they could not realistically elect a leader of their choosing, so there was no democracy for them.

 

Ho Chi Minh was a young Vietnamese patriot that went to the Paris conference on behalf of people living within the French Empire in Indochina. He believed in the principle of national sovereignty and self-determination that President Woodrow Wilson had promised. His desire was to free Vietnam from colonial rule by France. But like other advocates of colonial independence who came to Paris he discovered that Wilson’s pledge was in fact too good to be true. The British and the French refused to enforce self-rule for all of their colonies and they ignored Ho Chi Minh. He pursued a more radical solution to Imperial rule in Vietnam when he figured out that the democratic process did not include the Vietnamese people. While he was in France he joined the Communist Party and he took his teachings home to Vietnam and decided to lead them in a revolution. In 1941 he was ready to take on France but World War II had started and the Japanese took over Vietnam. After Japan lost the war Ho Chi Minh found Vietnam cut into North and South and France had taken over again. By the end of 1946 the Franco-Vietnamese war had begun with Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist forces fighting the French.

Ho Chi Minh learned about communism through Lenin’s revolutionary strategy for spreading communism outside of the Western world. Lenin spread the work of Karl Marx through an organization called Comintern. Comintern was a worldwide organization of communist parties formed to advance communism and world revolution. Karl Marx believed that the proletariat would be a class of workers with no national affiliation when it rose up against its bourgeoisie oppressors. Lenin believed that a single communist state could not survive against all the capitalist nations so he needed more and more socialist and communist countries to band together.

When Russia successfully changed their government after a revolution in 1917 Lenin wanted to tell the world that the Marxist party could overturn their governments as well. Lenin trained agents in communism and have them return to their own countries to form Marxist parties there. Nearly every colonial society in Asia had a Communist Party by the end of the 1920s. Lenin’s communism promised a violent revolution against major world empires that would lead to redistribution of land to peasants, economic equality, plenty of food for everyone, social services for everyone and true self-determination. Lenin and Ho Chi Minh believed that Democratic capitalistic nations could be taken over by Soviet communism if they were aggressive and expansive. All that they needed to do was work together, not necessarily as a nation, but as an ideology. That ideology was communism.