Atlantic Charter

Atlantic Charter. On 9–12 August 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met secretly aboard U.S. and British warships anchored in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The two leaders and their respective staffs brought divergent agendas to their Newfoundland rendezvous. The British sought active American participation in the military effort to block Axis threats in North Africa, the Atlantic islands, and Southeast Asia. Roosevelt hoped to obtain a statement of “peace aims” to counteract isolationism back home and to get on record Britain's commitment to such traditional American goals as open agreements, self‐determination, and multilateral trade.

Both sides partially achieved their goals. Roosevelt confirmed his policy of all‐out American aid for Britain and Russia, and the two leaders agreed on a statement of war and peace aims soon termed the “Atlantic Charter.” The dramatic circumstances of the conference ensured that the document would be celebrated—and endlessly debated—as an epochal event in the struggle for individual freedom and group rights. Five of the Charter's eight principles dealt with individual and group rights: self‐determination, freedom from want and fear, improved economic and social conditions for all, renunciation of territorial expansion, and protection against forced territorial changes. The remaining three embodied liberal internationalist thinking about the causes of war and the foundations of world peace. These were freedom of the seas, open access to markets and raw materials, and disarmament of aggressor nations pending the establishment of a permanent structure to assure world peace. The Atlantic Charter reflected American ideals embodied in President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points of 1918 and FDR's “Four Freedoms” proclamation of January 1941, and it strongly implied the universal applicability of these principles.

Long after the immediate circumstances that led to the Atlantic Conference had faded, the charter remained a living document. Beginning as an assertion of the aspirations of the nations opposing the Axis powers, the charter became the statement of Allied war aims after the United States entered World War II in December 1941. In 1945 it served as the guiding manifesto of the new United Nations, and indeed was formally incorporated in a “Declaration by the United Nations” as a “common programme of purposes and principles.” The Atlantic Charter is today included in the U.S. State Department's listing of treaties still in force, with all the nations adhering to the United Nations Declaration as its signatories. Initially no more than a press release by the leader of a belligerent power and the head of a neutral nation, the Atlantic Charter has come to be considered a pivotal document in the long campaign for universal principles of international human rights and justice.

Bibliography

Theodore A. Wilson , The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941, rev. ed., 1991.
David Facey‐Crowther and Douglas Brinkley, eds., The Atlantic Charter: Retrospect and Prospect, 1994.

Theodore A. Wilson