Atlantic Charter

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atlantic Charter was born on the 14th of August 1941, in the waters of Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland, months before the United States had fired a single shot in World War II. Two men had traveled there in secret to make a declaration about the world that would exist after a war that was, for one of them, still technically not his country's fight. The questions that meeting raised have never fully been answered: who did those principles belong to, and who was left out? What kind of world were they really promising?

• 2. The Meeting in the Bay

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  On the 9th of August 1941, HMS Prince of Wales steamed into Placentia Bay carrying Winston Churchill, escorted by the destroyers HMS Ripley. The American heavy cruiser USS Augusta was already waiting there, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and members of his staff aboard. Roosevelt had told the public he was on a ten-day fishing trip. Churchill had crossed the Atlantic in wartime secrecy. When they came face to face, both men were briefly silent. Then Churchill broke the silence: "At long last, Mr. President." Roosevelt replied, "Glad to have you aboard, Mr. Churchill."

  This was not actually their first meeting. They had been at the same dinner at Gray's Inn on the 29th of July 1918, decades before either man held the offices they now occupied. They had been corresponding since 1939, and this moment in Placentia Bay was the first of what would become 13 wartime meetings.

  Churchill then handed Roosevelt a letter from King George VI. A movie sound crew was present and attempted twice to record Churchill's official remarks but failed both times to capture them. The declaration they were about to produce, however, would carry farther than any film reel.

• 3. Eight Clauses for a New World

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  Naval Base Argentia, recently leased from Britain as part of the Destroyers-for-Bases deal, was the site where Roosevelt and Churchill worked through the drafts that would become the Atlantic Charter. The document they produced contained eight principal clauses: no territorial gains for either nation, territorial adjustments only in accord with the wishes of affected peoples, the right of all peoples to self-determination, the lowering of trade barriers, global economic cooperation and social welfare, a world free of want and fear, freedom of the seas, and disarmament of aggressor nations followed by common disarmament after the war.

  The fourth clause on international trade carried specific political weight. It insisted that both "victor and vanquished" would receive market access "on equal terms." This was a deliberate rejection of the punitive trade arrangements that had followed World War I, arrangements represented most pointedly by the Paris Economy Pact. The men who drafted those eight clauses had watched a previous peace collapse into another catastrophic war, and they were trying to design something that would not repeat that failure.

  There was, however, no formal signed document. Roosevelt told Congress the charter's contents on the 21st of August 1941, and Churchill used the name "Atlantic Charter" in the British Parliament on the 24th of August. But the agreement had been threshed out through drafts and the final text telegraphed to London and Washington. Roosevelt later acknowledged bluntly: "There isn't any copy of the Atlantic Charter, so far as I know. I haven't got one. The British haven't got one."

• 4. A Name From a Labour Newspaper

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  When the joint declaration was released to the public on the 14th of August 1941, its official title was "Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister." It was generally known at the time simply as the "Joint Declaration." The phrase Atlantic Charter was coined by the Labour Party newspaper the Daily Herald. Churchill picked it up and used it in Parliament ten days later, and the name stuck.

  An error crept into the London text during transmission but was subsequently corrected. Churchill's own account in his memoir The Second World War noted that several verbal alterations were agreed before the document reached its final form, making no mention of any signing ceremony. Roosevelt later told a story about the Yalta Conference in which he described finding a signed copy of the Atlantic Charter among his papers, both signatures apparently in his own handwriting.

• 5. Who the Charter Excluded

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  At the Inter-Allied Council meeting in London on the 24th of September 1941, the governments-in-exile of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia joined the Soviet Union and Free French representatives in unanimously endorsing the charter's principles. On the 1st of January 1942, a broader coalition issued the Declaration by United Nations, stressing solidarity against what it called Hitlerism. That declaration became the basis for the modern United Nations.

  But the charter's principle of self-determination immediately ran into the empires of its own signatories. The problems, as one analysis put it plainly, came not from Germany and Japan but from allies that had empires: the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and the Netherlands. Roosevelt's speechwriter Robert E. Sherwood observed that it was not long before the people of India, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia were asking whether the charter extended to the Pacific and to Asia.

  Mahatma Gandhi wrote directly to Roosevelt in 1942: "I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for the freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and for that matter Africa are exploited by Great Britain." Churchill rejected the charter's universal applicability outright, saying in September 1941 that it was meant to apply only to states under German occupation. He further stated that he had not become Prime Minister to administer the liquidation of the British Empire. British India had recruited roughly 2.5 million volunteers, the largest volunteer force in the world at the time, to fight for the Allies, mostly in West Asia and North Africa.

• 6. Fault Lines Among the Allies

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  Poland's government-in-exile recognized immediately that a genuine implementation of self-determination could block the Polish annexation of Danzig, East Prussia, and parts of German Silesia. An office of the Polish exile government wrote to warn Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, prompting Poland to ask Britain for a flexible interpretation of the charter.

  The Baltic states presented a different problem. Churchill argued for an interpretation that would allow the Soviet Union to continue controlling the Baltic states. The United States rejected that interpretation until March 1944, though Washington did not actively press Stalin on the issue while he was fighting Germany. Roosevelt planned to raise the Baltic question after the war. He died in April 1945, before the fighting in Europe had ended.

  At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt sided with Josef Stalin against Churchill on several colonial matters, opposing the return of Indochina to France. Roosevelt privately suggested to Stalin that the United States and Soviet Union work together to help develop an independent India "from the bottom, somewhat on the Soviet line." Stalin dismissed the idea. Moroccan nationalist organizations read the charter as an anti-colonial declaration and used it to call for the end of French and Spanish colonial administration.

• 7. Long Consequences

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  The charter's adherents signed the Declaration by United Nations on the 1st of January 1942, which laid the foundation for what became the modern United Nations. The dismantling of the British Empire, the formation of NATO, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade all traced their origins to the principles articulated at Placentia Bay.

  Eighty years after the original meeting, on the 10th of June 2021, US president Joe Biden and UK prime minister Boris Johnson met in Cornwall, England, and issued a document they called the New Atlantic Charter. The White House described it as aimed at meeting the "new challenges of the 21st century" while building on the commitments made in 1941. The two leaders met for the first time at that signing, echoing in a small way the circumstances of Roosevelt and Churchill traveling in secrecy to meet in Placentia Bay.