The Atlantic Charter

The meetings in Versailles following World War I, which led to the creation of the United Nations' predecessor, the League of Nations, the unwillingness of the United States Congress for its country to be a member of the League, and the manner in which the League finally collapsed are comprehensively described and discussed in a very scholarly book [MacMillan 2003]. Despite the failure of the League, the concept of an international organisation designed to ensure world peace and promote cooperation among nations did not die.

On 12 June 1942, on a battleship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill conceived and promulgated the Atlantic Charter: the critical conditions to be accepted and adopted by nations to ensure peace for all humanity after the end of World War II. The Charter perceived a peaceful world in which all people would enjoy freedom from want, fear, hunger, poverty and ignorance; would have access to health services by which to eradicate chronic diseases. The Charter specified: a. the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they wished to live; b. all nations to have access on equal terms to the trade and raw materials needed for economic prosperity, and c. all nations to abandon the use of military force to pursue their ambitions or to impose their will or ideologies on other nations. It is melancholy that the present political leaders of the United States and Britain do not appear to embrace the benign vision and aspirations of their predecessors.