Atlantic Charter

The Atlantic Charter was issued on 14 August 1941 by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill following their shipboard meeting off Placentia Bay, Newfoundland (the "Riviera" conference aboard USS Augusta and HMS Prince of Wales). Although the United States was not yet formally at war, the document publicly aligned Anglo-American war aims and articulated a vision for the international order that should follow the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Charter contained eight principles, including:

• No territorial aggrandizement by the signatories
• No territorial changes against the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned
• The right of peoples to choose their own form of government (self-determination)
• Access on equal terms to trade and raw materials
• Improved labor standards and social security through economic cooperation
• A peace allowing all nations to live in safety within their own borders ("freedom from fear and want")
• Freedom of the seas
• Disarmament of aggressor nations and the eventual establishment of a "wider and permanent system of general security"

The Charter was not a treaty and was never submitted to the US Senate for ratification; it was a joint declaration. Nonetheless, it carried significant legal and political weight. On 1 January 1942, twenty-six Allied governments endorsed its principles in the Declaration by United Nations, the document from which the post-war UN took its name. Its language on self-determination and collective security shaped the UN Charter (1945) and was later invoked by anti-colonial movements, sometimes uncomfortably for Churchill, who insisted the self-determination clause did not apply to the British Empire.

For MUN delegates and IR students, the Atlantic Charter is a key bridge between Wilsonian liberal internationalism of 1918 and the Bretton Woods–San Francisco order of 1944–45. It demonstrates how non-binding declarations can seed binding institutional architecture.