In this piece, the last of my three-part series on the 2021 Atlantic Charter, I will discuss the issue of success. Did the original, 1941 charter succeed in its purpose, and will its successor?
The extent to which any complex treaty or international agreement can ‘succeed’ is, of course, debatable. Any evaluation of either charter will depend on whether we agree with what they are trying to accomplish. Even then, it is impossible to trace causality, to claim, for example, that the 1941 treaty created the post-War world in any significant way.
But it is still worth considering the legacy of the old charter and the hypothetical legacy of the new charter. For one, in a world increasingly bound by multilateral treaties and ambitious climate goals, it is important to ask whether the world really can be remade by broad statements of principle that lack enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, it is useful to study the gap between international ideals and international realities; this gap usually tells us where real power lies, how problems get solved, and what circumstances dominate international politics. Just think about the gap between the United Nations’ proclaimed purposes and actual successes, or the EU, or NATO – predicting their future influence depends on where and by how much these projects have fallen short in the past.
So, did the first charter succeed? Did its vision of the future come to pass? Well, yes and no.
Some points of the Charter fared well. With the post-war economic liberalization, free trade largely became the norm. As did freedom of seas. The global economic system still contained tremendous inequalities, and trade was never totally unrestricted. But in the Western world, free trade and free seas slowly became the norm. Gone was the autarky and mercantilism of an older Europe, and largely because the U.S and U.K firmly backed an open, Bretton Woods-style economic system when the war ended.
The liberal, social welfare state described by Charter points five and six also came to pass. This unfolded unequally at different times in different places (and not at all in a linear way), but the degree of poverty and social depravation steadily decreased (although it now seems to be increasing again, but never mind that for now). Social safety nets that would have been unimaginable in 1941 - the NHS, Medicare, Medicade - became commonplace throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s. It is certainly indisputable that allied-occupied Western Europe pursued more liberal, equitable policy than the Nazi territories that preceded it. And while the 1941 Charter does not explain the emergence of the 20th century social state, it does suggest that the political and ideological will was in place long before they emerged.
In other ways, Atlantic idealism remained idealism.
Points one through three covered territorial aggrandizement and the sovereign right of nations to self-determination. These points were respected insofar as neither allied power annexed large chunks of the world after 1945, but the Cold War quickly made a farce of any global notion of self-determination and territorial sovereignty. As the decades rolled on, neither power felt bound by war-time promises made in 1941, and Britain and America intervened in the affairs of other countries when there was a perceived security or geopolitical reason to do so. We see this most obviously in the Suez Crisis (when an Anglo-British force attempted to retake the Suez Canal from Egyptian nationalists) and in Vietnam (when the United States failed to understand the true, nationalistic motivations of the North Vietnamese). It’s not that self-determination and territorial sovereignty didn’t matter – anti-Communist or pro-Western calculations simply mattered more.
It’s a similar story with disarmament. After the war, the amount of armaments in the world rose dramatically, most obviously in the case of nuclear bombs. Once again, both powers probably wanted a world with less weapons and less mutually-assured-destruction, but the invention of atomic weapons and the paranoid geopolitical climate made it extremely difficult to multilaterally reduce weapon stockpiles. In this sense, post-1941 conditions overtook the charter, making it a partially obsolete document.
In sum, the 1941 Charter was a mixed bag. Both signatories tried to stick to their ideals, but external politics often made it nigh-impossible to do so. It is, after all, extremely difficult for the ship of state to stay a course charted years ago, because the surrounding seas are always changing. In this case, the Cold War dwarfed most other considerations, interfering and muddling the achievement of charter promises. Internal politics also got in the way, as the big-government liberalism of the war years quickly faced opposition from new brands of conservatism and competing visions of the future. Culture changed, society swayed from hopeful optimism to nihilistic cynicism; wars happened, technology raced forwards, alternatives and socio-economic challenges emerged from a million places. And by 1970 the world of Roosevelt and Churchill might have seemed a distant, bygone era.
What does this portend for the 2021 charter? Well, I imagine that the new will proceed along a similar course as the old. There is a new kind of Cold War in the war, with China taking the role of the USSR. This conflict will probably lead us to make all kinds of mistakes, forsaking our ideals, both big and small, for the sake of the security and hegemony. There will be long-term pandemic effects, both in terms of economic and human health, that will complicate things further. And I’m sure that the domestic political situations of both countries will rock and shift, buckling under the weight of new-age populism and Trump/Brexit isolationism.
But it’s also a safe bet that some of the charter’s goals will happen. For what it's worth, my money is on points one, two and three (democracy and multilateral governance will make a comeback).
And, despite all the shortcomings, the 2021 Charter matters. These kinds of statements matter. If nothing else, they serve as a marker, to signify where we fall short and how we must do better.
I still have my doubts. It all might not amount to much more than a political PR stunt. But I’m still glad the 2021 Charter happened. The historical parallels alone are endlessly fascinating - they gave me material for three articles. More importantly, though, we are in an era of turbulent global seas. In such a time, it is nice to see a glimmer of old-fashioned idealism, shining like a lighthouse, giving us something to strive towards.
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