Atlantic Charter - Content and Analysis

Content and Analysis

The Atlantic Charter established a vision for a post-war settlement.

The eight principal points of the Charter were:

  1. no territorial gains were to be sought by the United States or the United Kingdom;
  2. territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned;
  3. all people had a right to self-determination;
  4. trade barriers were to be lowered;
  5. there was to be global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare;
  6. the participants would work for a world free of want and fear;
  7. the participants would work for freedom of the seas;
  8. there was to be disarmament of aggressor nations, and a postwar common disarmament.


Although Clause Three clearly states that all peoples have the right to decide their form of government, it fails to say what changes are necessary in both social and economic terms, so as to achieve freedom and peace.

Clause Four, with respect to international trade, consciously emphasized that both "victor vanquished" would be given market access "on equal terms." This was a repudiation of the punitive trade relations that were established within Europe post-World War I, as exemplified by the Paris Economy Pact.

Only two clauses have expressly discuss national social and economic conditions necessary post-war, despite this significance.

Read more about this topic:  Atlantic Charter

Famous quotes containing the words content and/or analysis:

    I have sometimes seen women, who would have been sensible enough, if they would have been content not to be called women of sense—but by aiming at what they had not, they only proved absurd—for sense cannot be counterfeited.
    Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

    The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)