ABSTRACT
In October 1945 the United Nations (UN) was officially established following the devastation of the Second World War, which had engulfed much of the world in conflict. The principal purpose of the organization was to prevent such a global conflagration from happening again. Indeed, tentative negotiations for the establishment of the UN as a replacement for the failed League of Nations had been initiated early on in the war with the Atlantic Charter agreed to by President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States (US) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain. Based on meetings held on August 9 and 10, 1941, off the coast of Newfoundland, the Atlantic Charter set out to define the intentions of the US and Britain in the face of war, going so far as to outline eight shared principles for a postwar order. Though largely speculative in scope, given that the war in Europe, Asia, and Africa was still ongoing, the Atlantic Charter reinforced in particular the idea of popular self-determination, albeit intended for Europe alone, that had served as a founding principle of the League of Nations as articulated by US President Woodrow Wilson (Mazower, 2012: 250). Self-determination as an idea was not exclusive to Wilson, having been embraced by other political figures such as the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin (Lenin, 2004 [1914]; Stalin, 2013 [1913]). But Wilson’s advocacy proved particularly influential during the period after the First World War, with Wilsonianism providing an international ethos that rationalized and legitimated nationalist struggles for self-determination across the world, especially those located in territories under colonial control (Manela, 2007). Through the influence of thinkers such as Wilson and Lenin, as well as institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, nationalism became the dominant force in the shaping of global politics during the twentieth century.
