Great Power conferences and the challenges of nation-building

Charles O’Neill’s poem, set to the tune of “The Banks of the Mourlough Side” and titled, “The Foggy Dew,” speaks of England calling young men to come serve in World War I in order that “small nations might be free.” (Whether Luke Kelly or Paddy Reilly sang it better is more than I can judge.) The point in this is that Ireland was itself a small nation, one that while not under the thumb of the Central Powers would nevertheless also like to rule itself. Independence for most of the island’s counties was to come soon after the Great War ended, and a number of nations emerged around this time in line with Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, but the global movement for decolonization was not to come until after the conclusion of the Second World War — and is still working itself out to this day.

The shape of things to come, from the perspective of World War II, was formed in outline in several meetings of heads of state over the course of the conflict. One example of was the conference in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland that produced the Atlantic Charter of 1941 in which Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed on a number of points, including freer trade and the right of peoples to govern themselves, but that was mostly aspirational, as the United States was not yet in the fight and the Soviet Union had only just been…