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 compelled to be involved. Mid-war discussions focused on the strategies for defeating the Axis Powers and on keeping the Allied side together. It was in Yalta in Crimea in February of 1945 and at Potsdam just outside of Berlin from the 17th of July to the 2nd of August of that year that the borders and political systems resulting from the war would be decided, at least in so far as the Big Three — the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union — were able and entitled, or so they believed, to divide the world according to their pleasure.
Those three nations had led the fight against fascism, and the Soviet Union suffered the highest number of casualties during the war, some 24,000,000 civilian and military deaths. But France and Poland, among other countries, could reasonably observe that they had gone through horrors perpetrated against them, and in any case, the Poles especially had cause to wonder why they were denied an independent voice in the…
