The Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter

Wartime documents gave colonial nationalists powerful arguments. In August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, whose third point respected the right of all peoples to choose their form of government. Churchill soon told Parliament that he meant European nations under Nazi rule, but nationalists from Rangoon to Lagos quoted it as a promise to them. The UN Charter of 1945 went further in principle.

Article 1 named the 'self-determination of peoples' as a goal, Chapter XI obliged colonial powers to promote self-government and report on their territories, and Chapter XII created a Trusteeship system for former League of Nations mandates. These texts did not force anyone to leave, but they gave anti-colonial movements an international stage and a legal vocabulary. The gap between Allied ideals and colonial reality became a central argument of decolonization.