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Britain initiated an extensive pro-democracy propaganda campaign during its wartime occupation of Iraq from 1941—5. Organizations such as the Brotherhood of Freedom aimed to instil civic pride in disaffected Iraqi youth, and the propaganda message was accompanied by a call for internal political reform as a means of protecting against growing communist influence. Allied declarations such as the Atlantic Charter played a key role in this campaign designed to win Iraqi support for the war effort, but the publicity drive also opened up new avenues for protest. The war saw the revival of leftist groups that harnessed this rhetoric to their call for British evacuation. The confluence of Allied democracy propaganda, Iraqi reformist movements, and widespread demands for British withdrawal and political reform served as a catalyst for postwar political change. Yet the reality of the occupation, in particular Britain's bolstering of the old regime in the interest of wartime stability, ultimately hampered the development of a viable democratic system.

In response to the Great Depression and the Second World War, the US government worked to propagate free trade throughout the Americas as a means of stimulating domestic economic growth and fostering hemispheric solidary. By 1941, Washington aimed to extend this free trade programme and, therefore, the Anglo-US Atlantic Charter contained a limited commitment to free trade as part of its outline for a new post-war order. However, in 1944, the Venezuelan government demonstrated that it was possible to challenge Anglo-US efforts to apply the Charter to the international oil industry. By analysing the development of the Atlantic Charter's free trade provision, this article develops our understanding of the origins of the international post-war settlement and its contested nature.

U radu se razmatra postupanje političkoga vrha Sjedinjenih Američkih Država (SAD) prije ulaska u Drugi svjetski rat, odnosno do potpisivanja Atlantske povelje. Postupci Franklina Delana Roosevelta protiv Njemačke na Atlantskom oceanu te provokacije i ultimatumi Japanu bili su pokušaj izazivanja njihove objave rata SAD-u. Roosevelt je zapravo tražio opravdanje pred američkom nacijom za izravnu konfrontaciju sa silama Osovine. Politika SAD-a prije i tijekom Drugoga svjetskog rata bila je slojevita, a poslije se (u historiografiji) uvriježilo mišljenje da je SAD vodio politiku izolacionizma kad ga je „iznenada” napao Japan. Uz taj problem, u radu se prikazuje i „neformalni brak” SAD-a i Velike Britanije ugovoren preko specijalnih poslanika.

A Most Uncertain Crusad e traces and analyzes the emergence of human rights as both an international concern and as a controversial domestic issue for US policy makers during and after World War II. Rowland Brucken focuses on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within certain domestic non-governmental organizations, and explains why, after issuing wartime declarations that called for the definition and enforcement of international human rights standards, the US government refused to ratify the first UN treaties that fulfilled those twin purposes. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations worked to weaken the scope and enforcement mechanisms of early human rights agreements, and gradually withdrew support for Senate ratification. A small but influential group of isolationist-oriented senators, led by John Bricker (R-OH), warned that the treaties would bring about socialism, destroy white supremacy, and eviscerate the Bill of Rights. At the UN, a growing bloc of developing nations demanded the inclusion of economic guarantees, support for decolonization, and strong enforcement measures, all of which Washington opposed. Prior to World War II, international law considered the protection of individual rights to fall largely under the jurisdiction of national governments. Alarmed by fascist tyranny and guided by a Wilsonian vision of global cooperation in pursuit of human rights, President Roosevelt issued the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. Behind the scenes, the State Department planners carefully considered how an international organization could best protect those guarantees. Their work paid off at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, which vested the UN with an unprecedented opportunity to define and protect the human rights of individuals. After two years of negotiations, the UN General Assembly unanimously approved its first human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention. The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), led by Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Subsequent efforts to craft an enforceable covenant of individual rights, though, bogged down quickly. A deadlock occurred as western nations, communist states, and developing countries disagreed on the inclusion of economic and social guarantees, the right of self-determination, and plans for implementation. Meanwhile, a coalition of groups within the United States doubted the wisdom of American accession to any human rights treaties. Led by the American Bar Association and Senator Bricker, opponents proclaimed that ratification would lead to a U.N. led tyrannical world socialistic government. The backlash caused President Eisenhower to withdraw from the covenant drafting process. Brucken shows how the American human rights policy had come full circle: Eisenhower, like Roosevelt, issued statements that merely celebrated western values of freedom and democracy, criticized human rights records of other countries while at the same time postponed efforts to have the UN codify and enforce a list of binding rights due in part to America's own human rights violations.

In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.

Responding to the way the Southern parts of the Atlantic have historically been obscured in conceptions of the Atlantic world and through the critical oceanic studies concepts of fluidity, solvency, and drift, this chapter serves as a critical introduction to the South Atlantic. Beginning with a rereading of the Atlantic Charter, it poses the South Atlantic both as a material geographic region (something along the lines of a South Atlantic Rim) and as a set of largely unfulfilled visions—including those of anti-imperial solidarity and resistance generated through imaginative and political engagement from different parts of the Global South with the Atlantic world. It also reflects on the conditions under which something called the “Global South Atlantic” could come into being and the modes of historical, cultural, and literary comparison by which a multilingual and multinational region might be grasped.

Middle East and Mediterranean: the Levant, Palestine, Iran, North Africa, Tangier. Future of the Italian colonies and the Italian Mediterranean Islands; questions of international trusteeship

Soviet Union and Russian questions. The Vatican transmits appeal by Russian colony in Rome that Russians in Allied territory be not sent back to Russia against their will