380 J.-A. PEMBERTON
the United Nations, whether individually or collectively, in regard to
what progress had actually been made ‘in the direction of the accepted
war aims,’ by which was meant the eight clauses of the Atlantic Charter
(which, among other things, condemned territorial aggrandisement and
the use of force, insisted on the right of peoples to choose their own
government and live in freedom from fear and want and called for a
permanent system of collective security), with a view to giving ‘the
native peoples of the East confidence in the sincerity of the announced
purposes.’^113
Information of this kind, it was suggested, would make mention
of such developments as the following: the effective recognition by the
Pacific War Council in Washington of Philippine independence; the agree-
ment between the United Kingdom and the United States that the extra-
territorial regime in China must come to a complete end; and the plan
which had been announced by Queen Wilhelmina while the conference
was in progress, to reconstitute relations between the Netherlands and
the Netherlands Indies such that the latter would achieve ‘full and equal
partnership with the mother country’ after the war.^114
In respect to the joint propaganda emanating from the United
Nations, most members thought it was of the essence that all doubts
be removed that the principles enshrined in the Atlantic Charter (sup-
port for which had been pledged in a declaration signed by the USSR
and the nine governments of occupied Europe, namely, Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway,
Poland, Yugoslavia and by the representatives of France’s General de
Gaulle at a meeting in London on September 24, 1941), were intended
to apply to the whole world and not to Europe alone. Here, it is worth
noting that the third clause of the charter, after having insisted on ‘the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which
they will live,’ stated that ‘they [the signatories] wish to see sovereign
rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly
deprived of them.’ Responding to the insistence that all doubts should
be removed concerning the universal applicability of the principle of
self- determination as enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, some members
(^113) International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, War and Peace in the Pacific,
24.
(^114) Ibid., 24, 54, 87. See also Hailey, ‘A British View of a Far Eastern Settlement,’ 6.