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Atlantic Union was the most common name for the proposal, originally advanced by journalist Clarence Streit in 1939, to unite the world's leading democratic nations into a federal union, in much the way the thirteen states united in 1789 under the U.S. Constitution.
For many years an Atlantic Union Resolution was introduced every session in the U.S. Congress, by Rep. Paul Findley, Donald Fraser, and Morris Udall as the lead co-sponsors, to call an "Atlantic Convention" which its proponents hoped would draft a constitution to be submitted for ratification to the countries represented. In 1960, the resolution finally passed and the convention was held, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was not a supporter of the concept, did not appoint supporters of federation as the U.S. delegates, so nothing came of the convention except a broadly-worded resolution calling for "greater cooperation".
The idea of Atlantic Union had its origin in the fertile brain of an Englishman named Cecil Rhodes. To this end he established the Rhodes Foundation, providing for the education in England of bright young Americans.
In 1939, a Rhodes Scholar named Clarence Streit wrote a book called Union Now , which advocated a gradual approach to final world union by way of regional unions, starting with the union between the US and Britain. Committees were set up all over America, and Mr. Streit reported that over two million Americans had signed petitions asking for union with Britain.
In Streit's own words, the Atlantic Union, now expanded to include Western Europe, was the first step towards total world government: "It [Union Now] proclaimed the need of world government and insisted that no country needed this more urgently than the United States." Streit, who has been a close associate of Communists and socialists all his adult life, had no hostility towards collectivism. He said in Union Now: "Democracy not only allows mankind to choose freely between capitalism and collectivism, but it includes Marxist governments." In his pamphlets Streit asks the question: "Does the rise of socialism in some Western European democracies prevent our federating with them?" He answers with an emphatic "No!"
In March 1949, Federal Union set up a political-action unit called the Atlantic Union Committee. The first president of this Committee was former Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts, who said he considers national sovereignty a "silly shibboleth."
The work for Atlantic Union is being worked towards by the Streit Council.
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the national frame and constraints of government. The Constitution's first three articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, whereby the federal government is divided into three branches: the legislative, consisting of the bicameral Congress ; the executive, consisting of the president and subordinate officers ; and the judicial, consisting of the Supreme Court and other federal courts. Article IV, Article V, and Article VI embody concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments, the states in relationship to the federal government, and the shared process of constitutional amendment. Article VII establishes the procedure subsequently used by the 13 states to ratify it. The Constitution of the United States is the oldest and longest-standing written and codified national constitution in force in the world today.
The term federalist describes several political beliefs around the world. It may also refer to the concept of parties, whose members or supporters called themselves Federalists.
World government is the concept of a single political authority with jurisdiction over all of Earth and humanity. It is conceived in a variety of forms, from tyrannical to democratic, which reflects its wide array of proponents and detractors.
A popular initiative is a form of direct democracy by which a petition meeting certain hurdles can force a legal procedure on a proposition. The hurdles the petition has to meet vary between countries, typically signatures by a certain number of registered voters. In direct initiative, the proposition is put directly to a plebiscite or referendum, also called a Popular initiated Referendum or citizen-initiated referendum. In an indirect initiative, the proposed measure is first referred to the legislature, and then if the proposed law is rejected by the legislature, the government may be forced to put the proposition to a referendum. The proposition may be on federal level law, statute, constitutional amendment, charter amendment, local ordinance, obligate the executive or legislature to consider the subject by submitting it to the order of the day. In contrast, a popular referendum that allows voters only to repeal existing legislation.
In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess.
Ratification is a principal's legal confirmation of an act of its agent. In international law, ratification is the process by which a state declares its consent to be bound to a treaty. In the case of bilateral treaties, ratification is usually accomplished by exchanging the requisite instruments, and in the case of multilateral treaties, the usual procedure is for the depositary to collect the ratifications of all states, keeping all parties informed of the situation.
The United States Constitution has served as the supreme law of the United States since taking effect in 1789. The document was written at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and was ratified through a series of state conventions held in 1787 and 1788. Since 1789, the Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times; particularly important amendments include the ten amendments of the United States Bill of Rights and the three Reconstruction Amendments.
A supranational union is a type of international organization that is empowered to directly exercise some of the powers and functions otherwise reserved to states. A supranational organization involves a greater transfer of or limitation of state sovereignty than other kinds of international organizations.
The Association to Unite the Democracies (AUD), is an organization seeking closer cooperation and integration among the world's democratic states. AUD was founded in 1939 by Clarence Streit, The New York Times correspondent at the League of Nations and author of Union Now. It was initially known as the Inter-Democracy Federal Unionists before being renamed Federal Union, Inc. in 1940. The organization's efforts were embraced by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, with figures including Harold L. Ickes and John Foster Dulles also endorsing Streit's proposal for a "Union of free peoples." Federal Union's ideas received a boost with the 1949 founding of the Roberts-chaired Atlantic Union Committee, which pressured Congress to pursue a federation of democracies and on whose board Streit sat. Receiving its present name in 1985, AUD has largely been succeeded by two affiliated organizations, the Streit Council and the Ashburn Institute. It is currently the sponsor of the Mayme and Herb Frank Scholarship Program funded by the Frank Educational Trust, offering financial assistance for graduate research on international integration and global federalism.
Clarence Kirschman Streit was an American journalist who played a prominent role in the Atlanticist and world federalist movements.
A convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution, also referred to as an Article V Convention, state convention, or amendatory convention is one of two methods authorized by Article Five of the United States Constitution whereby amendments to the United States Constitution may be proposed: two thirds of the State legislatures may call a convention to propose amendments, which become law only after ratification by three-fourths of the states. The Article V convention method has never been used; but 33 amendments have been proposed by the other method, a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress; and 27 of these have been ratified by three-fourths of the States. Although there has never been a federal constitutional convention since the original one, at the state level more than 230 constitutional conventions have assembled in the United States.
The Virginia Conventions have been the assemblies of delegates elected for the purpose of establishing constitutions of fundamental law for the Commonwealth of Virginia superior to General Assembly legislation. Their constitutions and subsequent amendments span four centuries across the territory of modern-day Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.
Democratic World Federalists, a civil society organization based in San Francisco with supporters worldwide, advocates a democratic federal system of world government in order to end war and crimes against humanity and to promote “a just world community and the preservation of a livable and healthful global environment” through the development of enforceable world law. It is affiliated with the Coalition for Democratic World Government, the Community of World Citizens, and the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy.
In the context of the United States, secession primarily refers to the voluntary withdrawal of one or more states from the Union that constitutes the United States; but may loosely refer to leaving a state or territory to form a separate territory or new state, or to the severing of an area from a city or county within a state. Advocates for secession are called disunionists by their contemporaries in various historical documents.
The Streit Council for a Union of Democracies is Washington, DC-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit foreign policy think tank working to unite democracies as a path toward greater individual freedom, international solidarity, and global stability. It aims for the creation of an international order of, by and for the people.
Union Now is a book by journalist Clarence Streit calling for a federal union of fifteen of the world's major democracies. The first edition of the book was published in 1939. The book attracted public attention to world federalist and Atlanticist ideas and helped lay the groundwork for the efforts of Streit's organization Federal Union, Inc..
Wolf-PAC is an American nonpartisan political action committee formed in 2011 with the goal of adding an "amendment to the United States Constitution to ensure balance, integrity, and transparency to our national system of campaign finance".
The World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy, Ltd. is an organization that advocates for a democratic world government of a world federalist system. They seek to realize these goals by expanding international organizations and moving towards a unified system of governance.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a Trotskyist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.
World federalism or global federalism is a political ideology advocating a democratic, federal world government. A world federation would have authority on issues of global reach, while the members of such a federation would retain authority over local and national issues. The overall sovereignty over the world population would largely reside in the federal government.