Long Range Peace Objectives

John Foster Dulles, chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace instigated by the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in December 1940, wrote a pamphlet criticizing the Atlantic Charter, an eight-point declaration by President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill,…

Vorschläge für eine europäische Neuordnung

This anonymous blueprint, likely hailing from the Kreisau Circle and in that case probably written by Von Trott, outlines the creation of a European commonwealth of nations after the example of the British Commonwealth. Distinctive for the time in which it was written, when German aristocrats generally still resented the British for the punitive nature…

no title (Memorandum on the German Resistance)

This blueprint belongs to the most famous war-time documents to have been created by German resistance circles. The members of the Kreisau Circle outlined a strategy to overthrow the Hitler regime and subsequently negotiate a peace with the Allies and rebuild Germany. Von Trott wanted to use this document to convince the British to aid…

The Future of Europe (Third Draft)

J.H. Oldham and Dennis Routh, the secretary of the British Peace Aims Group, drafted a blueprint together in 1943, the year in which PAG lost its founder William Paton. They contended that one of the goals of utmost importance for the immediate post-war era would be to create ‘common institutions and agencies’, both in economics…

Six Pillars of Peace (a.k.a. Statement of Political Propositions)

The Six Pillars of Peace were the outcome of a conference organized by the CJDP in July 1943 in Princeton, USA. They stated the political goals the CJDP wanted to infuse American war and foreign policy with. In the commentary on the first pillar, Europe is singled out as an area particularly suitable for regional…

A Durable Peace in Europe

William Henry Chamberlin was not known for his avid ecumenism, but was asked by the CJDP for his many years of journalistic experience in Europe to write a memorandum to translate the Six Pillars of Peace into a programme of action for the European situation from an American point of view, which resulted in this…

Towards a Responsible Society

For the Third Section of the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948, themed ‘The Church and the Disorder of Society’, J.H. Oldham defined what would become the most influential concept in ecumenical thinking about the right ordering of economics and society: the responsible society. Influenced by Jacques Maritain and other Roman Catholic thinkers, Oldham argued that human…

Toward a Third Way

John C. Bennett, a close academic associate of Reinhold Niebuhr, saw the nascent political tradition of social democracy in Europe as a powerful force, that could be combined with ecumenical thinking on the ideological middle ground between capitalism and communism. In this blueprint, he provides the contours of such a politics and suggests ways in…

The Regeneration of Europe

In a speech before students of the World Christian Student Federation, Visser ‘t Hooft reflected back on the years between 1944 (when a meeting had taken place at his home in Geneva with representatives of resistance movements from all over Europe) and 1949 (a year in which the Marshall Plan’s effects had become visible, but…

European Issues

This statement was the first official publication of the Ecumenical Commission for European Cooperation, in which Christian politicians from various Western European countries spoke out on the necessity of and their support for European integration, as it was laid out in the so-called Schuman Plan a year earlier. The statement supported European integration for three…