History

In 1939, Clarence K. Streit proposed a federal union of democracies. His best seller, Union Now, articulated why the only way to safeguard freedom, peace and justice in the modern world was to start the process that would lead to a democratic world federation. What he proposed was the immediate formation of a federal union of democracies, as an open nucleus that others would join.

The Association to Unite the Democracies (AUD) was formed to advocate this. AUD members played key roles in NATO’s birth, although they remained critical of its alliance structure and of its limited military scope.

AUD continues promoting freedom and peace, through federal frameworks of governance, in communities and institutions. 

In 1939, Clarence Streit, a New York Times correspondent at the League of Nations, published his work Union Now. A proposal for a federal union of the leading democracies. Union Now advocated the gradual growth of a democratic world federation to prevent the possibility of future wars. In 1940, a year later, Streit founded Federal Union, Inc., a non-profit membership organization committed to the burgeoning federalist movement influenced by his timely book. Federal Union Inc. would later change its name into The Association to Unite the Democracies, Inc.

Streit offered the federal union idea as a method of defending democratic societies against the internal and external threat of totalitarianism. From the very beginning, the mission of the AUD has been to defend, extend and sustain individual liberty and peace.

In early 1949, AUD spawned the Atlantic Union Committee, with former Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts as Chairman, former Under-Secretary of State Will Clayton and former Secretary of War Robert Patterson as Vice Chairman, in an intensive nationwide campaign for Atlantic integration. This was the climate in which NATO was proposed, the stage already being set by the Marshall Plan of which Clayton was the principal author. In the period 1949-53, the Atlantic Union Committee (AUC) became the primary organization in America supporting NATO. In the early 1950’s, the AUC took the initiative to form an Atlantic Assembly, as an annual consultative assembly of parliamentarians from the NATO countries, which formally became the North Atlantic Assembly in 1966, and then was transformed into the NATO Parliamentary Assembly under which name it exists today. Other AUD members and supporters involved in the cause, including George Marshall, Robert Schumann, Theodore Achilles, Will Clayton, Lester Pearson, and Paul Henri-Spaak, played key roles in the birth of the Marshall Plan, NATO and the European Community.

AUD, however, warned that these institutions would not serve the cause of protecting the true values of democratic societies if they did not alter their mutual relations by creating a real democratic union through federation.

Today, AUD continues to promote the federal principle, i.e. the coming together of freedom and union, as the preferred framework of voluntary societal cooperation, both domestically and internationally.

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