In 1939, as totalitarian regimes mobilized for war and the League of Nations collapsed, Clarence K. Streit published Union Now, calling for an open federal union of democracies (the nucleus of a future world federation). More than a response to crisis, his proposal offered a structural insight: unless the relations among democracies themselves were transformed—through shared political institutions capable of mutual constraint—their cooperation would remain strategic, temporary, and vulnerable to the return of power politics. The nucleus he proposed was not merely a stronger alliance, but a federative beginning: an institutional form that could scale liberty, bind its members, and grow by consent.

Streit drew from the U.S. founding tradition of the compound republic, in which free peoples federate without dissolving into a unitary state.  Crucially, this union would derive its authority from individuals, not just states, making citizenship, not sovereignty, its operative foundation.

Soon after the publication of Union Now a spontaneous movement was born—Federal Union, Inc. The movement had a leading role in the WWII debate on world organization. It shaped public and elite debates in the United States and the world.  As war intensified, Federal Union members worked alongside other internationalist organizations and yet made their support conditional to the creation of an alternative world order based on federative structures.  They warned: without federal transformation, alliances would collapse into geopolitical maneuvering—even among democracies.

Federal Union helped shape early postwar expectations for transatlantic order. But as NATO and other structures emerged, Streit and his supporters warned that unless these forms matured into a true federation, they would reproduce the very geopolitical instability they sought to overcome. Elements of Streit's vision found partial institutional expression in the United Nations, the EU and NATO. Yet Streit and his allies understood these as incomplete steps. 

In the decades that followed, Federal Union supported the creation of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, convened the Atlantic Congress (1959) and the Atlantic Convention (1962). Renamed the Association to Unite the Democracies (AUD) in 1985, it anticipated EU and NATO expansion after the collapse of communism. Yet, it cautioned that unless these frameworks evolved into an open federal union—governed by mutual constraint and capable of deriving its authority from and acting on individuals—the logic of expansion would risk fragmentation and lead back to wars.
AUD’s initiatives aimed to turn the opening created by the end of the Cold War into a process of federative development.  It promoted East-West dialogues to facilitate this structural transformation without which the extension of the transatlantic system risked turning into a new form of power politics. Only by embedding consent and shared constraints could its growth preserve the gains of liberty and avoid reproducing the very divisions it aimed to overcome.

In 2002, AUD hosted a major conference in Moscow to explore security arrangements beyond Cold War divisions—an effort to restart on new terms and avert the resurgence of great power competition.

Today, the Streit Council carries forward this legacy. We do not see transatlantic and global institutions as inherently virtuous. We ask instead if they can scale liberty and mutual constraint or if they preserve the logic of power politics in new forms.

Our history is not the record of a completed project, it rather points toward a worldview and institutional design whose architecture can scale and adapt to meet enduring challenges. As fragmentation, authoritarian resurgence, and unchecked technological power intensify, the relevance of federal union only grows. It remains the essential alternative —still needed, still possible.​

 

The Streit Council's original mission statement can be found here.

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