International trade organization

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The International Trade Organization ( english International Trade Organization , ITO ) was a planned institution whose creation in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference was proposed. Alongside the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, it should form the third “Bretton Woods Institution”.

Historical macroeconomic background

In the great global depression between 1929 and 1932, triggered by “ Black Friday ” on the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, the structural problems of the protectionist world economic order came to light and worsened in the crisis times of the Second World War. As early as the First World War, the international financial system, which was characterized by relatively free world trade, the gold standard and free convertibility of the currency, collapsed. Through unilateral measures, the states tried to strengthen their own economies at the expense of other states' export opportunities. All sought their salvation at the expense of the other. After 1929 the states, especially the USA, fled to a policy of setting up customs barriers, devaluing their currency and introducing non-tariff trade barriers (import restrictions) to fight the crisis . An economic war developed between the main players in the world economy (USA, Great Britain, Japan, Canada), which set in motion a spiral of protectionism and monetary devaluation, which in turn provoked a decline in the volume of world trade and thus extremely exacerbated the world economic crisis, which was caused by a high number characterize the unemployed. The crisis peaked in 1932.

The main actors in the negotiations on the ITO were also the victorious powers USA, England and Canada. The USA and England had different requirements. England, for example, was heavily indebted at the end of World War II with over $ 5 billion. Its debt to the former colonies was as much as $ 14 billion. England somehow had to pay off this debt, otherwise it would lead to the constant outflow of her gold reserves .

Historical-political background

After Germany attacked Poland in a blitzkrieg in 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. From autumn 1940 the USA gave Great Britain more and more material support ( lend lease agreement ). This support began as partisan neutrality and developed into the undeclared war. Only after Germany's attack on the USSR was an arms aid agreement (October 1, 1941) concluded between the USA, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. In 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt proclaimed the establishment of a joint body for joint strategic planning and warfare against Germany and Japan in the Atlantic Charter . On May 2, 1945, Berlin capitulated under the Allied forces. With the US atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), the Japanese-American War was also ended. The enthusiastic period of the economic boom in the 1950s was, however, heavily overshadowed by the Korean War and the beginning of the Cold War .

The failure of the ITO

All of them were persistently traumatized by the great economic depression of the 1930s that culminated in World War II. In order to avoid the same world economic crisis, the Anglo-American victorious powers tried as early as the Second World War to establish a new liberal world economic order through an international organization that was primarily supposed to dismantle trade and the associated trade barriers. They wanted to prevent a beggar-thy-neighbor policy through a liberal world trade system. The World Bank , the International Monetary Fund and a draft for an International Trade Organization ( ITO ) emerged from the first round of negotiations (Bretton Woods) .

While the Second World War was raging in Europe, the first talks about the future ITO took place in 1941 in a small group of US government officials and economic experts. They wanted to establish a liberal world trading system. Further negotiations followed in autumn 1945, a few months after the fall of Germany and Japan. As a result of these negotiations, the US Department of State published the document Proposals for Consideration by an International Conference on Trade and Employment , which convened a UN conference to negotiate a new trade charter.

In February 1946, the United Nation Economic and Social Council convened a first-ever 18-member conference to lay the foundations for trade and economy. The members were representatives from all regions of the world. In the months that followed, the USA, Canada and England reworked the Proposals for Consideration by an International Conference on Trade and Employment into a detailed draft charter , which was used as the basis for discussion of the upcoming negotiations (October-November 1946) for the preparatory committee in the Church House, in London served.

From April to October 1947 the preparatory committee held a second meeting in the Palais des Nations (Geneva). It was divided into various small commissions to prepare the draft trade charter for the subsequent Havana Conference (November 1947) and negotiated with the most important countries about specific tariff and tariff reductions, which led to the tariff schedules for the participating countries. Both the draft trade charter and the tariff schedules made up the GATT.

At the Havana Conference in November 1947, the Havana World Trade Charter was signed by 45 UN countries. Other rounds of negotiations followed, in which several thousand tariff cuts were negotiated. In 1949 the round in Annecy (France) followed with 5000 tariff concessions and in 1950 the third round in Torquay (England). In the early 1950s, the US government announced in the fifth round that it would not ratify the Havana Charter before the US Congress. The WTO describes the relationship on its website as follows:

“Although the ITO Charter was finally agreed at a UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana in March 1948, ratification in some national legislatures proved impossible. The most serious opposition was in the US Congress, even though the US government had been one of the driving forces. In 1950, the United States government announced that it would not seek Congressional ratification of the Havana Charter, and the ITO was effectively dead. "

The Havana Charter was never ratified by the US Congress, which is why the "ITO" project was buried and world trade continued to be determined by the GATT until 1995.

Difference between ITO and GATT

The original drive for the International Trade Organization was ambitious. It should be about much more than just trading. On the current website of the World Trade Organization (WTO) the agenda is summarized as follows: “ It extended beyond world trade disciplines, to include rules on employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices, international investments and services.

In the course of the creation process of the ITO, the draft trade charter was negotiated, which is part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and contained the following: traditional provisions , as well as valuation for duty, national treatment on internal taxation, and regulation, quantitative restrictions, subsidies, antidumping, countervailing duties, state trading.

However, the draft trade charter did not contain any provisions on employment, investment, restrictive business practices, commodity agreements or organizational provision to the ITO. The original ambitions of the ITO were therefore much more progressive than those of the GATT. In the future, the ITO should not only contain provisions on trade, but also provisions e.g. B. to create new jobs. As an organizational form, the GATT was not an international organization until the founding of the WTO on January 1, 1995, but only a multilateral trade agreement.

aftermath

The potential for conflict - an imbalance in the distribution of power within the WTO - that has been latent since the WTO was founded can be seen as a consequence of the failure of the ITO. Structural problems of the WTO have been coming to light since the 1980s, before the WTO came into force in 1995.

In September 2003, another development round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) took place in Cancún (Mexico). For the first time in the history of the WTO, however, the developing countries allied to challenge the major trading powers. Around 70 developing countries reaffirmed their categorical resistance to the demand from the industrialized countries to start negotiations on the "Singapore issues", which include investments, competition policy, public procurement and trade facilitation, which is why these negotiations failed. They accused the industrialized countries of failing to implement the commitments made in the development round in Doha (Qatar) and of merely pursuing their particular interests. They would have benefited to a large extent from the opening of the markets of the south, which was enforced by the International Monetary Found (IMF for short) and the World Bank.

literature

  • Brockhaus: Contemporary History. From the eve of the First World War to the present . F. A Brockhaus, Leipzig 2003.
  • Alexander Cairncross: A British perspective on Bretton Woods . In: Kirshner, Orin (Ed.): The Bretton Woods-GATT System. Restrospect and Prospect after fifty years . ME Sharpe, London UK 1996.
  • William Diebold Jr .: From the GATT to ITO- and back . In: Kirshner, Orin (Ed.): The Bretton Woods-GATT System. Restrospect and Prospect after fifty years . ME Sharpe, London UK 1996.
  • Mangus Maddison: The world economy in the 20th century, OECD, Development center studies, Paris 1989.
  • Meyer's little encyclopedia of history . Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG, Mannheim 1987.
  • Simon Reisman: The birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GATT . In: Kirshner, Orin (Ed.): The Bretton Woods-GATT System. Restrospect and Prospect after fifty years . ME Sharpe, London UK 1996.
  • Volker Rittberger: International Organizations - Politics and History. European and worldwide intergovernmental associations . In: Ulrich von Aleman (ed.): Basic knowledge of politics . Volume 10. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1994.
  • Raymond Vernon: The US Government at the Bretton Woods and after . In: Kirshner, Orin (Ed.): The Bretton Woods-GATT System. Restrospect and Prospect after fifty years . ME Sharpe, London UK 1996.
  • J. Whalley: World Trade Organization . In: Neil J. Smelser , Paul B. Baltes , Editor (s) -in-Chief: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences . Elsevier Science, Oxford UK 2001.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Alexander Cairncross : A British perspective on Bretton Woods . P. 70.
  2. Brockhaus 2003. pp. 359f.
  3. ^ Raymond Vernon : The US Government at the Bretton Woods and after , p. 60.
  4. ^ Simon Reisman: The birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GATT , p. 82.
  5. ^ Simon Reisman: The birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GATT , p. 83.
  6. ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wto.org
  7. wto.org
  8. ^ A b Simon Reisman: The birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GATT . P. 85.