TY - JOUR
AU1 - Clavin,, Patricia
AU2 - Dungy,, Madeleine
AB - World War One fundamentally transformed the constitutive elements of global order—states, markets, and civil society.1 The relationship of trade regimes to the political order in the aftermath of the war is one of the most understudied of these transformations. Before 1914, the world economy was underpinned by a network of bilateral trade treaties that provided reciprocal guarantees of non-discrimination through most-favored-nations (MFN) clauses. Such MFN clauses were intended to ensure that no single trade partner was ever treated as the “most favored nation,” privileged above others. During the war, the massive expansion in state economic authority and upsurge in protectionism undermined these pre-war treaties. The accompanying disintegration of Central and Eastern European empires, leading to new nation states with their own economic ambitions, further complicated the postwar task of re-building a viable international economy. In 1919, U.S. and British peacemakers sought to break with nineteenth-century notions that the European continent could be pacified by a “balance of power”; they believed the search for balance had led to a destructive race for advantage. At the Paris peace negotiations, U.S. and British officials in charge of setting the trade terms attempted to establish multilateral, procedural rules on which stable and legitimate cooperation would depend.2 Ultimately, though, the competing regional and imperial trade ambitions of the United States and Britain prevented them from devising a coherent program for positive international trade cooperation, one robust enough to constrain the protectionist impulses of both victors and vanquished. Notably, they failed to address Germany’s regional role; after 1871 the newly unified state had become the nucleus of a pre-war system of European trade agreements. Germany may have ended World War One with greatly diminished diplomatic influence, but it retained strong economic muscle.3 The 1919 peace terms produced a stark and novel tension in international trade law. U.S. and British peacemakers remained wedded to the nineteenth-century MFN practice but juxtaposed, on the one hand, a vague norm of universal non-discrimination with, on the other, one-sided economic obligations imposed on the defeated powers. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had included a general commitment to “equality of trade conditions” realized later as a pledge in Article 23 (e) of the League Covenant “to secure and maintain equitable treatment for the commerce of all Members of the League.”4 In the face of these declarations about equitable trade, though, the peace treaties required the defeated countries to grant the victors MFN status without reciprocity. This new and lopsided application of standard international economic law resulted from the ambivalent embrace of free trade by Britain and the United States. Both states declared their support of the ideal of equity embodied in the MFN clause, while giving themselves legal latitude to pursue regional and imperial trade preferences as national security projects. The 1919 negotiations sharpened tensions over regional and imperial economic solidarity. Put into practice as part of League trade law, these conflicts remained central to Anglo-American relations until the mid-twentieth century. Contradictory impulses around trade—liberalizing and protectionist—also help explain the transformation of empires in the period. Fatefully for the future prospects of peace, trade policy and law determined Austrian and German actions as they sought to regain their former commercial influence in Central and Eastern Europe.5 Although trade was the only economic issue explicitly addressed in Wilson’s Fourteen Points and in the Covenant of the League of Nations, it has received relatively little attention from historians. There has been important work on international political economy during and after the war, centered primarily on finance—on reparations, war debts, and the gold standard.6 A few more specialized studies include a substantive discussion of the trade terms of the peace but are limited to the timeframe of the war and the peace conference.7 Scholarship on the peace treaties places a strong emphasis on reparations and generally evaluates the settlement—positively or negatively—as discrete sets of claims, obligations, and constraints.8 More generally, the precedence given to the financial history of the period reflects the fact that sovereign debt affected currency stability, economic prosperity, and political prospects more directly and dramatically than trade protectionism. Nevertheless, trade policy impeded markets, poisoned politics, and exercised important influence over the legal architecture of the world economy. We analyze the MFN clauses of the peace treaties as an intervention in a wider regime of international trade law that predated the 1919 peace settlement, and that subsequently underpinned the work of the League of Nations and successor organizations after 1945. MFN had become the cornerstone of the trade treaty system after 1860 and was enmeshed in the power politics of the period.9 The process began with the hallmark Cobden-Chevalier Treaty signed between Britain and France in 1860, which was followed by roughly fifty further European treaties.10 These treaties were linked together through unconditional MFN clauses, whose use Britain helped generalize. The clause guaranteed treaty partners all tariff concessions and regulatory advantages afforded to third parties. It encouraged trade negotiations by signaling that any treaty could not be undercut by a future agreement granting better concessions to other partners. MFN also became the universal baseline against which Britain and the United States defined regional and imperial preferences. After the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 Britain had become a famously free-trading state. It refrained from protective tariffs, even as other European governments introduced them following the global economic crisis of the 1870s. Crucially, although Britain applied a uniform free-trade policy to all non-imperial partners, it did demand special allowances for imperial trade. Britain’s self-governing colonies—soon to become Dominions—used their commercial autonomy to introduce protective tariffs and began to grant Britain preferential reductions on those duties starting in 1897. This practice, known as “imperial preference,” was deeply contentious in international and British domestic politics. It signaled the colonies’ growing agency and expectations of the British state. The London government could not reciprocate the tariff preferences extended by its colonial partners because it did not have any tariffs on the staple commodities of imperial trade. Nor was it keen to introduce them, as tariffs were strongly associated with higher food prices thanks to the Corn Law debates. Nevertheless, Britain defended the Dominions’ imperial preferences, arguing that they lay beyond the scope of foreign governments’ MFN entitlements.11 We show how, although Britain did not adopt a comprehensive system of imperial preference until the Great Depression, legal provision for it emerged in both British and international trade law in 1919. While Britain carved out an imperial exemption in an otherwise uniform free-trade policy, the United States used a “conditional” interpretation of the MFN principle to develop idiosyncratic trade relations with all partners. “Conditional” MFN meant that the United States only transferred treaty concessions from one trading partner to another if it secured equivalent advantages from both. Thus, the United States claimed only a portion of European MFN trading concessions, offering each contracting government advantages commensurate to its specific sacrifices. It used the same practice to develop privileged trading relationships across the Americas and the Pacific. By recovering how MFN was inscribed in the legal architecture of the Paris peace settlement, we reveal how this legal norm imported power-political rivalries from the nineteenth century and World War One into the global order framed by the League of Nations. When it opened its doors, the League became the world’s first public international organization to be granted oversight of international trade relations. The trade terms of 1919 were understood by all parties as transitional placeholders, and functioned as such. The League went on to elaborate the content of Article 23 (e) through a series of commissions, conferences, and treaties with lasting consequences for global norms.12 Moving trade policy to Geneva opened important new multilateral channels that profoundly influenced more conventional bilateral trade treaties. It is important not to project the League’s end onto its beginning.13 Its development of new law, practices, and institutions did not strip politics from legal norms. Rather, the League’s work affirmed the centrality of trade law as a focus for competing geopolitical claims as states and empires sought to make themselves secure. It made MFN a core principle of international trade policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1947, it was the basis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and its 1995 successor, the World Trade Organization.14 Competing Visions of Free Trade World War One prompted states to become more involved in economic management than ever before, and it necessitated and legitimized trade protection on an unprecedented scale.15 After 1914, national frontiers were expressed in strongly militarized terms, and states developed ever-more sophisticated bureaucratic practices to control the movement of people and goods. In particular, the war produced heightened awareness as to the importance of commodities, notably food and particular types of materials needed for armaments’ production. The trend was underlined by the importance of the blockade to the Allies’—particularly the British—prosecution of war against the Central Powers. In order to impede the Central Powers’ access to Allied and neutral economic resources, Britain orchestrated widespread intervention into the practice of international trade. The British navy enforced the blockade at sea, and neutralized Germany in ways that provoked it to deploy submarines, with catastrophic consequences for war aims and empire. But the real efficacy of the blockade was rooted in British political, bureaucratic, and intelligence operations. Britain negotiated with neutral states to convince them not to trade with the Central Powers. Thousands of clerks and statisticians in the Foreign Office compiled lists of goods it designated as “contraband” based on principles of international law. They covertly monitored commodity trade in the world’s port cities, and where possible, prevented it. When naval muscle, and diplomatic suasion failed, Britain used its financial fire-power to buy up stocks of goods on the open market to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.16 If the relationship between states and markets had changed with important implications for global order by 1919, so, too, had relations with society. World War One forced states across Europe to demand new sacrifices from, and to expand social protections and political rights of, their citizens or subjects. As a result, public expectations shifted in ways that would define trade policy in the twentieth century: states now held direct responsibility for maintaining a continuing level of economic activity, and political legitimacy increasingly depended on the ability to manage the domestic economy to the collective advantage of the electorate. Yet most states and democratic political parties had yet to appreciate fully how the war had altered their relations with markets and society, and how those changes would shape trade relations. The Anglo-American view that market forces would heal war-battered economies prompted most countries to adopt trade policies guided by minimalist principles of non-discrimination.17 Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Covenant of the League of Nations kept references to economics deliberately vague. Point III of the Fourteen Points called for “the removal as far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all nations consenting to the peace.”18 Similarly, Article 23(e) of the Covenant of the League of Nations expressed the organization’s responsibility “to secure and maintain equitable treatment for the commerce of all Members.”19 At the same time, the peace treaties imposed more far-reaching demands on the defeated powers; most notably a unilateral obligation to grant the Allied and Associated States MFN treatment for five years after the war. The outcome was a tension deep in the heart of the 1919 settlement: a weak, general commitment to non-discrimination in the League Covenant, combined with strong measures of discrimination enacted on the defeated powers. The formula was the imperfect resolution of a conflict between Wilsonian principles of equal and open diplomacy, and continued Allied determination to use economic tools to support their national and imperial security. The tension can be traced back to an economic conference held by the Allies in Paris in June 1916.20 The conference was in session during the Allies’ second major offensive on the Somme, characterized by an unprecedented level of heavy bombardment. This massive deployment of industrial resources underlined the intention of Allied policies for the Paris Economic Conference: harmonizing wartime blockade and boycott procedures to reduce reliance on Germany and Austria-Hungary for strategically important raw materials in the future. The tools of war were thereby refashioned as instruments of peace. At the 1916 conference, the Allies concluded an “Economic Pact” that aimed to de-couple strategic branches of production from German and Austro-Hungarian suppliers. Its centerpiece was a British proposal that the Allies withhold MFN treatment from the Central Powers after the war in order to shelter strategic industries from German competition.21 This measure institutionalized the British intention to safeguard “key industries.” Early in the war Britain experienced critical shortages of dyes, smelted zinc, optical and chemical glass, and synthetic drugs, all previously supplied from its most important non-imperial trade partner: Germany.22 During the war, the British government developed domestic supplies of these strategic materials, and determined to protect these fledgling industries.23 The Paris Economic Pact differed markedly from the trade provisions of the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, whereby France and Germany had guaranteed one another MFN status.24 In 1916, in contrast, the Allies signaled their intention to force the Central Powers to adhere to norms of free trade in any future peace settlement without accepting reciprocal obligations themselves. The French justified the deviation from the precedent set by the Treaty of Frankfurt on the grounds that its reciprocal MFN provisions had disproportionately benefitted Germany as the stronger exporter; British leaders endorsed this view.25 They later transferred this approach to the peace negotiations. In 1919, although Britain and France both wanted to withhold MFN status from the Central Powers after the war, they disagreed fundamentally about treaty policy and the global trade order it encompassed. The wartime French Minister of Commerce, Étienne Clémentel, had sweeping ambitions to modernize French production and reorganize the world economy along corporatist lines, a vision he later pursued in conjunction with the League of Nations as the founding director of the International Chamber of Commerce. In 1916, Clémentel tried to use the Paris Economic Conference to subject international markets to more systematic planning, calling upon the Allies to pool their raw materials after the war to support reconstruction and defense strategies against Germany. The Paris Economic Pact contained some non-binding resolutions along these lines, but Clémentel wanted to convert these into a firm legal commitment. MFN again was the tool: he led France to denounce all its commercial treaties that included it. Clémentel then invited Britain and its other Allies to follow suit in a mass denunciation of MFN treaties that would offer them maximum latitude to trade raw materials on a preferential basis.26 Some British leaders welcomed France’s suggestion, notably Edward Carson, the First Lord of the Admiralty.27 In contrast, the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade strongly opposed the French proposal. They considered MFN treaties to be an essential safeguard against regionalism in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, which threatened a centrifugal pull on the integrity of the British Empire.28 Their view ultimately prevailed: in 1918 France denounced all trade treaties containing the MFN clause; Britain did not.29 Following its failure to secure inter-Allied coordination of trade treaties, France shifted focus from trade law to securing raw materials, industrial assets, and reparations during the peace negotiations. While Britain and France adopted divergent treaty policies, both signaled a new willingness to impose protection on the grounds of “security.”30 A crucial step for Britain was the Safeguarding of British Industries Act of 1921.31 It introduced a five-year duty of 33.3% on goods regarded as essential to British success in the Great War. It also levied duties on imports sold below the cost of production, a phenomenon known as “dumping” which continued throughout the 1920s. Security concerns impinged on U.S. foreign economic policy, too. Disputes about maritime rights were a running sore in Anglo-American relations. While neutral, the United States defended its right to “freedom of the seas” as essential to its commercial interests in the face of Britain’s naval operations to blockade Germany and to monitor neutral trade via contraband control. Wilson had strongly opposed these practices, which proved hugely disruptive to U.S. trading interests already hit by the conflict. Yet, following its declaration of war in April 1917, the United States adopted aggressive methods of economic warfare, confiscating German ships, industrial assets, and patents, and pursuing German export markets cut off by the blockade.32 While at war, Wilson did not object in principle to discriminating against German suppliers in order to promote the development of industrial resources at home and markets abroad, but he continued to fear the wider implications of the Paris Economic Pact for the post-war order. The Paris Pact threatened to subdivide European and global markets in ways that could hobble the peace.33 In early 1917, Wilson defined as one of four fundamental “bases of peace” a “mutual agreement not to take part in any joint economic action by two or more nations which would in effect constitute an effort to throttle the industrial life of any nation or shut it off from fair and equal opportunities of trade with the nations thus in concert or with the rest of the world.”34 The President’s articulation was intended to shape the world, but not to constrain U.S. regional or colonial influence. He saw U.S. power as a force for international peace, in contrast to divisive European imperialism.35 Wilson later expressed this position more fully by demanding explicit confirmation that the League Covenant would not conflict with the U.S. Monroe Doctrine.36 Wilson’s suspicion of European protectionism left a legal footprint. In April 1917, just before the United States joined the war, Wilson appointed a bipartisan Tariff Commission with the “power to investigate the Paris Economy Pact and similar organizations and arrangements in Europe.”37 As chairman of the commission, he appointed Frank Taussig, a Harvard economist and well-known advocate of U.S. international engagement.38 Shortly after his inauguration, Wilson had pushed through a major tariff cut but was initially reluctant to relinquish the United States’ historical commitment to preferential trade relations based on a “conditional” interpretation of MFN. It was the war which accelerated his move to endorse universal principles of non-discrimination.39 Scholars have offered varying assessments of Wilson’s trade policy. Some present him as a zealous advocate of open markets, emphasizing his ties to the young Cordell Hull, the “Tennessee Cobden.”40 Others argue that Wilson was often indifferent to economics and considered concrete policies only when they intersected with his core political objectives.41 Elements of both characterizations can be seen in the ambivalent trade terms of the peace settlement. The Paris treaties included a vague commitment to universal commercial equity that rested alongside established tools of bilateral preference that left the U.S. government wide latitude to discriminate when pursuing its national and regional priorities. Since its founding, the United States had used its “conditional” interpretation of MFN to cultivate regional economic ties on a preferential basis. In 1917, the Tariff Commission argued that it was time for a change. It advanced a bold claim that put trade liberalization at the heart of U.S. global leadership: “An opportunist attitude was natural so long as the United States kept aloof from foreign complications and was intent upon avoiding them.” The war had however, “completely altered” the international role of the United States, as the country “has become committed to far-reaching participation in world politics.” Now, U.S. policy was required to “consider the world at large” and “shape its commercial policy in conformity with the political and humanitarian principles which govern[ed] its general attitude in the international sphere.”42 The Tariff Commission did not propose that the U.S. government formally abandon conditional MFN, fearing a Congressional backlash. Instead, it recommended that the “guiding principle” of U.S. trade policy should be “equality of treatment,” a functional substitute for unconditional MFN that would give U.S. leaders room to gradually advance new norms on sensitive issues such as access to colonial markets.43 The principle of “equality of treatment” was included in Point III of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, offering a starkly contrasting economic vision to that outlined by the Allies in Paris in 1916.44 In his path-breaking study of the politics of trade published thirty years later, the political scientist Albert Hirschman described the Paris Pact and the Fourteen Points as “twin conflicting fountainheads” of the post-World War One order.45 The inconsistency between them was resolved in 1919 through an inversion of the 1916 Paris Economic Pact. This inversion has been missed by most historians—including Georges-Henri Soutou, the most widely-cited authority on the 1916 Paris Economic Pact—but we show that it had great political significance.46 In 1916, the Allies agreed to withhold MFN treatment from the Central Powers. In contrast, the 1919 peace treaties imposed an obligation on the defeated states to grant the Allied and Associated Powers MFN status. The Allied and Associated Powers could choose to reciprocate this obligation (as the United States did in 1923), but they would not have to. Hirschman observed that “the silence concerning the commercial policy of the Allies” eliminated the “open contradiction” between the discriminatory Paris Economic Pact and Wilson’s commitment to equality of trade conditions. It gave the war’s victors the freedom to pursue either policy voluntarily.47 The formulation of the MFN principle in the peace treaties was much more detailed than in 1916. The Paris Economic Pact contained one sentence committing the Allies not to grant the Central Powers MFN status; the 1919 peace treaties included four lengthy articles that safeguarded MFN by proscribing different forms of discrimination.48 The peace treaties stipulated that the tariff burden on imports and exports of Allied and Associated States could not be more onerous than that imposed on goods going to, or coming from, any other country. Nor could trade be subject to any discriminatory procedural or regulatory practices. Finally, the treaties required that any legal advantage granted to one Allied or Associated State be automatically extended to all the others.49 These clauses were standard across all of the peace treaties and formed the legal foundation for a range of other trade provisions covering shipping, indications of origin, and the legal treatment of foreign firms. The Paris peace treaties addressed financial and trade policy separately, although they were closely linked. During the 1920s, the gold standard, a fixed monetary regime, was gradually introduced with the support of extensive international loans, which had to be repaid with foreign revenue from trade. Further clouding these complex relationships was the poisonous political fall-out of negotiations over war debts and reparations. This left European debtor powers desperate to earn dollars by exporting to the U.S. market, which remained highly protected despite Wilson’s moves towards freer trade.50 In the later stage of his presidency, Wilson faced increasingly strong protectionist headwinds. Pro-tariff Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in the midterm election of November 1918, marking the ascent of a protectionist current that would continue through successive Republican administrations of the 1920s. In the run-up to the election, Wilson dropped the demand for the “removal” of “economic barriers” included in his original Fourteen Points. Yet he clung to the principle of “equality of treatment,” assuring congressional leaders that this would not impede national governments’ sovereign authority to impose trade restrictions, so long as they applied equally to all partners.51 In January 1919, Wilson instructed U.S. and British legal advisers David Hunter Miller and Robert Cecil to write a draft of the League Covenant to form the basis for negotiations. Wilson himself led the negotiations and ensured that the U.S.-British draft underwent minimal modifications. Indeed, when preparing the draft of the League Covenant that served as a basis for negotiations at the peace conference, both British and U.S. leaders initially considered applying many of the commercial obligations imposed on the defeated powers also to the victors, through a supplementary Convention on Equality of Trade Conditions.52 It would have included general principles of non-discrimination as well as provisions relating to transit rights, intellectual property, and other regulatory questions. This Anglo-American approach would have brought greater equality in legal trade terms for victors and vanquished powers. Yet, ultimately, the British and U.S. delegations decided to condense these more elaborate proposals into one short clause concerning “equitable treatment” of trade. It became Article 23 (e) of the Covenant. Anglo-American conflict over empire and the making of multilateralism Anglo-American disputes over imperial preference were the primary factor that impeded a more comprehensive and even-handed approach to trade at the Peace Conference, according to David Hunter Miller, the U.S. legal adviser responsible for writing the Covenant.53 As we show, this unresolved conflict subsequently framed expectations of multilateral policy coordination in the new League of Nations. The war had rekindled debate about imperial preference in Britain by demonstrating the strategic importance of the Empire’s economic and political cohesion. This led to the creation of an Imperial War Cabinet in 1917 that included leaders from India and the Dominions.54 But proposals to introduce a reciprocal imperial preference mechanism that would enshrine imperial solidarity in trade law remained divisive because this measure would require Britain to introduce protective duties on food. In 1917, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George offered a rhetorical endorsement of imperial preference in the name of colonial unity. He refused, however, to introduce these “food taxes,” fearing further public discontent over food costs, up by more than two hundred percent since 1914. Dominion leaders largely accepted that war was not a propitious moment to introduce UK tariff preferences on agricultural staples, but wanted to ensure that the future peace settlement would not introduce legal obstacles permanently precluding this policy.55 Within the Imperial War Cabinet, Wilson’s commitment to “equality of trade conditions” was singled out as a new, key obstacle to the future evolution of imperial preference. William Morris Hughes, the Welsh-born Australian Prime Minister, who arrived in Britain in March 1916, was outspoken on this issue. He argued that Wilson’s Point III threated the Dominions’ rights to self-government: “it affected their rights to make commercial treaties; and it shut the door on differential tariffs and, perhaps, even on preferential trade within the Empire.”56 Hughes attracted widespread public attention for his fire-eating, patriotic speeches, and saw the relationship between economic and military questions as vital.57 He strongly supported negative restrictions on German commercial sovereignty but was critical of plans for positive, inter-Allied cooperation.58 When he came to Britain in June 1918, also attending the Paris Peace Conference, Hughes fiercely attacked the British government, which “had declared war without consulting the Dominions, and now they were settling the peace terms equally without referring to them.”59 He was influential in securing separate recognition of the Dominions as signatories to the peace treaties, and their separate membership in the League of Nations. Hughes was particularly alarmed by a proposal from Britain’s Board of Trade for the “translation of President Wilson’s ‘third point’” into the above-mentioned Convention on Equality of Trade Conditions.60 He pressed the Foreign Office to draft the convention in such a way as to safeguard the space for imperial preference, should the British government agree to it at some point in the future.61 His intervention determined Britain’s approach to Article 23 (e), which resisted the United States’ broader formulation of equality in trade conditions hostile to imperial preference. As a result, the legal space for imperial preference was built into the Covenant of the League of Nations over a decade before the British definitively embraced it at the Ottawa Imperial Conference of 1932.62 In the 1920s Britain took only hesitant steps in the direction of imperial preference by introducing special reductions for empire trade in existing revenue tariffs. For example, the Safeguarding of Industries Act of 1921 exempted imperial trade from new tariffs protecting strategic industries.63 These preferences had a negligible impact because they did not cover staple commodities that made up the vast majority of empire trade.64 Despite the limited immediate consequences of these war-induced changes in British trade policy on the ground, their practical and legal thrust aroused considerable concern among U.S. advisors. “The Inquiry,” the brain trust established in 1917 by Wilson to prepare the peace settlement, focused its analysis of trade policy on “economic penetration” by “great powers” in less developed regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, both colonial and independent. The members of the Inquiry saw British imperial preference as a geo-political threat because it gave legal sanction to wider “zones of influence” based on privileged relations with one “great power.”65 Members of the Inquiry thereby identified a core challenge that would confront policy-makers after 1918: how to address the issue of “economic penetration.” The economist Allyn Abbott Young initially wanted the United States to sponsor a universal MFN pact, prohibiting preferences in the British Dominions and imposing an “open door” in all colonies without tariff autonomy.66 Others considered this formula untenable, including Taussig.67 He argued that the U.S. Congress would be unwilling to abandon its preferential arrangement with the Philippines and “overtly” embrace the European conception of MFN.68 The conflict between Young and Taussig over imperial preference was tied to divergent conceptions of global order, and Germany’s position in it. At issue was Germany’s role in the pre-war system of trade treaties. The last major round of European trade negotiations before World War One was led by the German Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow. In 1902 he pre-emptively passed a steep tariff increase as an opening bid for treaty negotiations to lower it. Many of Germany’s trading partners responded by also introducing higher “fighting tariffs” as a basis for negotiation. These tariffs were partially reduced through a series of treaties signed with Germany, but not enough to cancel out the initial “fighting” rates.69 While econometric studies suggest that Germany’s deals did not increase effective levels of European tariff protection, Bülow’s policies resulted in an overall increase in nominal tariff rates across Europe, which government officials and traders fixated on.70 Although Taussig favored low tariffs, he saw such competitive bargaining as an essential feature of the international trade system.71 Taussig argued the U.S. government should arm itself with “bargaining tariffs,” for “we wish a fair field, an honorable rivalry.”72 In contrast, Young disapproved of “bargaining tariffs” in principle. He believed Bülow had used MFN irresponsibly, thereby undermining international stability, and endorsed Allied plans to hamstring Germany’s bargaining capacity after 1918. Young asserted, “Germany is perhaps primarily responsible for the origin and development of the present European system of discriminatory tariffs … if Germany is bound for the present to the observance of the principle of equality and uniformity, it is likely in the long run to have a wholesome effect upon other European tariff systems.” Thus, for Young the unilateral MFN obligations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles were “in accordance with the President’s principle of ‘equality of trade conditions.’”73 Wilson also subscribed to this assessment. His intention behind the “equality of trade conditions” was that “old arrangements of retaliatory tariffs and discriminatory tariffs should be done away with.”74 Taussig and Young may have disagreed about trade policy, but they both believed it should become the subject of ongoing multilateral policy coordination within the League of Nations. Indeed, the move to perpetual “conference” in the League made sense precisely because they disagreed. Both men favored the creation of an “International Commercial Commission” that would formulate and adjudicate new international norms.75 The main British trade official at the peace conference, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, similarly advocated further negotiations after the ratification of the peace treaties in order to decide how to implement “equality of trade conditions.”76 In sum, Article 23 (e) served as a legal marker to enable the League of Nations to revisit trade debates initiated during the peace negotiations. The Move to the League When the U.S. Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles, Britain stepped into the leadership role on trade. The United States remained aloof from tariff discussions in Geneva until the World Economic Conference of 1927. Within the League, Llewellyn Smith became a key member of the Economic Committee, its trade body.77 He took the lead in defining its agenda as the chairman of a standing sub-committee empowered to determine “the meaning and scope” of Article 23 (e). In this role, Llewellyn Smith steered the Economic Committee away from core disputes over protectionism and towards incremental regulatory standardization.78 Avoiding tariff policy kept British imperial preference out of the international spotlight in the early 1920s. The fledgling League’s limited authority also justified a cautious approach to trade. The global recession in 1920–1921 and monetary instability across Europe made it difficult to establish a stable basis from which to regulate tariff policy. Many governments used trade barriers to raise revenues and conserve scarce foreign exchange, also introducing flexible “anti-dumping” tariffs to compensate for price advantages from countries in Central and Eastern Europe with rapidly devaluing currencies.79 These patterns were aggravated by conflict over reparations, which fueled runaway hyperinflation in Germany. Thus, currency stabilization and reparations detente were essential prerequisites for tariff cooperation. In 1924–1926, these conditions were met, at least provisionally, through the Dawes Reparations Settlement and through a series of currency-stabilization loans in Austria, Hungary, Greece, and Bulgaria, supported by the League Financial Committee.80 Although it operated within narrow constraints in its early years, the Economic Committee nevertheless made crucial innovations in multilateral practice. Meeting two to three times each year, it provided a new platform for sustained policy dialogue between governments, business organizations, and experts. The League promoted multi-party treaties standardizing customs procedures, commercial arbitration, and intellectual property rights. It conducted studies on a range of other questions including raw materials, bills of exchange, and the legal rights of foreign commercial agents.81 As this multilateral practice expanded to encompass core tariff policy in the late 1920s, it provoked renewed debate about the MFN principle and about allowable exemptions for regional and imperial preferences. The Economic Committee moved to address tariff policy only after Germany joined the League in 1926, following the de-escalation of Franco-German conflict through the Dawes Settlement and the 1925 Locarno Treaties.82 Across the Atlantic, the United States signaled its commitment to German reintegration and stabilization by signing its very first unconditional MFN treaty with Germany in December 1923.83 Through this act, the United States marked its acceptance of unconditional MFN and its full participation in the international trade treaty system. With Herbert Hoover indomitable, first as Secretary of Commerce and then President, successive Republican administrations combined tariff protection with international engagement, concluding twenty-two new trade treaties with unconditional MFN at their heart from 1923 to 1929.84 In 1925, the French industrialist-statesman Louis Loucheur responded to Germany’s return to the world stage by calling for a League conference to establish new multilateral guardrails for German economic power. While Loucheur mainly hoped to pursue industrial cooperation through cartels, Llewellyn Smith worked with a broad coalition of League collaborators to refocus the conference on trade liberalization.85 What became the first World Economic Conference offered an opportunity to re-engage the United States in League trade debates. The United States sent a delegation to the conference and thereafter took up a permanent seat on the League’s Economic Committee. With U.S. support, the gathering issued a strong endorsement of unconditional MFN.86 It recommended the “widest and most liberal interpretation” of MFN as the foundation for a “system of long-term commercial treaties,” and empowered the League to codify that system. At the same time, the conference authorized the League to promote tariff reduction through multilateral “collective action” without specifying how the new multilateral structures created would relate to existing treaty commitments.87 The Economic Committee spent two years debating the 1927 MFN directives. This process exposed bilateral treaty practice to novel multilateral scrutiny and established the League as the central arbiter of MFN norms. Richard Riedl, an Austrian trade expert tied to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), worked with the League Secretariat to produce a survey of MFN treaties exceeding one hundred and fifty pages.88 The central question for Riedl, and for the League, was whether trade preferences granted through League-sponsored multilateral agreements should be exempt from outside parties’ MFN claims.89 Many League collaborators argued that without such an exemption, states would simply free-ride on others’ multilateral commitments. A non-participating state would be able to claim the benefits of a multilateral agreement without accepting its burdens by invoking a bilateral MFN treaty with any one of the participants. Consequently, Arthur Salter, the League’s most senior economic official, concluded that “the application of the [MFN] clause in its fullest sense and without any exception whatever, cuts away the very basis on which multilateral conventions are negotiated.” At the same time, Salter did not want to jettison MFN, which he considered an important weapon against tariff discrimination.90 Salter endorsed the cautious line taken by the political appointees in the Economic Committee. They allowed that “plurilateral conventions of a general character and aiming at the improvement of economic relations between peoples” could be exempt from bilateral MFN claims.91 Salter supported this view, diverging from London’s position. British trade officials stridently opposed a MFN exemption for multilateral agreements as a blank check that would undermine the international treaty system, while they simultaneously defended imperial preference on the grounds that it did not concern “foreign” trade.92 Several European states, including Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland began to insert an explicit exemption for multilateral conventions into their bilateral MFN treaties, using the Economic Committee’s formula.93 Notably, Britain and the United States did not.94 As the world’s leading trading powers, their refusal carried great weight. Few states were willing to jeopardize access to the British and U.S. markets by pursuing multilateral policies without their explicit consent.95 These issues may appear technical and legal. But they were actually a debate about forms of international solidarity that grew only more pressing in the face of economic downturn and rising political tensions at home and abroad after 1929. They were evident within the League when, that same year, Aristide Briand, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented the Assembly with a plan for European federation. This was an attempt to counter the rising global tide of protectionism, signaled by U.S. preparations for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The “Briand Plan” did not bear fruit but stimulated a flurry of analogous projects for sub-European groupings, including, most controversially, Austria and Germany. The question of regional unions in the League intersected with a growing movement in favor of British imperial preference, as advocates of European unity justified their demands for commercial solidarity by citing British imperial precedents.96 British supporters of imperial preference rejected comparisons to Briand’s federation of sovereign European states as an affront to the constitutional integrity of the Empire, while critics feared that League-sponsored regionalism would undermine their universalist arguments against imperial protectionism.97 In March 1931, debates about empire unity, European unity, and global order were blown wide open by a proposal for a customs union between Austria and Germany.98 This project used the tools of League-sanctioned trade law to address one of the most divisive questions in European security, the Austro-German relationship. Trade law was the vehicle for this scheme but not its primary motivation. As the front-page headline in The New York Times proclaimed, the proposal for an Austro-German customs union threatened “A Political Union of Teutons” that would stir “all Europe.”99 In the 1920s, Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria, was a politically mainstream idea in both countries, largely independent of the associations with National Socialism it would later develop.100 It surfaced with vigor in 1931, after the pot was stirred by proposals for a Danubian economic union, based on the exchange of grain surpluses from countries such as Hungary and Romania for Austrian manufactured goods. The proposal for a re-heated “Habsburg Empire” triggered alarm among advocates of pan-German unity in Austria and Germany. In response, the nationalist politicians now in charge of German foreign policy, made a more explicit eastward turn by demanding an Austro-German customs union.101 Anschluss was prohibited by the German and Austrian peace treaties and by a supplementary Protocol that accompanied a League-sponsored currency-stabilization loan to Austria in 1922.102 Yet, while the proposal for Austro-German customs union effectively challenged the territorial settlement of 1919, it was carefully articulated through League norms on international trade. A full customs union was proposed, in lieu of reciprocal tariff preferences, because customs unions were widely recognized as exempt from MFN claims, including by the League Economic Committee.103 Austrian and German leaders also attempted to conform to the 1922 Geneva Protocol that bound Austria not to give another state “exclusive economic advantages.”104 They insisted their customs union was not an exclusive bilateral project; rather, it was the basis for a broader multilateral organization open to all willing participants. Many contemporary observers took the Austro-German pledge to support League multilateralism at face value, especially as Austrians and Germans had been very active in League-led trade cooperation after 1926, when the two countries were given seats in the Economic Committee.105 Richard Riedl warmly supported the Austro-German customs union as a contribution to League multilateralism.106 The Austrian trade expert backed Austro-German rapprochement as part of a wider European union that would restore both countries’ pre-war regional commercial influence.107 His approach was originally conceived as a corrective to the 1919 peace settlement, in which, he alleged, the “ideals of freedom and self-determination of nations” led to the “commercial atomization of Central Europe and the suppression of German economic expansion to the benefit of England and America.”108 British imperial preference and U.S. regional preferences were key legal precedents for his plan to restore regional unity to Central Europe under German leadership in the 1920s.109 Riedl was not privy to the top-secret negotiations leading to the 1931 customs union, but his policy studies formed an essential part of its legal foundation.110 As a leading figure in German nationalist circles, he stridently defended the customs union plan after it was announced. More moderate economic leaders were also drawn to the legal case for an Austro-German trade bloc. They included the German Liberal Party politician and economist, Moritz Bonn, who was well-regarded in mainstream U.S. and British political circles. Bonn defended the Austro-German customs union at Chatham House in London, the equivalent of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.111 He identified British imperial preferences as a breach of MFN norms, which established a clear precedent for the Austro-German customs union: “The historical, geographical and national connection between Germany and Austria is much closer and older than the historical, geographical and national connections of the British Empire. Your historical connection with the Dominions is a thing of yesterday; our connection with Austria goes back to times of Magna Carta.”112 In the face of global depression, Bonn endorsed Anschluss as a practical necessity. Facing the critics, he argued that if the customs union threatened political union and challenged the 1919 peace settlement, it demonstrated a willingness to pursue treaty revision through League channels: “talk of revision was reasonable only on the assumption that one considered that the Treaty as it existed was binding.”113 His was a prescient observation. After 1933, the Nazi regime pursued a unilateral program of economic and political expansion to the East that flouted rather than revised League norms. Bonn, as a Jew, was forced to watch this process in exile first in Britain and then in the United States.114 The Austro-German customs union marked a watershed in the politicization of international law. Riedl and Bonn’s perspective on it demonstrate that the conflicts over regional and imperial geopolitics that characterized trade debates in Paris in 1919 lived on in the League. In 1931, the League’s Permanent Court of International Justice was asked to pronounce on whether an Austro-German customs union would conform to League treaties. Its judgment found against in a marginal verdict: eight to seven. The lengthy dissenting opinion insisted that in technical legal terms, the planned customs union was compliant with the countries’ treaty commitments. The majority opinion openly admitted that the negative decision was based primarily on extraneous political factors, namely a presumed future evolution towards full Anschluss.115 In short, the court condemned on political grounds a treaty project framed using principles of international trade law sanctioned by the League’s Economic Committee. The outcome confirmed the deep interpenetration of security and economics in the legal sinews of the League system. The economic and political fallout was explosive. It unnerved already fragile financial markets in Central Europe and impeded diplomatic cooperation to address the resulting banking crisis, contributing to a catastrophic cycle of political radicalization and economic collapse.116 The Austro-German customs union helped initiate a fragmentation of the international economy into competing blocs that challenged MFN norms. In 1932, Britain embraced a more comprehensive regime of imperial preference. It granted a reduction of around ten percent on new duties on primary goods that had been introduced in a General Tariff in February of the same year. This was part of a wider turn away from international and European engagement signaled by Britain’s unilateral decision to leave the gold standard in 1931 and establish an informal “sterling bloc.”117 At the same time, Germany began to construct a complicated system of bilateral currency and trade agreements to extend its commercial dominance in Europe. These moves are associated with Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933. But he stood on the shoulders of German nationalists in power after 1930. They had drafted plans to break off treaties with France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia that had served as anchors for Germany’s MFN commitments, and concluded preferential agreements with the Scandinavian dairy producers (Denmark and Finland). The Nazi government exploited and expanded upon these steps, charting an assertive new course for German trade policy. Over the course of the 1930s, it used preferential barter agreements that placed many of Germany’s neighbors in a position of deep economic dependence.118 This article shows that the legal clause of MFN served as a handmaiden for complex regional and imperial maneuvers during the war, the peace conference, and in the League of Nations. Domestic and international debates regarding British imperial preference peaked between 1928 and 1932, yet the legal foundations for this policy were laid in 1919. These legal provisions legitimated Austrian and German demands for regional trade deals that came to define the new global order that emerged after 1929. The Allied Economic Pact of 1916 categorized the Central Powers as a single economic unit to be defended against. The characterization underpinned the prohibition against Anschluss and unilateral constraints on Austrian and German commercial sovereignty in 1919. The Allies’ asymmetrical treatment persuaded Austrians and Germans to regard MFN as a tool of power politics benefiting large economic and political units such as the British Empire and the United States. In 1931, Austrian and German commentators across the political spectrum—Riedl a nationalist; Bonn a Liberal—used MFN to advocate for an Austro-German customs union within the League of Nations. The plan’s failure discredited League norms, opening a path for more radical political solutions to the crises facing Central Europe. International lawyers have long been attracted to law as a means to administer justice and thereby depoliticize disputes.119 We show how the politics of trade facilitated and shaped the development of law. Far from a solely depoliticizing tool, new trade law in 1919 in turn supported new forms of distinctly international conflict and cooperation. Contained by the League of Nations in the 1920s, it structured debates within, across, and between states. Throughout, politics remained and outcomes were contradictory. The real dangers for the League system came when the political will to address trade protection internationally dissipated, and law was abandoned in the 1930s. After 1945, unconditional MFN, codified and promoted by the League, opened a pathway to multilateral tariff reductions that eventually unlocked barriers to trade in the world economy. The principle is the cornerstone of the World Trade Organization and its institutional predecessor and legal foundation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But, as in 1919, the commitment to freeing trade was less full-throated than first appeared. In 1947, Article XXIV in the GATT also affirmed MFN as a key legal lever in geopolitics by including an exemption for “free trade areas.” In so doing, it drew on the MFN exemption for multilateral treaties defined by the League’s Economic Committee in 1929.120 Many commenters argue that the exemption for “free trade areas” is the Achilles heel of the WTO because its operation undermines the “unconditional” character of MFN.121 Today, the WTO recognizes 263 preferential agreements formed on the basis of Article XXIV.122 The proliferation of preferential trade agreements in recent decades puts states with mere MFN status at a strong disadvantage in the WTO. The problem has been highlighted recently in British negotiations with the EU in relation to “Brexit.” At the same time, tensions in United States-China relations over trade protection illustrate that the development of highly sophisticated multilateral trade institutions in recent decades has not purged trade law of its links to security politics. The pursuit of national interests through trade and the codification of trade law is built into the foundations of these international organizations. The question is whether it makes or breaks them. The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Leverhulme Trust. Footnotes 1 Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford, 2008). 2 G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 140–149. 3 AJP Taylor’s provocation “the first world war left the ‘German problem’ unsolved,” still holds. See AJP Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), 57; Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke, 2009), 2; Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921,” The Journal of Modern History 85, no. 2 (2013): 639–640; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (London, 2014), 274. 4 “The Covenant of the League of Nations,” The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School (hereafter Avalon Project), accessed April 2, 2018, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp. 5 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007); Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, 2011); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London, 2012); Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ed., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford, 2014); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2018); Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, ed., Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford, under contract). 6 Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1992); Albrecht Ritschl, Deutschlands Krise und Konjunktur 1924–1934: Binnenkonjunktur, Auslandsverschuldung und Reparationsproblem zwischen Dawes-Plan und Transfersperre (Berlin, 2002); Yann Decorzant, La Société des Nations et la naissance d’une conception de la regulation économique internationale (Brussels, 2011); Tooze, The Deluge; Barry Eichengreen, “Versailles: The Economic Legacy,” International Affairs 95, no. 1 (2019): 7–24. 7 Georges-Henri Soutou, L’or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris, 1989); Elisabeth Glaser, “The Making of the Economic Peace,” in The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, ed. Manfred F. Boemke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser (Cambridge, 1998), 371–400. 8 Norman Graebner and Edward Bennett, The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision (Cambridge, 2001); Michael Dockrill and John Fisher, ed., The Paris Peace Conference 1919: Peace without Victory? (Basingstoke, 2001); Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919–1923, 2nd edition (London, 2008); David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Hoboken, NJ, 2009); Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths.” 9 On the role of bilateral treaties in nineteenth-century international relations, see Edward Keene, “The Treaty-Making Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” The International History Review 34, no. 3 (2012): 475–500. 10 Hubert Llewellyn Smith, The Board of Trade (London, 1928), 63; There is debate about whether the bilateral treaty system of the nineteenth century actually increased overall volumes of trade. See Marc Flandreau and Olivier Accominotti, “Bilateral Treaties and the Most-Favored-Nation Clause: The Myth of Trade Liberalization in the Nineteenth Century,” World Politics 60, no. 2 (2008): 147–188. 11 In a striking unilateral move, Canada granted Britain one-sided imperial preference in 1897, and thereby kicked a hornet’s nest in domestic and international politics. Germany and Canada, March 1904, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 64/1643, The National Archives of the UK (hereafter TNA); G.J. Stanley, Commercial Treaties of the United Kingdom: Report to the President of the Board of Trade on the Treaty of Arrangements of the United Kingdom, September 1917, vii–viii, Board of Trade (hereafter BT) 274/24, TNA; Michael Hart, A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization (Vancouver, 2003), 80–81. 12 On trade policy during the transition from the First World War to the League of Nations, see Madeleine Dungy, “Peace, Power and Economic Order: International Rivalry and Cooperation in European Trade Politics, 1900–1930” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017); On trade policy in relation to broader structures of economic governance in the League of Nations, see Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford, 2013). 13 For accounts of 1919 that anticipate the end of the League, see Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, (New York, 2003); Patrick Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge, 2008); Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, MA, 2018); Eckart Conze, Die große Illusion: Versailles 1919 und die Neuordnung der Welt (Munich, 2018). 14 John Gerard Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York, 1993), 4–10; Douglas Irwin, “Multilateral and Bilateral Trade Policies in the World Trading System: A Historical Perspective,” in New Dimensions in Regional Integration, ed. Jaime de Melo and Arvind Panagariya (Cambridge, 1993), 95–101; John Jackson, The World Trading System: Law and Policy of International Economic Relations (Cambridge, MA, 1989, 1997), 35; Rorden Wilkinson, Multilateralism and the World Trade Organisation: The Architecture and Extension of International Trade Regulation (Abingdon, 2002), 44–45; Douglas Irwin et. al., The Genesis of the GATT (Cambridge, 2011), 133; Petros Mavroidis, GATT, vol. 1 of The Regulation of International Trade, (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 195–239. 15 Antoni Estevadeordal, “Measuring Protection in the Early Twentieth Century,” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 1 (1997): 89–125; Robert Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 429–472; Mark Harrison and Jari Eloranta, “War and Disintegration, 1914–1950,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Broadberry and Kevin O’Rourke (Cambridge, 2012): 133–155. 16 Archibald C. Bell, The Blockade of Germany and of the Countries Associated with her in the Great War, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, 1914–1918 (London, 1937); Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher era, 1904–1919, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1961); Greg Kennedy, “Intelligence and the Blockade, 1914–1917: A Study in Administration, Friction and Command,” Intelligence and National Security 5, no. 22 (2007): 699–721; Nicholas Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca, NY, 2017). 17 William H. Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago, IL, 1982); David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford, 1982), 334; Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction After the First World War (Cambridge, 1990), 22–23. 18 “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” Avalon Project, accessed April 2, 2018, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp. 19 “The Covenant of the League of Nations,” Avalon Project. 20 Francis M.G. Wilson and Daniel N. Chester, The Organization of British Central Government, 1914–1956 (London, 1957), 84; Dungy, “Peace, Power and Economic Order,” 54. 21 HMG Stationery Office, Recommendations of the Economic Conference of the Allies held at Paris on June 14, 15, 16 & 17, 1916 (London, 1916), 7. French and British leaders both supported a five-year agreement to withhold MFN from the Central Powers. However, representatives from Italy and Russia, concerned about preserving access to the German market, protested that this timeframe was too long. See Memorandum on the Paris Economic Conference, June 30, 1916, MS 30, Herbert Henry Asquith Papers, Bodleian Library, Department of Special Collections, Oxford, United Kingdom. 22 Memorandum on the Paris Economic Conference, June 30, 1916, Bodleian Library. 23 Dungy, “Peace, Power, and Economic Order,” 88–90; Minutes of Evidence taken before the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy, Evidence of Hubert Llewellyn Smith, September 14, 1916, BT 55/10, TNA; HMG Stationery Office, The History of the Ministry of Munitions (London, 1922) vol. 7, Part I: 5, 58; The History of the Ministry of Munitions vol. 7, Part IV: 11–12, 33–34; Per Högselius, Arne Kaijser, and Erik van der Vleuten, Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (Basingstoke, 2015), 147. 24 Béatrice Dedinger, “The Franco-German trade puzzle: an analysis of the economic consequences of the Franco-Prussian War,” The Economic History Review 65, no. 3 (2012): 1043–1044. 25 Soutou, L’or et le Sang, 84, 167; Memorandum on the Paris Economic Conference, June 30, 1916, Bodleian Library. 26 Historians disagree about whether Clémentel’s trade policy followed a liberal or protectionist bent. See: Marc Trachtenberg, “‘A New Economc Order’: Étienne Clémentel and French Economic Diplomacy during the First World War,” French Historical Studies 10, no. 2 (1977): 315–341; Laurence Badel, Diplomatie et grands contrats: L’État français et les marches extérieurs au XXe siècle (Paris, 2010), 39–40; Soutou, L’or et le sang, 553–554. 27 Edward Carson, Memorandum on Economic Offensive, September 1917, G 156, CAB 24/4/6, TNA; Peter Cline, “Winding Down the War Economy: British Plans for Peacetime Recovery, 1916–19,” in War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919, ed. Kathleen Burk (Abingdon, 1982), 173; Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction, 15–17. 28 Albert Stanley, Notes on Sir Edward Carson’s memorandum “Economic Offensive,” with some immediate suggestions for action by the President of the Board of Trade, October 1917, G 158, CAB 24/4/8, TNA; Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet, July 18, 1918, CAB 7/11, TNA; Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy, September 14, 1916, BT 274/24, TNA. 29 Glaser, “Making the Economic Peace,” 378; Soutou, L’or et le sang, 820–835. 30 Patricia Clavin, “The Genesis of the War,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II, ed. Richard Overy (Oxford, 2015), 7–35. 31 F W. Hirst, From Adam Smith to Philip Snowden. A History of Free Trade in Great Britain (London, 1925), 69–70; F.W. Hirst, Safeguarding and Protection in Great Britain and the United States (London, 1927). 32 Kennedy, Over Here, 311–316; Robert Tucker, Woodrow Wilson & the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville, VA, 2007); Kathryn Steen, The American Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry: War and Politics, 1910–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014), 78–171. 33 The Ambassador in France (Sharp) to Secretary of State, June 22, 1916, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1916, Supplement, The World War, ed. Joseph V. Fuller (Washington, DC, 1929), Doc. 1310; Kennedy, Over Here, 308–310; Soutou, L’or et le sang, 358–359; Anne Orde, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895–1956 (Basingstoke, 1996), 46–47; Douglas Irwin, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (Chicago, IL, 2017), 345. 34 Woodrow Wilson to Robert Lansing, February 9, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition (Charlottesville, VA, 2017), originally published in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Vol. 41 (Princeton, NJ, 1983), accessed February 9, 2019, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/WILS-01-41-02-0179. 35 Tooze, The Deluge, 53–54. 36 MacMillan, Paris 1919, 95–96. 37 U.S. Code, Title 19, Chapter 4, Subtitle II, Part II, §1332., US Code, Cornell Law School Open Access, accessed March 23, 2018, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1332. 38 Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, 341–343. 39 Kennedy, Over Here, 299–310; Trygve Throntveit, Power Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago, IL, 2017), 79; C. Donald Johnson, The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America (Oxford, 2018), 169–172. 40 Crane Brinton, “A Tennessee Cobden,” review of Memoirs of Cordell Hull by Cordell Hull, The Sewanee Review 57, no. 1 (1949): 167–176; Tony Smith, Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 152–153; Johnson, The Wealth of a Nation, 170–172, 212. 41 Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations, 158; Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, 346; Throntveit, Power Without Victory, 78–79. 42 United States Tariff Commission, Reciprocity and Commercial Treaties (Washington, DC, 1919), 10. Douglas Irwin argues that this report “proved to be one of the most influential government documents on trade since Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures.” See Irwin, Clashing Over Commerce, 362. 43 Second Annual Report of the United States Tariff Commission (Washington, DC, 1918), 27; Comment by F.W.T. on Memorandum by A.A.Y. entitled “Possible International Action with Respect to Tariffs,” undated, American Committee to Negotiate Peace (hereafter ACNP), folder 316, box 111, Economic Records, Record Group 256 (hereafter RG 256), U.S. National Archives (hereafter USNA). 44 Wilson drafted Point III himself, with encouragement from Colonel House. See: “From the Diary of Colonel House,” January 9, 1918, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition, originally published in Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 45 (Princeton, NJ, 1984), accessed February 9, 2019, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/WILS-01-45-02-0528. 45 Albert Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1945), 65–66. 46 Soutou, L’or et le sang, 843. 47 Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, 66. 48 See Section B. II. of the Recommendations of the Economic Conference of the Allies held at Paris. 49 See Articles 264–267, HMG Stationery Office, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany (London, 1919), 123–124. 50 Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe (London, 2000), 7–39. 51 Arthur Walworth, Wilson and his Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (New York, 1986), 511; Soutou, L’or et le Sang, 827; Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, 345–349; Throntveit, Peace Without Victory, 253. 52 MacMillan, Paris 1919, 90–94. 53 D.H. Miller to E.M. House, December 1, 1918, FRUS, 1919, vol. 1, The Paris Peace Conference, ed. Joseph V. Fuller (Washington, D.C., 1942), doc. 387; Sidney Mezes to David Hunter Miller, Dr. Young’s Memorandum “Possible International Action with Respect to Tariffs, January 19, 1918, ACNP, Economic Division, folder 321, box 112, RG 256, USNA; “Document 4: Equality of Trade Conditions, American Draft, British Draft, and Notes,” in David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 2 (New York, 1928), 16–22. 54 Tooze, The Deluge, 180–181. 55 Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet, April 24, 1917, CAB 23/40/11, TNA; Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008), 194–196. 56 Committee of the Prime Ministers of the Dominions: Imperial War Cabinet Meeting, June 21, 1918, 208 CAB 23/44A/14, TNA. 57 “Hughes, William Morris (1862–1952),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed March 20, 2018. 58 Memorandum on the Paris Economic Conference, June 30, 1916, Bodleian Library; The Ambassador in France (Sharp) to Secretary of State, June 23, 1916, FRUS, 1916, Supplement, Doc. 1310. 59 Committee of the Prime Ministers of the Dominions: Imperial War Cabinet Meetings, June 21, 1918, 207, CAB 23/44A/14, TNA. 60 Hubert Llewellyn Smith to Bernard Baruch, February 6, 1919 181.17/13, ACNP, RG 256, Microfilm 820/154, USNA; Economic Commission, Section on Permanent Commercial Relations, Sub-Commission on Customs Regulations, Duties, and Restrictions, March 12, 1919, 181.171101/1, ACNP, RG 256, Microfilm 820/155, USNA. 61 Robert Borden, Imperial Preference and Inter-Allied or League of Nations Economic Arrangements, March 31, 1919, FO 608/72.27, TNA; Minute by Sir William Malkin, April 4, 1919, FO 608/72.27, TNA. 62 Ian Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire (Abingdon, 1972), 51–70; Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 331–332. 63 Minutes of a Meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet, April 26, 1917, CAB 23/40/12, TNA; Charles Kindleberger, “Commercial policy between the wars,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire vol. 8, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (Cambridge, 1989): 161–162. 64 Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 51–70; Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 331–332. 65 Lawrence Gelfland, The Inquiry, American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT, 1963), 294–295. On the geopolitical implications of “economic penetration,” see Tooze, The Deluge, 15–16. 66 Allyn Abbott Young, Possible International Action with Respect to Tariffs, January 6 1918, ACNP, Economic Division, folder 321, box 112, RG 256, USNA. 67 Letter to Robert Lansing, unsigned, March 3, 1919, 181.17/22, ACNP, Microfilm 184/154, RG 256, USNA. 68 Comment by F.W.T. on Memorandum by A.A.Y. entitled “Possible International Action with Respect to Tariffs,” undated, USNA. 69 Torp, The Challenges of Globalization, 203–204; Bairoch, “European trade policy,” 72–83; H. Dietzel, “The German Tariff Controversy,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 17, no. 3 (1903): 365–416. 70 Effective levels are calculated as the overall ratio between customs duties and imports. Compare Board of Trade, The New German Tariff as Modified by Treaties (London, 1905) to Torp, The Challenges of Globalization, 262–265, 274; Kevin O’Rourke, “Tariffs and Growth in the Late 19th Century,” The Economic Journal, 110, no. 4 (2000): 461. 71 Frank Taussig, Memorandum on Bargaining Tariffs and Commercial Treaties in European Countries, January 26, 1918, ACNP, Economic Division, folder 231, box 107, RG 256, USNA. 72 Frank Taussig, How to Promote Foreign Trade, May, 1918, ACNP, Economic Division, Folder 321, Box 112, RG 256, USNA. 73 Allyn Young, Memorandum for Mr. Lamont, April 5, 1919, ACNP, Economic Division, folder 256, box 108, RG 256, USNA. 74 Quoted in David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1: 197. 75 Comment by F.W.T. on Memorandum by A.A.Y., undated, USNA; Allyn Young, Memorandum on the Program of the Economic Drafting Committee, February 6, 1919, 181.17/6, ACNP, Microfilm 820/154, RG 256, USNA. 76 Economic Commission, Section on Permanent Commercial Relations, Sub-Commission on Customs Regulations, Duties & Restrictions, First Meeting, March 12, 1919, 181.171101/1, ACNP, Microfilm 820/155, RG 256, USNA. 77 Economic Commission, Section on Permanent Commercial Relations, Sub-Commission on Customs Regulations, Duties, and Restrictions, First Meeting, March 12, 1919, 181.171101/1, ACNP, Microfilm 820/155, RG 256, USNA. 78 Report presented to the Assembly from the Economic and Financial Organisation, [League] of Nations Doc. A. 59.1922.II (Geneva, 1922). For the working papers and minutes of the Economic Committee’s Sub-Committee on the Equitable Treatment of Commerce, see dossier 10/6105 in boxes R307 and R308, League of Nations Archive (hereafter LON), Geneva, Switzerland. 79 Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 116–117. 80 Nathan Marcus, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 78–111; Juan H. Flores Zendejas and Yann Decorzant, “Going Multilateral? Financial Markets’ Access and the League of Nations Loans, 1923–8,” Economic History Review 69, no. 2 (2016): 653–678. 81 Commercial Policy in the Interwar Period: International Proposals and National Policies, League Doc. II.A.6 (Trenton, NJ, 1942), 24–30. 82 Joachim Wintzer, Deutschland und der Völkerbund, 1918–1926 (Munich, 2006). 83 Treaty between the United States of America and Germany, December 8, 1923, FRUS, 1923, vol. II, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, ed. Joseph V. Fuller (Washington, D.C., 1938), doc. 28. 84 David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 171; Ellis W. Hawley, ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice (Iowa City, IA, 1981); Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, 362–365. 85 Clavin, Securing the World Economy, 41–43; Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis, 168–177. 86 Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade, 172; “Recommendations for Resolutions on Questions of Commercial Policy. Submitted by the American Members,” in League of Nations, Report and Proceedings of the World Economic Conference held at Geneva, May 4th to 23rd, 1927, Vol. II, League Doc. 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(Vienna, 1995), 171–197; Julie Thorpe, Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist State, 1933–38 (Manchester, 2011), 16–44; Erin Hochman, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Ithaca, NY, 2016). 101 Anne Orde, “The Origin of the Austrian Customs Union Affair,” Central European History 13, no. 1 (1980): 34–59; Holm Sundhaussen, “Die Weltwirtschaftskrise im Donau-Balkan-Raum und ihre Bedeutung für den Wandel der deutschen Außenpolitik unter Brüning,” in Aspekte deutscher Aussenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, special issue, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrsheft für Zeitgeschichte, ed. 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TI - Trade, Law, and the Global Order of 1919
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhaa027
DA - 2004-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/trade-law-and-the-global-order-of-1919-1ib0fLqHK4
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -