The Havana Conference and the Reception of the GATT Agreements across the Commonwealth

Abstract

The Geneva conference was but one step in the long process of reforming international trade. Three weeks after the Geneva conference ended, over 1000 representatives from 56 countries gathered in Havana to consider the trade charter afresh. For most developing nations this was the first time they were included in discussions of the postwar trade order. They seized their opportunity and proposed over 800 amendments that diluted the liberal nature of the charter and ‘emasculated the carefully developed compromises worked out in Geneva’. The amendments confirmed that the developing world wanted recourse to the practices that had facilitated industrial development elsewhere in the past, but were now banned or sharply circumscribed under the ITO. In so doing, they made the point that freer trade practices could be ill-suited to rudimentary and developing economies. Reconciling the differences between developed and developing nations was the foremost preoccupation at the Havana conference. There were no tariff negotiations and therefore no direct challenge to imperial preference. But the debate over preferences was not entirely at an end because the principle of regional preferential blocs resurfaced in Havana in connection with developing nations.

Perhaps more than any other single factor, imperial preference represents a source of friction in the commercial relations of the United States and the members of the British Commonwealth.₁

(Department of State Policy Statement)

Empire preference is a political concept with no economic meaning.₂

(Mr Falstein)