Mr GATT

Like many international civil servants, Eric Wyndham White did not write his memoirs. The best essay about his skills as a mediator is Gilbert Winham's article (1979); the best biography available today is the recent profile written by Francine McKenzie (Reference McKenzie2012). The most relevant primary sources about his work are the volumes of speeches deposited at the WTO Library. Most of them, however, are dry exercises in presenting an odd institution to puzzled audiences around the world (White, Reference White1967, Reference White1957, Reference White1959, Reference White1960a, Reference White1960b, Reference White1960c, Reference White1962, Reference White1964).Footnote ⁶ The only volume to stand out is the unfinished manuscript organized by Sydney J. Wells. Wells argued that although Wyndham White used a rhetoric of restraint, his speeches and writings provided ‘an illuminating commentary upon the course of world economic events since the Second World War’ (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 2). The following remarks are based almost exclusively on his work. We know that Wyndham White was born in London on 26 January 1913. He studied at the London School of Economics (LSE), where several liberal economists – like Lionel Robbins and Frank Paish – had a great influence on him. The rivalry between the LSE and the University of Cambridge in the field of economics was in its heyday. The fact that Wyndham White embraced in this early period a more free-trade position did not result entirely from the stern lectures of his professors. The Australian economist E. H. Coombs was also a student at the LSE in this period and was not convinced by the chorus of praise for free trade and unregulated markets. The truth is that in the depths of the depression that swept the world in the 1930s, it was extremely hard to understand the deteriorating economic conditions using classic economic theories. As the economist D. H. Cole stated in 1934:

The age of skepticism, autarky, and protectionism seemed to be the new rule. It was in this environment that Wyndham White got his law degree and started to practice before returning briefly to the London School of Economics as a Lecturer. During this period, he was active in the LSE's Conservative Association (he was encouraged to run as a Conservative candidate in the 1945 election). According to Wells, ‘at the time he felt no sense of vocation to a career in an international organization’ (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 2). His first diplomatic endeavor was an invitation to participate in the British delegation to the 1937 Berlin Conference of the International Chamber of Commerce. The event was held at the Berlin Opera House. The streets were lined with people and soldiers. Inside, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring welcomed delegates. The meeting did not have the same profile as the League of Nations, but it presented a comprehensive overview of the dire conditions of the world economy to Wyndham White.

When war broke out in 1939, he worked first at the British Embassy in Washington and between 1945 and 1946 he served as economic counsellor for the British Embassy in Paris. United Nations Secretary General Trigvy Lie invited Wyndham White to act as Executive Secretary to the first session of the Preparatory Committee for the International Conference on Trade and Employment in 1946 (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 2–4). There is no detailed information on what triggered his leap from being a diplomatic representative to holding a leadership position in the United Nations secretariat.

Church House

The auditorium of Church House, Westminster, was built in 1940, the same year it was bombed by the Luftwaffe. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so impressed by the strength of the building that he requested that it house Parliament for the rest of World War II. That was the place where on 15 October 1946 diplomats from 18 countries opened the first preparatory meeting for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment – the final Conference was held in Havana from November 1947 to March 1948. Most of the delegates in London probably noticed that 100 years ago in that same town the Corn Laws were repealed by the British Parliament, symbolizing the beginning of one of the biggest trade liberalization efforts in Europe.Footnote ⁷ But two world wars and a deep recession had broken down the trading order created after the Corn Laws. The purpose of this meeting, therefore, was to study the Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment, a document prepared by the US government that suggested the creation of an International Trade Organization based on set of rules to manage international trade relations. Three other meetings would ensue. The most important for the purpose of this essay is the one held in Geneva from April to October 1947. This meeting had two tasks. The first was to improve the draft for the International Trade Organization. The second was to promote the first round of trade liberalization among the participants of the meeting.

During the first meeting of the London Preparatory Session, A. D. K. Owen, the United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Affairs, informed all delegates that Wyndham White – with the Uruguayan Julio Lacarte – ‘[would] be responsible for all the secretarial arrangements’ for the meeting.Footnote ⁸ What Owen had in mind for the position of Executive Secretary was simple and straightforward: deal with the essential administrative activities. Initially, there was no leeway for direct involvement in the management of the negotiations themselves.

On paper, the secretariat had few substantive responsibilities. Wyndham White's main task ‘was to provide the physical arrangements for tariff conferences, to take down and circulate minutes and to provide the necessary documentation for the delegates’. After some years in the role, it was Wyndham White himself who provided one of the best descriptions of his job. It was ‘as something that combines the organizer, the secretary, the housekeeper, the politician (or peace-maker) and the globe-trotter’.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, Sydney Wells was one of the early academics to examine the different roles Wyndham White performed as Executive Secretary. The first one was mediation in cases of disagreement between parties. In these cases, Wells highlights the fact that sometimes Wyndham White called some delegates to ‘informal talks on matters at issue’. The second role was as an initiator (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 6–10). These roles were a product both of his activism and the demands from delegates.

Menial tasks have great impact on negotiations, despite what outside observers might think. Wyndham White's administrative work was essential to the progress of the meeting. Without tight schedules, short agendas, accurate simultaneous interpretation, and the availability of documents, the meeting could not have achieved meaningful results. He was the one responsible for managing all these matters and much more. Sometimes, menial activities opened a venue for strategic decisions. As he was the person responsible for defining schedules, Wyndham White had the opportunity to shape how the decision-making process evolved. He was particularly responsive to the fact that developing countries lacked adequate representation to participate in the concurrent meetings of several committees. To settle this grievance, at least at the beginning of the Conference, he succeeded in approving a schedule in which committee meetings would be opened in succession. For this plan to work properly, each meeting could last no longer than 45 minutes. There was no time for long speeches and discussions, and delegates were supposed to be pragmatic in dealing with an objective agenda. When he received complaints, Wyndham White stated that to avoid scheduling conflicts, delegates could begin meetings earlier and work during lunch.Footnote ¹⁰ This is a precedent for the way he helped to create the pragmatic and businesslike culture of GATT negotiations in the future – and for his critics, informal and opaque.

Before the election of committee chairmen, Wyndham White filled the role. His performance demonstrated his methods and his relentless will to drive delegates down a path of efficiency. He gave instructions for the secretariat to ‘not in any sense … spare the delegates but to keep them hard at work – if necessary even late into the night’.Footnote ¹¹ From the beginning, he tried to expand his role in the organization of the meeting. After offering a proposal on meeting schedules, he stated that ‘if comments are not received from any delegation by the dead-line, their acquiescence in the arrangements will be assumed’.Footnote ¹² Despite the gains in efficiency, this precedent had great effect on developing countries. Without having an approriate number of delegates to keep abreast of all negotiations, this arrangement would preclude their participation.

Despite having multiple administrative tasks to take care of, being the person responsible for managing the Conference gave Wyndham White a broader knowledge of what each committee discussed. Chairs and delegates alike were usually too compartmentalized in their own committees, sub-committees, and working groups to be abreast of the global evolution of discussions and the interconnectivity of issues. Delegates usually summoned him in the course of meetings to promote linkages between articles and clauses they discussed separately. One of these cases was in the discussions of Committee II of the London meeting – responsible for the topic of general commercial policy (the articles that would later integrate the text of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). A British delegate was shocked about the number of waivers and escape clauses in the draft under negotiation. H. B. McKinnon, from the Canadian delegation, agreed saying that they had ‘almost reached the point when [they] may have a chapter on escape clauses’. Both wanted to form a general estimate of them before deciding about particular ones. The committee faced a problem, as no one had a general picture of what was going on. The solution was to draw the attention of Wyndham White to the matter.Footnote ¹³

At the end of the London meeting, Wyndham White performed an important activity that would bring many opportunities for his display of leadership in the future. In the process of writing the final committee reports, delegates faced the dilemma of attributing to particular countries the viewpoints expressed in the proceedings. This would certainly be a problem if the document was released to the press. Wyndham White seized the opportunity to suggest that the secretariat prepare for publication an edited version without attributions for distribution to the public. This might be another menial job, but deciding what would publicly be proclaimed as the result of the conference and also the general points of views of the participants was an important task. It set the record for the future.Footnote ¹⁴

Transparency

One of the first administrative issues delegates confronted was the revision of the Rules of Procedures (E/PC/T/2). Based on the rules of procedure of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), it originally stated that committee meetings should be held in public unless the Preparatory Committee decided that ‘exceptional circumstances’ required them to be private. The matter of transparency had great impact on the decision-making process. It was clear during negotiations who would lose and win, which sector would face more domestic competition and which one would have better opportunities abroad. Without the dark veil of secrecy, most losers would strive against the success of trade meetings and very likely derail the whole effort; increasing the participation of interest groups would also create the possibility that they use the multilateral level after losing domestic battles. That is why several delegations wanted adjustments in the rules of procedures. During the discussions, Clair Wilcox, the head of the US delegation, argued that all committee sessions should be private. Canadian, French, and Belgian delegates supported Wilcox. A. D. K. Owen was at the meeting. He argued, ‘if the Conference was to succeed, the Press and public opinion must be kept well-informed. The nations of the world ought to know of the work that was being done by their delegates.’ Delegates from Cuba and India supported Owen's position. The Norwegian delegate suggested deleting the words ‘exceptional circumstances’ from the rules. The proposal was voted and adopted. The available documents do not reveal Wyndham White's personal position. Nonetheless, this was the moment when the first step was taken to create a working environment different from the United Nations in terms of transparency; trade talks would be more secretive. It is important to remember that this course was taken as a consequence of the initiative of delegates from developed countries in spite of resistance from the United Nations secretariat.Footnote ¹⁵ Also significant is the fact that discussions about transparency at that time were not the same as the current debates. Indeed, few people could imagine at that time that a temporary agreement would endure almost 40 years and would regulate such arcane and intrusive issues such as trade related aspects of intellectual property rights and trade in services. As a consequence, at the beginning of GATT only a limited number of firms and organized interest groups were aware of (or interested in) the nature, scope, and potential consequences of postwar trade negotiations.

The decision on the rules of procedures did not end the discussion about transparency. A London newspaper managed to print in its pages a confidential document that the UK delegation submitted to the Conference. The British government did not accuse anyone of a role in the leak, but in the discussion a British delegate suggested two possible explanations. The first was the access of unauthorized persons to the meetings. The second was the fact that delegates sometimes left documents on the table before leaving the rooms. In the two cases, it was a subtle remark that tainted the professionalism of the Secretariat. Wyndham White first had to defend the Secretariat policy that forbade, ‘in conversation with the press, to attribute statements to any delegate or view to any delegation, or to make any restricted document available for the press except with leave of the delegation concerned’. For him, ‘secrecy had become correspondingly more difficult to maintain’ with a large number of copies of restricted documents and, in the end, it ‘depended upon the personal care of delegates’.Footnote ¹⁶ This case would reinforce his careful quest to confine the decision-making process on contentious issues in an environment of secrecy. It also demonstrates how Wyndham White already regarded as difficult the attempt to completely barricade the negotiations in order to prevent leaks. In the following year during the Geneva negotiations he would worry about the security of the rooms and the adequate protection of secret documents.Footnote ¹⁷

Whether international agencies and non-governmental organizations could attend meetings was also discussed. From the beginning of his activities as Executive Secretary, Wyndham White had to take into account the existence of international agencies with mandates that affected international trade negotiations – the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Labour Organization, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Monetary Fund. In London, he defended the participation of these organizations as observers in the process.Footnote ¹⁸ In this case, he was able to rely on the formative years of United Nations practice.

The case of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), however, was different. It is not possible to know from the available documents how many NGOs had an interest in the trade talks and approched the United Nations Secretariat to follow the meetings. We know, however, that Rule 46 in the rules of procedure for the London meeting stated that all committees could consult only with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the International Cooperative Alliance, the American Federation of Labour, and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).Footnote ¹⁹ These organizations were not averse to the agenda of trade negotiations, but they had different ideas about what features a trade charter had to have. The ICC, for instance, wanted to secure free trade provisions, while the WFTU desired more provisions in the chapter on employment; all four organizations wanted to influence the outcome of the negotiations (Sutherland et al., Reference Sutherland, Bhagwati, Botchwey, FitzGerald, Hamada, Jackson, Lafer and de Montbrial2004: 41; Wang, Reference Wang and Steger2009: 269).Footnote ²⁰ The rules of procedure left unanswered, however, what exactly the process of consultation involved. Representatives from the four organizations hoped at least to attend committee sessions. They would be bitterly disappointed. The Secretariat believed that they could not attend those meetings as observers. The only thing they could do was submit their views in writing and, if specific committees allowed, they could be invited to present their ideas.

There are several cases in which the Secretariat received letters from the four organizations and forwarded them to delegates. Chairmen usually appraised the contribution and reminded delegates to comment on them in the course of meetings.Footnote ²¹ Soon, however, the ICC and the WFTU began to push for more participation. In Committee IV (Intergovernmental Commodity Arrangements), the British diplomat J. R. C. Helmore, as chair of the meeting, received a letter from the ICC asking to attend meetings. For Helmore, having representatives from non-governmental organizations attending meetings as observers was inconvenient. For him, discussion needed to be frank and free. The presence of outsiders could prevent this kind of trust. However, Helmore also thought the ICC could state their views and ask questions during a special session held for that specific purpose. Afterwards, two representatives from the ICC managed to attend a meeting of Committee IV and read a prepared text.Footnote ²²

From the beginning, Wyndham White saw a profitable venue for cooperation with the ICC. On 23 October 1946 he invited the organization to submit papers on several issues under discussion in London. The ICC submitted some documents and letters, but they still wanted to take part as observers in the private meetings of committees – a move Wyndham White blocked.Footnote ²³ The WFTU complained that the arrangements suggested by the Preparatory Committee were inadequate. An Australian diplomat received their complaint and forwarded it to Wyndham White. After discussing the issue with several members, delegates agreed to allow the representative of the organization to make a speech in a plenary session.Footnote ²⁴

Allowing these organizations to present papers and sometimes deliver speeches did not appease the complaints. The WFTU and the ICC representatives complained in Geneva about the inadequate facilities for consultation at the London meeting.Footnote ²⁵ Wyndham White's position on this matter is complex. He knew that delegations could not spend all their time barricaded inside closed rooms. It was necessary, in his opinion, to give the impression that meetings were open and inclusive. His idea was to create two environments. The first would be created for public relations purposes, in which delegates would express their opinions for the press and observers. It was also in this place that non-governmental organizations would act. The other setting was where the real negotiation took place – as he said, ‘the working machinery of the conference would, of course, be established in closed sessions’.Footnote ²⁶ The separate environments meant dissociation between participation and influence, spotlight, and shadows; like most political intercourses, it tried to convey the idea of transparency and broad consultations, when in fact a small group wielded power in the diplomatic engagement.Footnote ²⁷

This duality was not a direct creation of his activities, but he understood that this was necessary to reach agreement on contentious trade questions. Yet, it did not mean he was averse to transparency. He asked for reclassification of some documents ‘in order to facilitate public reporting of the Conference’.Footnote ²⁸ He tried to prod some members to let non-governmental organizations attend specific closed meetings as observers.Footnote ²⁹ He also attempted to expand the number of non-governmental agencies that could be consulted.Footnote ³⁰ Wyndham White's stance reflected a wider ambivalence about non-governmental participation among delegates. If demands from these organizations were accepted, most believed they would stand at the same level as delegates from member countries and, as we saw above, preclude the frank exchange of ideas.Footnote ³¹

Despite his efforts, Wyndham White failed to satisfy the NGOs in London. In Geneva in 1947, Wyndham White came up with an idea on how to integrate the interests of these organizations into the work of the Preparatory Committee. He suggested instructing all sub-committees to ‘take into account the suggestions which have been put forward by the non-governmental organizations’ in their work. Wyndham White also wanted the negotiators to prepare responses on how the suggestions were (or were not) incorporated in negotiations. He intended to appease the NGOs by claiming that their ‘views were being seriously considered in the framework of general discussion’. Several delegations – like South Africa and Norway – refused to reply to the NGOs.Footnote ³²

The initiative did not satisfy critics. In a new effort to placate them, the heads of delegations and Wyndham White created a Consultative Committee, which would receive oral and written communications from selected non-governmental organizations.Footnote ³³ This was a bold idea and a serious effort to introduce NGOs into the negotiating process. By creating an institutional arrangement apart from the real negotiations, but counting with diplomats and NGOs representatives, he managed to bridge the distance between secrecy and transparency. Several meetings of the Consultative Committee were held and high-level diplomats often participated. But it is hard to gauge the real impact of these efforts. In one of the meetings, ICC representatives defended, among other things, revisions in the chapter about Commodity Agreements. They were worried about the impact those agreements could have in international trade and suggested several modifications in the draft under negotiation. The committee members replied to their grievances, assuring them that their demands had already been taken into account. Indeed, the next draft of the chapter had many modifications that brought the text nearer to some of the ICC demands. The changes, however, were made before the presentation of the ICC and were introduced by developed countries in order to improve the precision of the chapter. There is no evidence the ICC demands were the reason for the alterations.Footnote ³⁴ It seems, therefore, that despite being a noteworthy exercise in consultation, the engagement also had relevance in the game of dissimulation.

Even after the Havana Conference, the issue of non-governmental organizations was debated. In the second meeting of the Interim Commission for the International Trade Organization, Wyndham White suggested some practical arrangements about how to deal with NGOs. For him the ITO needed to use the ECOSOC list of non-governmental organizations to adopt a list of ‘consultants’. The consultants would send observers to annual meetings of the ITO and they would have the right to propose items for the agenda (in this case the Executive Board would have the final decision). They would not be able to read restricted documents and all papers submitted by them would be distributed at the discretion of the Director General.Footnote ³⁵

The peacemeal approach to trade liberalization

Wyndham White's activities on the issue of transparency and NGO participation during the preparatory meetings are certainly relevant, but they do not inform us about how he reacted to the essence of the negotiations. His role as Executive Secretary, and the demands of neutrality placed upon him, precludes us from having a better understanding of his beliefs about the substantive aspects of multilateral trade negotiations. There are several documents, however, that convey his ideas about the matter.

Wyndham White always associated trade liberalization with peace. This was not just a fortuitous belief. GATT activities were generally technical, dull, and monotonous, and it was hard to see in its daily activities a deeper significance to people around the world. That is why, specially in the early years ahead of GATT, he associated his activities with the global quest for world peace – he believed that ‘if we face up to economic problems of the world and tackle them energically, we can create conditions of well-being and prosperity in which alone is there any hope of attaining the prize of enduring peace’ (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 26). The policy he found most approriate to tackle these problems was deeply tied to a specific view of history. He repeatedly stated that interwar protectionism and bilateralism had great impact on political conflicts. The lesson was ‘the fundamental importance of combating economic isolationism’ with ‘economic and social institutions directed towards this end’ (Wells [Reference Wells1965?]: 97).

Tariff negotiations are certainly one of the most important issues he commented on. In Geneva, an original and experimental approach was created – several countries simultaneously negotiated bilateral trade agreements that were later generalized by the most-favored-nation clause. During the conference Wyndham White informed some journalists that a lot of people would have said: ‘it is a fine idea, but it is unrealizable, and anyway, it is not very practical to expect people, a good many of whom are confronted with acute and fundamental post-war reconstruction problems, really to settle down to do business seriously about tariff negotiations’. He was not among the skeptics, but before the meeting, he had serious doubts about the prospects of the meeting: ‘I must say I share the view of those who say it is an impossible enterprise, and I must confess, I embarked on it with a considerable amount of trepidation. It was entirely new ground. There is no precedent for an operation so complex or grandiose on which one could work, and therefore, we were breaking new ground.’ Such a formidable task demanded a cautious programme, described by him as being ‘very tentative, extremely ambitious, and tinged with optimism’. He did not sweeten the bitter pill for journalists. Stating that participants faced a strenuous job, he said: ‘there would be no great virtue in negotiations which were smooth and simple. The virtue is in concluding negotiations which are difficult.’Footnote ³⁶

Wyndham White's depiction of the work as ‘very tentative, extremely ambitious, and tinged with optimism’ describes perfectly GATT negotiations during the 1950s.Footnote ³⁷ The challenging objective of freeing international trade during a period of serious trade imbalances was a task that could only be faced with optimism in order to succeed. He gave a more precise meaning to these words in an article published in August 1947. In it, he acknowledged that the lofty dreams of free trade contrasted strongly with the chaos in international economic relations during the 1940s. The Draft Charter negotiated in Geneva was supposed to be applied, therefore, ‘in normal world conditions’. To adapt high-minded principles to reality, negotiators created a series of escape clauses. He defended them, because to put your ‘head in the clouds of unreality might well be the quickest way to kill the ideal trading conditions’ for which all countries were striving.Footnote ³⁸ In what ways did this belief shape Wyndham White's cautious strategy for directing multilateral trade negotiations in the future?

First, Wyndham White supported what can be described as a ‘piecemeal approach’ to trade liberalization. It is not clear today how far this approach was the result of diplomatic engagement, economic conditions or his own initiatives, but he certainly managed to shape the way it was applied. Diplomats, chairs, and the GATT secretariat would use the strategy until the Uruguay Round (1986–1994), when the creation of the ‘single undertaking’ circumvented the possibility of deeply unbalanced results across issue areas. Wyndham White's realism about the limits of trade negotiations stemmed from a keen perception that the clash of interests was so high in certain areas that they could derail the whole effort. Unfortunately, contentious topics would have to have permissive rules in order to safeguard victories on a greater number of issues. Having a strict and across-the-board engagement on everything would only bring frustration – they were in the ‘clouds of unreality’, as he said. The rationale behind this strategy is that partial victories could appease protectionist forces and create an environment of economic growth, which would promote the assault on the neglected areas later on.

In the beginning, this strategy brought fast and significant results to negotiators. One of the main examples is the connection between monetary imbalances and trade liberalization. The relationship was clear enough to him already in Havana: ‘Is it worth creating a new international agency whose success in reducing barriers to trade can be completely frustrated if purchasing power is not fairly distributed amongst the nations interchanging their goods?’ he asked.Footnote ³⁹ The challenge was daunting in 1947, when the British government made the pound a non-convertible currency and several European countries applied more strict quantitative restrictions. His answer to that question was to follow the matter closely, reduce the scope of action, and give flexibility to rules with the expectation that time would allow all economies affected by trade restrictions to recover. In 1954, 16 of 20 developed countries argued they had balance of payment problems in order to apply quantitative restrictions in their foreign trade. At the end of 1957, the balance of payments situation was much better, but 14 industrialized countries still used quantitative restrictions.Footnote ⁴⁰ In due time, however, all developed countries reduced significantly their restrictions. Other areas were not as lucky. Trade liberalization in agriculture was relegated to a secondary place during Wyndham White's tenure as Executive Secretary and later as Director General of GATT. We can see now that the ‘piecemeal approach’ brought many victories, but created an unbalanced framework in which several areas lagged far behind in terms of precision in legal commitments, scope in negotiation engagements, and depth in trade liberalization.

Another way Wyndham White's pragmatism shaped his strategies ahead of GATT is the cautious pace at which the organization promoted trade liberalization. Wyndham White's responsibility was to persuade the GATT contracting parties to abide by the rules and bind themselves in new agreements. In several instances, though, he acquiesced to trade restrictions even if he deeply desagreed about them – the American waiver in agriculture, the European regionalism, developing countries’ restrictions in foreign trade, and state-trading in Communist contracting parties.Footnote ⁴¹ It might seem odd that an organization designed to increase free trade would act in such a way. But these countries faced fierce domestic opposition to GATT's agenda and GATT's own success only increased these obstacles. A harder stance aimed at enforcing all rules across the board would be equivalent to putting your ‘head in the clouds of unreality’ and could possibly derail the whole initiative.