Tariff Preferences as an Issue in International Relations

Abstract

Britain was said, by a nineteenth century wit, to have acquired the British Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. That appears to have been how the European Community acquired its array of preferential trade agreements with countries extending from Africa and the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and the Pacific. Little regard was paid, when they were being negotiated, to the cumulative impact the agreements would have on the credibility of the multilateral trading system, institutionalised in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Yet it was through the principles and rules of the GATT, and through successive rounds of multilateral tariff-cutting negotiations within the GATT framework, that orderly conditions in the conduct of international trade had been restored after World War II and following, more to the point, the autarchic and discriminatory policies which resulted from the protectionist excesses of the 1930s.1 The return of prosperity and security to Western Europe owed a great deal to the restoration of orderly conditions in international trade and payments. Without it, the formation of the European Community might not have been possible.