The United States Wine Gallon Concession: How the Biggest Chip in the Tokyo round was Negotiated

Abstract

It is improbable that the wine gallon concession will be recorded as a signal event in international history. It was just one part of the Tokyo Round trade negotiation, which was concluded in 1979 after a period of approximately five years. The Tokyo Round itself was a vast, complicated negotiation designed to liberalize trade and was conducted under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt). Its results included an agreement on tariffs that was broader than that reached at the Kennedy Round in the 1960s. As well, the Tokyo Round negotiated a number of codes dealing with non-tariff barriers, such as the codes on custom valuation procedures, on subsidies and countervailing duties, or on government procurement practices. These codes amounted to constitutional reform of the basic gatt agreement of 1947 and were very significant events in the history of the international trading system. Within this vast endeavour the wine gallon concession appears simply as a point on a very large spectrum. If any lessons are to be learned from studying it, they deal more with the process of how international trade agreements are negotiated than with the substance of the agreements themselves. When Carl von Clausewitz wrote his classic work on military strategy, he indicated he would not entertain any abstruse or com-