The GATT’s Origins and Early Years

It is one of the more comforting facts of modern history that a group of remarkable politicians, public servants, and academics in the United States and the United Kingdom began planning for postwar reconstruction and economic cooperation in the earliest years of the Second World War.2 All were convinced that inappropriate international economic policies immediately after the First World War, and economic warfare in the 1920s and 1930s, had delayed postwar recovery, caused the Great Depression, and created the conditions which led to World War II. Insistence by the allies on reparations had impoverished and alienated Germany and sown the seeds of totalitarianism and aggression. Trade restrictions and discrimination, and exchange rate instability and competitive devaluations, had deepened the economic contraction. Economic nationalism and ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies only served to produce further economic deterioration and political hostility. International conferences had acknowledged the problems and their causes, reaffirmed liberal principles, and indicated the directions in which solutions lay, but they had failed to curb economic warfare and stem the rising tide of political hostility.