In light of the difficulties that recent multilateral trade negotiating rounds have encountered, trade officials, sometimes with nostalgia, reflect back on the easier trade negotiations of the past. Yet, although the 1940s was a golden age of international institution building, the negotiations that led to the GATT were never easy. The path from James Meade's draft plan for an “International Commercial Union” in 1942 to the Geneva conference in 1947 was fraught with pitfalls, delays, and obstacles. The ambitious plans for an International Trade Organization were eventually abandoned. In its place remained a smaller and shorter agreement on commercial policy that had many weaknesses. Yet the GATT survived the test of time.

The delegates entrusted with the task of rebuilding the multilateral system of world trade and payments were a rare breed. It is unusual to see some of the greatest economic minds actively participate in national delegations, and work together with the political establishment towards the institutionalization of international cooperation and the constraint of economic unilateralism. It is to Henry Cabot Lodge that the phrase “the U.N. system is designed to avoid taking us to hell, but it cannot take us to heaven” is attributed. The Bretton Woods institutions and the GATT were designed as the first steps towards the other way.

The negotiating record amply supports the view that the GATT is very much the end product of a transatlantic negotiation.