Before email and smart phones, I would always send my mother a postcard whenever I travelled abroad. I’m reminded of that habit by today’s #stampoftheday, which was issued on October 9, 1952 by the United Nations to honor the in honor the Universal Postal Union (UPU) on the 78th anniversary of the treaty that created what became the UPU. (Because of the treaty, October 9th is World Post Day.)
The stamp and the associated first-day covers also remind me that in the late 1970s, when I spent months travelling across Europe, and then the Indian subcontinent, I eagerly looked forward to going to a big-city post office where, using the Poste Restante system, I would get a month or two of letters sent by family members and friends.
In all those years, I never thought about the system that made all this possible. But it was all thanks to the UPU, which has been around since 1874 (and has been part of the UN since 1948). And while it appears that the UPU is just another quaint bureaucratic entity, it turns out for about a year it was the heart of a dispute that one critic warned was giving give President Trump “his own Brexit” and, in doing so, create “an absolute free-for-all” that might have greatly harmed the US economy and further damaged our international standing.
In some ways, Trump almost recreated the system that was in place before the establishment of the UPU when each country negotiated separate bilateral treaties to govern the movement of mail and parcels. Those negotiations could be difficult; the U.S. and France, for example, had been negotiating (unsuccessfully) for five years before the GPU was signed, an impasse that led Elihu Washburne, the U.S. Ambassador to France at the time ,to claim that “there is no nation in the world more difficult to make treaties with than France.”
In 1874, led by the postmaster of the recently unified German Empire, 21 countries finally agreed on a system with three notable features. First, each country would set a uniform flat rate for any international to mail. Second, postal authorities should give equal treatment to foreign and domestic mail. And third, each country would retain all the money it collected for international postage (on theory that a letter sent to one country would likely generate a response from that country).
The new organization grew rapidly; by 1933 52 countries were members and another 35 countries and territories weren’t official members but had agreed to follow UPU’s rules. And it took on other issues. In the late 19th century, the UPU issued rules concerning stamp design that were supposed to improve the handling of international mail. One rule specified that stamp values be given in numerals, as denominations written out in letters were not universally comprehensible. Another required member nations to use the same colors on their stamps issued for postcards (green), normal letters (red) and international mail (blue), a system that remained in place for several decades.
In the early 1900s, the system was greatly strained because unlike letters, periodicals and parcels often did not have balanced flows.
The imbalances grew in the 1950s and 1960s because many new and developing countries, wanted to be compensated for the fact that their citizens received much more international mail than they sent out of the country. In 1969, the UPU introduced a system that, in theory, was supposed to address this problem by requiring payments between countries that had uneven mail flows. But the system was designed in ways that rewarded low-cost countries, which turned out to not only include many developing countries but also the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Despite tweaks, the system continued to benefit the United States Postal Service, which as late as 2010 was running a $275 million surplus on international mail. To protect its profits, the US often voted with the developing countries to protect the existing system, which US officials, also argued that helped spur economic growth in developing countries. However, US officials were also starting to raise concerns that the system was unfairly aiding China, which could not really be considered a developing country.
US concerns grew in the last decade because the growth of e-commerce, which led US consumers to import more goods by mail, reversed the Postal Services financial incentives. Because of these shifts in 2015, for the first time, the US Postal Service ran a net deficit in international mail. In response, the UPU established a new remuneration system in 2016. The US State Department claimed the new system would this would “dramatically improv[e] USPS’s cost coverage for the delivery of…packets from China and other developing countries.” But the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission (as well as many US firms) disagreed, an assessment that seemed accurate in 2017, when the Postal Service announced it had run an $80 million deficit on international mail.
Not surprisingly, this issue got the attention of the Trump Administration which had already exited several other multilateral arrangements including the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Paris climate change accords and obscure provisions of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. So in October 2018, the president announced that unless these imbalances were addressed, the US, would leave the UPU in October 2019. While this looked likely for a long time, UPU leaders developed a compromise plan that allowed the U.S. and other countries to set their own postal rates over the next five years.
Administration officials and many business leaders hailed this as an important victory. But others, such as Daniel Drenzer, a professor at the Fletcher School who sometimes writes for the Washington Post weren’t sure. In a blog he wrote for the Post this summer Drenzer contended, “There has not been a credible commitment that the Trump administration has not wrecked….NATO, the WTO, the alliance with South Korea, even the Universal Postal Union – Trump has threatened to walk away from all of them.” And while Drenzer conceded that one of the president’s rare victories came in the postal deal, he contended that “like an overleveraged casino, this meager haul has come with a high price tag. This president has trashed American values even more than he has harmed American interests….Little wonder that the rest of the world trusts Trump about as much as they trust Vladimir Putin.”
Little did I know when I started writing this post that two seemingly innocuous UN first-day covers and my fond memories of sending postcards would take me to core questions about US foreign policy. But that’s often the way it goes.
Be well, stay safe, send a postcard to someone you love, fight for justice and work for peace.