Tribune. On June 23, 2016, voters in the United Kingdom voted in a referendum in favor of withdrawing from the European Union. On Christmas Eve 2020, after four and a half years of negotiations, a trade and cooperation agreement defining the terms of this withdrawal was finally found.
The questions raised during the discussions on the terms of Brexit bear striking similarities to the debates which animated the trade negotiations between Great Britain and the United States after the latter had gained their independence in 1783.
Recalling these events and putting them in parallel seems a good way, if any, to illustrate how history recalls in the present, but also how it warns about the future.
A free trade agreement
The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, marked the recognition of the independence of the United States of America by Great Britain. On a commercial level, British policy towards its thirteen former colonies was at first conciliatory. It changed abruptly from June 1784, when Charles Jenkinson (1727-1808), better known as the first Earl of Liverpool, took over as chairman of the Board of Trade (Commission du Commerce, equivalent to a ministry of trade).
The following decade saw political and trade tensions escalate between the two countries. In order to avoid an armed conflict with his former colonial power, George Washington decided in 1794 to send John Jay, the president of the Supreme Court, to London to negotiate a “treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation. “. Like the Brexit negotiations, the Treaty of London, signed on November 19, 1794, aimed to settle certain questions, in particular trade, between two territories which were formerly economically integrated.
An essential feature of the Treaty of London was that it was fundamentally a free trade treaty. John Jay, as well as William Wyndham Grenville, the British foreign secretary with whom Jay was negotiating, were both in favor of free trade. They mutually agreed to apply the most-favored-nation clause to the goods of the opposing party, a clause by which each country undertakes to apply to the goods of the other the best conditions granted to a third country.
The only real violation of the freedom of trade concerned trade with the West Indies, which remained inaccessible to American ships exceeding 70 tonnes. The agreement of December 23, 2020 between London and Brussels is also a free trade agreement which respects the rules generally recommended by the World Trade Organization (WTO), in particular the most-favored-nation clause.
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