Richard Schüller’s journal article examines the Geneva tariff truce as a limited diplomatic instrument and a preliminary step toward European economic rapprochement. Moving from the disappointing aftermath of the 1927 International Economic Conference to the truce’s legal provisions, subsequent negotiating programme, and institutional limits, Schüller distinguishes an agreement’s formal obligations from its practical and moral effects. His central argument is that European economic integration requires freer trade among European states, not simply a common tariff against the rest of the world.
The article opens with the League of Nations Assembly’s criticism of governments’ failure to reconcile commercial policy with their international declarations. Schüller pointedly observes that governments were thereby criticizing themselves. The convention abolishing import and export prohibitions remained blocked: several states required Polish participation, while Poland considered foreign restrictions on its coal and livestock exports insufficiently relaxed to justify abandoning its own prohibitions. Limited commodity agreements and the Franco-German tariff treaty represented progress, but tariff increases elsewhere contradicted the conference’s programme. Schüller introduces a cautiously hopeful analogy with the 1920 Brussels Financial Conference: monetary stabilization eventually followed years of apparent disregard for its recommendations. He nevertheless refuses to treat that sequence as a prediction for commercial policy.
Against this background, the tariff truce proposed by Belgium’s Hymans was intended to secure time for a programme of economic rapprochement. Its obligations differed between two groups. Britain, Holland, Denmark, and Norway, which lacked tariff treaties, undertook for one year neither to introduce new protective duties nor to increase existing ones. States with tariff treaties promised not to terminate their current commercial agreements, but could still increase unbound duties or revise treaty rates by mutual consent. Schüller acknowledges the apparent imbalance before qualifying it:
Die Ungleichheit ist übrigens nur eine scheinbare.
English translation: The inequality, incidentally, is only apparent.
His reasoning concerns the parties’ probable conduct rather than identical legal restraint. The free-trading states were not already contemplating protective increases, whereas the treaty states were protectionist countries where such increases were a genuine danger. Moreover, an injured state could demand negotiations over compensation. If agreement failed within two months, it could terminate the convention against the offending state or against all participating states. Thus free-trading countries retained an escape from obligations whose commercial basis had been undermined.
This elasticity makes the truce less a prohibition enforceable through sanctions than an instrument for requiring explanation and exposing obstruction:
Wie sich aus Vorstehendem ergibt, ist die Bedeutung dieses sehr elastischen Übereinkommens vor allem eine moralische.
English translation: As the foregoing shows, the significance of this very flexible agreement is above all moral.
Tariff increases would entail negotiations and the odium of provoking another state’s withdrawal. The convention’s short duration and delayed ratification further limited its immediate force, although Schüller notes its possible influence before entry into effect and its provision for renewal. His account also records Austria’s particular difficulty: ongoing treaty revisions might require increases in duties. Austria therefore secured reservations permitting termination of its treaties with Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Such exceptions reveal how the collective undertaking accommodated national negotiations already under way.
The conference’s second task was to establish a programme extending beyond the standstill. Schüller identifies two commercially decisive negotiations within a broader technical agenda. First, European protectionist states would discuss tariff reductions in return for a longer commitment by free-trading countries to maintain their existing regimes. Second, continental agricultural importers would negotiate improved access for exports from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania in exchange for reciprocal concessions. Most-favoured-nation treatment complicated the latter project: advantages for European grain exporters would also have to extend to overseas suppliers. Livestock trade, governed by veterinary agreements, presented a less extensive version of this obstacle.
Schüller’s concluding conceptual move is to separate a European economic area from a European external tariff. Drawing on the difficulty of maintaining Austria-Hungary’s common customs territory even under extensive political unity, he challenges the institutional feasibility of a multinational tariff:
Eine größere Anzahl national selbständiger Staaten ohne gemeinsame politische Institutionen kann keinen Zolltarif erstellen und handhaben.
English translation: A larger number of nationally independent states without common political institutions cannot establish and administer a customs tariff.
A tariff requiring every parliament’s approval for adoption and alteration would lack workable common authority. More fundamentally, Europe’s existing tariffs chiefly protected European countries against one another. Preserving those barriers while adding higher protection against overseas territories would not produce an integrated European economy.
Dieses könnte nur zustandekommen, wenn in der Handelspolitik der europäischen Staaten der freiere und schließlich der freie Verkehr zum Durchbruch käme.
English translation: This could come about only if freer and ultimately free trade prevailed in the commercial policy of the European states.
The article’s relevance lies in this distinction between diplomatic coordination, institutional capacity, and actual market opening. Schüller neither mistakes a flexible truce for substantial liberalization nor dismisses its capacity to prepare further bargaining. Its value depends on whether temporary restraint can support reciprocal reductions in the barriers dividing Europe itself.
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