ns through the World Bank and monetary stabilization via the International Monetary Fund. While the IMF and the World Bank date to the original Bretton Woods conference of June 1944, trade rules were first addressed in a 1946 meeting that set tariff levels and developed a draft charter for an International Trade Organization (ITO) that was presented at the 1948 UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana. John Maynard Keynes, the original architect of the Bretton Woods system, had hoped to develop worldwide trading rules that would avoid the destructive protectionism prevalent during the Great Depression, while preserving a commitment to full employment. The ITO charter contained sections on employment, commodity agreements, business practices, international investment, and services. However, the ITO was to be stillborn. And the prominence of employment in the construction of the 1948 ITO would be lost in the creation of the 1995 WTO. Between 1946 and 1948, the start of the Cold War had closed what, in retrospect, was a very narrow window for postwar internationalism in the United States that included an activist role for government. GATT was far weaker than the proposed ITO, but even GATT was opposed by the American right, as an infringement on American sovereignty. Conservative commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., coined the slogan, "a GATT in your ribs," from the popular James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson Hollywood genre of the day, in which guns, in gangster slang, were called "gats." When in 1950 the Truman administration realized that it lacked congressional support, the ITO died. In its place the key trading nations adopted the earlier and more limited 1946 agreements and established the "provisional" GATTpending a final transformation into some type of permanent treaty obligation. It took longer than expected47 yearsto convert the provisional GATT into a permanent WTO, whose structure and provisions are not terribly different fro...
