In the Kingdom of Denmark these days, the beer bottles must have square labels, because the Government decided that oval ones waste too much paper. In Providence, R. I., stonecutters have refused to cut names into tombstones shipped ready-shaped from Sweden and Finland. And in Britain last week, Food Minister John Strachey told a truly shocked House of Commons that the tea ration might have to be cut, partly because India and Ceylon did not like Government-regulated tea buying.
Western Arithmetic. These are some of the more bizarre symptoms of what ails world trade. This week in Geneva, the representatives of 18 nations* will meet, chiefly to hear what the U.S. thinks can be done.
Robin J. Cruikshank, a sharp-eyed British journalist, told Americans this winter (TIME, Jan. 20) how Europe's ears would be cocked. He asked: "Will Uncle Sam decide to take the expansionist way in the world?" What the U.S. offered at Geneva would be the tipoff: "The first speech of the American spokesman . . . will have all the force of an act, a decisive act."
U.S. Under Secretary of State Will Clayton would go to Geneva with congressional permission to cut U.S. tariffs up to 50%. The U.S. could discuss concessions on as many as 3,500 different items, including abaca, Bibles, goat meat, curling stones, unbleached teasels and zinc dust. Despite some worried special interests at home, Clayton had as clear a mandate to "take the expansionist way" as a U.S. Congress was ever likely to give.
In return, the U.S. wanted a general relaxation of all the trade restrictions thought up by nervous economic planners to make their economics more "secure." And the U.S. wanted the new rules for "freer" world trade written into the Charter of an International Trade Organization (I.T.O.), to act as umpire hereafter.
The return concessions were the rub. People all over the world now believe that governments are responsible for a lot of things—even down to the corners of a beer-bottle label—that used to be none of a government's business. The program for "freer" world trade ran smack into the program for "secure" economic systems.
Eastern Subtraction. The Russians had made their choice. With their own ideas of economic predestination, they would not even be present in John Calvin's grey old city. The postwar deals that Soviet trade chief Anastas Mikoyan has been arranging made it clear that Russian trade would be based on the Kremlin's notions of military security and political expediency—not on old-fashioned consumer demand.
The Czechs would be at Geneva, but they were lukewarm about freer trade. Zdenek Augenthaler, Prague's representative, wanted lower tariffs on the goods the Czechs will spare for the West. But Augenthaler was even more interested in seeing that the new I.T.O. did not discriminate against state trading monopolies.