"Championing Collaboration over Competition: The Role of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Liberalizing World Trade Facilitation and Governance"

This year the International Chamber of Commerce marks its 100th anniversary as the world’s largest multinational business association with members from 45 million companies located in over 100 countries. Started in late October 1919 by a small group of American, French and British businessman in Atlantic City, NJ, the International Chamber of Commerce vowed to re-build “the privately operated peacetime machinery of world industry and commerce” by facilitating greater business-government cooperation over trade rivalry that had led to World War I. Since its founding, the ICC has gone well beyond fostering business congeniality, building vast corporate association networks, which it leveraged to create rules-based global trade governance and facilitation systems. Arguably, it is precisely because the ICC, as the strongest world business association body, came to emerge over governments as the most effective champion of global corporate collaboration and the coming of 21st c. international trade and movement facilitation standards. While several works have examined the ICC’s interwar formation and activities (most notably creating the International Court of Arbitration) little scholarship exists on its post-1945 activities. However, it is in this period that ICC surges in its drive to facilitate greater business coalescence and collaboration in support of rules-based facilitation systems to underpin the development and movement of global trade through the formation of modern supply chains. This paper examines ICC’s critical post-1945 role as a chief mediation body among business and government groups for the advancement of critical new cross-border/multi-lateral trade facilitation. It chronicles the ICC's success in leveraging business collaboration to create the INCOTERMS system, which shifted trade customs, shipping and transportation management away from pre-war protectionism toward globalization and liberalized business supply chains.