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

This presentation traces the dynamic 100 year rise of the International Chamber of Commerce as the world’s largest multinational business association with members from 45 million companies located in over 100 countries. In particular, it focuses on the ICC efforts since 1945 to go beyond its early mission f worldwide business congeniality to leading the creation of vast corporate association networks, which enabled the current INCOTERMS create rules-based global trade governance and facilitation system. It argues that 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 realization through INCOTERMS of 20th-21st c. universal compliance with international trade and movement facilitation standards. While born of unprecedented, dynamic ICC-led business collaboration, the INCOTERMS system, however, has been largely understudied in historical as well as political economic legacy terms. This presentation centers then on the highly significant role the ICC and the postwar coming of the INCOTERMS systems as an essential platform for the rise of multinational coordination of regulated global business supply chains, which in turn liberalized and transformed the previous Cold War segmentation of organizational arrangements of world trade. This paper utilizes archival papers and collections involved with the ICC located at the Hagley Museum and Library, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the COCOM and ICC archives located in Paris and the UK Records Office, and related papers and reports issued by the ICC, WTO, the UNCTAD, and other post-1945 trade liberalization groups. It also builds on the presenter's prior publications on the role of the ICC and aligned business groups to counter and amend Cold War era international strategic trade containment and controls measures.