Universal Postal Union

Before the establishment of the UPU, every pair of countries that exchanged mail had to negotiate a postal treaty with each other. In the absence of a treaty providing for direct delivery of letters, mail had to be forwarded through an intermediate country.[4] Postal arrangements were complex and overlapping. In 1853, the United States had a postal treaty with Prussia, but some states in southern Germany were sending their US-bound mail through France instead. Since there was no postal treaty between the United States and France, the mail had to travel on a British or a Belgian ship. US Postmaster-General James Campbell doubted "whether ... the arrangement can be safely continued," but he saw hope in a postal treaty with Bremen that also covered the Austro-German Postal Union.[5]^{: 721–722}

Negotiations for postal treaties could drag on for years. The United States drafted a postal treaty with France in 1852,[6] but the two countries disagreed on how to divide the inland postage,[5]^: 721 and a treaty was not signed until 1857.[7] However, the treaty was allowed to expire. Elihu Washburne, the new US Minister to France, arrived in Paris in 1869 to find "the singular spectacle ... of no postal arrangements between two countries connected by so many business and social relations."[8]^: 13–14 The United States and France finally exchanged ratifications of a postal treaty in July 1874,[9] just three months before the Universal Postal Union made the treaty unnecessary.[8]^: 14[10]^{: 254–255} An exasperated Washburne complained, "There is no nation in the world more difficult to make treaties with than France."[8]^: 13

The UPU Monument (Weltpostdenkmal) in Bern, bronze and granite, by René de Saint-Marceaux (1909), the five continents join to transmit messages around the globe, later adopted (1967)[11] as the organization's logo[note 1]

Heinrich von Stephan, German Postmaster-General and founder of the General Postal Union

Faced with such difficulties in exchanging mail with Europe, the United States had already taken the lead in calling for improvements to international mail arrangements. United States Postmaster General Montgomery Blair called for an International Postal Congress in 1863. Meeting in Paris, the delegates laid down some general principles for postal cooperation but failed to come to an agreement.[12]

The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War cleared away the obstacles to a postal union. After defeating Napoleon III in 1870, the North German Confederation and the South German states united to form the German Empire. The German Reichspost established a uniform set of postage rates and regulations for the new country, but the uniformity ended at the German border. Different amounts of postage were required to mail a letter from Berlin to New York, depending on which ship carried the letter across the Atlantic Ocean.[13] To bring order to the system of international mail, German Postmaster-General Heinrich von Stephan called for another International Postal Congress in 1874.[13]

Meeting in Bern, Switzerland, the delegates agreed to all of von Stephan's proposals.[13] The Treaty of Bern was signed on October 9, 1874, establishing what was then known as the General Postal Union.[14]

The treaty provided that:

1. There should be a uniform flat rate to mail a letter anywhere in the world
2. Postal authorities should give equal treatment to foreign and domestic mail
3. Each country should retain all money it has collected for international postage.

One important result of the Treaty was that it was no longer necessary to affix postage stamps of countries that a mailpiece passed through in transit. The UPU provides that stamps from member nations are accepted along the entire international route.

The Treaty of Bern had been signed by 21 countries, 19 of which were located in Europe.[note 2] After the General Postal Union was established, its membership grew rapidly as other countries joined. At the second Postal Union Congress in 1878, it was renamed the Universal Postal Union.[12]

French was the sole official language of the UPU until English was added as a working language in 1994. The majority of the UPU's documents and publications – including its flagship magazine, Union Postale – are available in the United Nations' six official languages French, English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.[15]

Toward the end of the 19th century, the UPU issued rules concerning stamp design, intended to ensure maximum efficiency in handling international mail. One rule specified that stamp values be given in numerals, as denominations written out in letters were not universally comprehensible.[16] Another required member nations to use the same colors on their stamps issued for post cards (green), normal letters (red) and international mail (blue), a system that remained in use for several decades.[17]

100 years of UPU commemorated on a US postage stamp

After the foundation of the United Nations, the UPU became a specialized agency of the UN in 1948.[18] It is currently the third oldest intergovernmental organization after the Rhine Commission and the International Telecommunication Union.

The 1874 treaty provided for the originating country to keep all of the postage revenue, without compensating the destination country for delivery. The idea was that each letter would generate a reply, so the postal flows would be in balance.[19][20] However, other classes of mail had imbalanced flows. In 1906, the Italian postal service was delivering 325,000 periodicals mailed from other countries to Italy, while Italian publishers were mailing no periodicals to other countries.[20] The system also encouraged countries to remail through another country, forcing the intermediate postal service to bear the costs of transport to the final destination.[21]

Remailing was banned in 1924, but the UPU took no action on imbalanced flows until 1969. The problem of imbalanced flows became acute after decolonization, as dozens of former European colonies entered the UPU as independent states. The developing countries received more mail than they sent, so they wanted to be paid for delivery.[20]

In 1969, the UPU introduced a system of terminal dues. When two countries had imbalanced mail flows, the country that sent more mail would have to pay a fee to the country that received more mail. The amount was based on the difference in the weight of mail sent and received.[20] Since the Executive Council had been unable to come up with a cost-based compensation scheme after five years of study, terminal dues were set arbitrarily at half a gold franc (0.163 SDR) per kilogram.[21] Also since 1969, it announces the annual best postal services on the 9 October, the World Post Day.[22]

Once terminal dues had been established, they became a topic of discussion at every future Postal Union Congress. The 1974 Congress tripled the terminal dues to 1.5 gold francs, and the 1979 Congress tripled them again to 4.5 gold francs. The 1984 Congress increased terminal dues by another 45%.[21]

The system of terminal dues also created new winners and losers. Since the terminal dues were fixed, low-cost countries that were net recipients would turn a profit on delivering international mail. Developing countries were low-cost recipients, but so were developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.[20] Since the dues were payable based on weight, periodicals would be assessed much higher terminal dues than letters.[19]

The continuing fiscal imbalances required repeated changes to the system of terminal dues. In 1988 a per-item charge was included in terminal dues to drive up the cost of remailing, an old scourge that had returned.[21] To resolve the problem with periodicals, the UPU adopted a "threshold" system in 1991 that set separate letter and periodical rates for countries which receive at least 150 tonnes of mail annually.[19] The 1999 Postal Congress established "country-specific" terminal dues for industrialized countries, offering a lower rate to developing countries.[21]

In 2010, the United States was a net sender because it was mailing goods to other countries. That year, the United States Postal Service made a $275 million surplus on international mail.[23] In addition, the UPU system was only available to state-run postal services. Low terminal dues gave the United States Postal Service an advantage over private postal services such as DHL and FedEx. To protect its profits on sending international mail, the United States voted with the developing countries to keep terminal dues low. They were opposed by the German Bundespost and the Norwegian Post, which wanted to increase terminal dues.[20]

However, the low terminal dues backfired on the United States due to shifts in mail flows. With the growth of e-commerce, the United States began to import more goods through the mail. In 2015, the United States Postal Service made a net deficit on international mail for the first time. The deficits increased to $80 million in 2017.[23] The UPU established a new remuneration system in 2016,[24] a move that the United States Department of State said would "dramatically improv[e] USPS's cost coverage for the delivery of ... packets from China and other developing countries." However, the Chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission disagreed.[25]

With the outbreak of the China–United States trade war in 2018, the issue of terminal dues was pushed into the forefront. Americans complained that mailing a package from China to the United States cost less than mailing the same package within the United States. At the time, the UPU's Postal Development Indicator scale was used to classify countries into four groups from richest to poorest. The United States was a Group I country, while China was a Group III country, alongside countries like Mexico and Turkey that had similar GDP per capita. As a result, China paid lower terminal dues than the United States.[25]^: 38 The Donald Trump administration complained that it was "being forced to heavily subsidize small parcels coming into our country."[26] On 17 October 2018, the United States announced that it would withdraw from the UPU in one year and self-declare the rates it charged to other postal services.[27]

The Universal Postal Union responded in May 2019 by calling, for only the third time in its history, an Extraordinary Congress for 24–26 September 2019.[28] The members voted down a proposal submitted by the United States and Canada,[29] which would have allowed immediate self-declaration of terminal dues.[30] The UPU then unanimously passed a Franco-German compromise to allow self-declared terminal dues of up to 70% of the domestic postage rate and increase the UPU terminal dues by 119–164%, phasing in both changes from 2021 to 2025. In addition, countries receiving more than 75,000 tonnes of mail—currently only the United States—could opt in to accelerated self-declared terminal dues on 1 July 2020 in return for an $8 million annual "contribution" to the UPU for five years.[31] Trump adviser Peter Navarro declared that the agreement "more than achieved the President's goal,"[32] but he denied that the United States was "buying" the deal with its "contribution".[31] UPU Director Siva Somasundram hailed the agreement as "a landmark decision for multilateralism and the Union."[33][32]

Palestine is an observer state in the UN, and it was granted special observer status to the UPU in 1999. In 2008 Israel agreed for Palestine's mail to be routed through Jordan,[38][39] although this had not been implemented as of November 2012.[40] Palestine began receiving direct mail in 2016.[41] In November 2018, Palestine signed papers of accession to the UPU.[42] However, its bid for membership was defeated in September 2019 by a vote of 56 in support, 23 abstaining, 7 countries in opposition, and 106 countries not responding to the request to vote (which, according to UPU rules, lead them to be tallied as abstentions)--leaving the bid substantially short of the required two-thirds majority of UPU members.[43]

States with limited recognition must route their mail through third parties, since the UPU does not allow direct deliveries.[44]