West German negotiators carved duty-free banana access out of the Common Market tariffs.
Evidence
Empire was no footnote to Müller-Armack. He devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to the matter of the associated territories. He recounted that the French and Belgian negotiators sprang association as a “surprise” condition for ratification on the final day of negotiations, which pushed the negotiation of tariffs for individual products late into the night. Müller-Armack zeroed in on the question of bananas at the “turbulent night session … offering resistance to the very last” to the proposal that bananas from outside of the Common Market be burdened with a 20 percent tariff—itself an artifact of the Italian protection of their colonial Somali banana crop. … Even after the negotiations technically were concluded, Müller-Armack won the chance to draft a last protocol with Robert Marjolin to be included as an annex in the final version. Completed between the final negotiations in Paris and the treaty’s signing in Rome, the so-called Banana Protocol created a crack in the tariff wall of the Common Market by securing renewable access for West Germany to duty-free bananas from beyond the protected African producers of the European empires and the French overseas territories in the Caribbean. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 629
Categorization
- XREF: The 20 percent tariff traceable to Italian colonial Somali banana protection is a concrete, connectable detail for imperial economic history.
- CANDY: A late-night EU founding argument over bananas is an amusing, tweetable historical tidbit.