800.796/8–2946
The British Minister (Balfour) to the Acting Secretary of State (Acheson)
Dear Acting Secretary of State: On August 13th [12th] you wrote a personal letter to Lord Inverchapel on the subject of recent developments in the field of international air transportation. Your letter was at once passed on to the Foreign Office and I have now received their comments.
When representatives of our two Governments met at Bermuda they approached the question of commercial traffic rights from widely divergent standpoints which had hitherto been irreconcilable. That agreement was reached at that Conference was largely due to the very special relations prevailing between our two countries, particularly in the field of civil aviation where our interests are world wide and interlocked, and to the fact that provision could be made in the Agreement for setting up machinery for continuous consultation, as a result of which it was found possible to dispense with the detailed regulation of commercial traffic on a slide-rule basis and substitute for it the statement of certain general principles coupled with the provision of ex post facto safeguards.
At the time of the Bermuda Conference neither the United States nor the United Kingdom were alone in advocating the principles for which each had previously stood. On the contrary, the United States had, since the Chicago Conference concluded a series of bilateral agreements based on the unconditional grant of all five freedoms. The [Page 1487] United Kingdom for their part had concluded certain bilateral agreements based on the regulatory principles which they had put forward at Chicago, and these principles had been adopted by the partner Governments of the British Commonwealth of Nations at a Conference held in London in January 1945. While the spirit of the compromise which our two countries displayed at Bermuda enabled them to reconcile their conflicting viewpoints in a mutually satisfactory manner, the corollary has unfortunately not followed that the remaining countries of the world have unreservedly associated themselves with the principles and methods which formed the basis of our bilateral agreement at Bermuda.
Indeed, it was clearly recognised at Bermuda that this was unlikely to be the case, and paragraph 8[9?] of the report of the ad hoc Committee recorded the agreement of both parties that the Governments of third countries should “decide for themselves, in the light of their own interests, the extent of the traffic rights which they would be prepared to grant to the civil air carriers of the United Kingdom and the United States”. Since Bermuda my Government have felt entitled on more than one occasion, notably in Greece and the Middle East, to suggest to the United States Government that they should not press third countries to conclude bilateral civil aviation agreements on the basis favoured by the United States Government before Bermuda but they have never challenged the freedom of the United States Government to conclude such agreements should third countries themselves propose this course. We should have regarded such action as a breach of the understanding reached in the ad hoc Committee. That this view is shared by the United States Government is apparent from the letter addressed by Mr. Norton to Mr. Masefield on June 27th in which he states that the United States interpretation of this understanding is that “neither of our governments would seek to deter the governments of third countries from concluding bilateral agreements on any basis which these third countries felt was acceptable in the light of their own interests” and that the United States Government “is willing to use the Bermuda arrangement, or pertinent provisions thereof, as a basis for bilateral negotiations whenever desired by other foreign Governments”.
Since the Bermuda Conference it has been the policy of His Majesty’s Government to propose to those foreign countries with which they have negotiated bilateral civil aviation agreements that these should follow the general lines of the Bermuda Agreement and at the First Interim Assembly of PICAO the United Kingdom Delegation [Page 1488] tabled proposals for Working Principles for the framing of a Multilateral Agreement which are based thereon.
His Majesty’s Government did not depart from these principles in the proposals which they submitted to the French and Argentine Governments for the conclusion of the Agreements referred to in paragraph 4 of your letter. In the case of France, the original proposals submitted to the French Government before the Bermuda Conference provided for the equal division of capacity. When the negotiations opened in Paris immediately after the conclusion of the Bermuda Conference the United Kingdom Delegation submitted to the French Delegation fresh proposals based on the Bermuda Agreement. It was only in deference to the clearly expressed wish of the French Government that the principle of the equal division of traffic with metropolitan France (though not with French overseas territories) was incorporated in the Agreement as eventually concluded.
You also referred to Argentina. Here again, it was only on the insistence of the Argentine Government, after lengthy negotiations and faced with the alternative of a breakdown which would have interrupted the operations of British South American Airways that the United Kingdom agreed reluctantly to certain conditions more restrictive than those of Bermuda. Had they not done so they would not have been leaving it to the Argentine Government to “decide for themselves, in the light of their own interests, the extent of the traffic rights which they would be prepared to grant to civil air carriers of the United Kingdom”.
His Majesty’s Government regret that the Mexican Government should have quoted to United States negotiators the example of the Anglo-Argentine Agreement. They are however not in a position to defer its implementation or ratification. This Agreement has already been approved by Parliament and His Majesty’s Government could not justify to public opinion in this country a withdrawal from it at this late stage. They would, however, be prepared to consider approaching Latin American Governments on parallel lines with a view to the conclusion of civil aviation agreements on the Bermuda model. Moreover, they look forward to full discussions in mid-September of all the issues involved which will no doubt establish whether the identity of view’s between our two Governments will enable us to join the United States Government in a public declaration of the kind which you have proposed.
May I add my personal hope that the forthcoming discussions will rapidly dissipate any misunderstandings and uncertainties which may have grown up around the Bermuda Agreement.
Yours sincerely,