International Mail

By: Joshua O’Brien

Because I am one of the only people in the world who would find international postal policy interesting

Three stamps. I need three stamps to cover the postage to my Norwegian best-friend. Two more than the domestic one, but that’s okay. Typically, I just affix three stamps to the envelope, drop it in the box, and forget about it. But this week, on my drive back from the Post Office, I realized how little I know about the international mail system.

I figured, vaguely, that the USPS would forward it to an airport, where it would hop the Atlantic to Oslo. From there, Posten Norge would handle the rest after the letter cleared Customs. I’m still guessing something like this happens, but the actual diplomatic development of that system has a surprising history.

Back in the 19th century, when romantic authors exchanged smutty letters, mail rates and transport were governed by postal treaties. All of these treaties were bilateral, so little uniformity existed in the system. And often, trans-Atlantic letter rates varied based on the ship carrying the mail.

Then, in 1879, the Treaty of Bern! The Treaty of Bern established the Universal Postal Union, which allowed for uniformity in international mailing and rates across Europe and the North Atlantic. It sounds incredibly boring, but on some level, it was the diplomatic equivalent of a massive trade deal at the time.

Today, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) exists as a United Nations Specialized Agency, with headquarters in Bern. It still coordinates international postal policies across nations and is surprisingly involved in modern economics. For instance, the UPU convened an Extraordinary Congress in 2019 after the United States threatened to withdraw from the body to terminal dues with mailings to China. The UPU Extraordinary Congress moved to allow self-declared terminal rates up to 70%. While I do not know exactly what that means, it warms my nerdy heart that there is mail diplomacy. Heated mail diplomacy.

This is only what I’ve learned with a half-hour of Google searching. I had to stop myself from going further down the rabbit hole, because I might not leave until I’m an expert on international mail policy, and in-line to be the UPU’s next Director-General. If I find anymore gems in the history of postal diplomacy, I will be sure to follow-up in a future blog post. But for now, I will contain my obscure nerdy interests to this post.