Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1938, Blaðsíða 51

THE OSLO CONVENTION AND AFTER
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that all nations were free to adhere to the conventions. The con-
ventions were doomed when Great Britain persisted in her op-
position and claimed the right to benefit automatically from all
the reductions. Under these conditions neither the Netherlands
nor Belgium and Luxemburg ratified the convention, and so it
never was carried into effect.
Just before the close of 1934, the Norwegian Government,
with Mr. Mowinckel as Minister for Foreign Affairs again, took
another initiative that seemed to be better adapted for the con-
ditions and the demands of the moment. On December 20th, he
proposed that all the members of the Oslo Group should extend
the obligations of mutual communication and negotiation con-
tained in the Oslo Convention to the whole field of commercial
restrictions, i. e. make them applicable not only to customs duties
but equally to every kind of regulation of imports, whether it be
in the form of licensing, contingencies, quotas, prohibition or
bank control.
At first, the plan did not prove successful. The proposal was
accepted only by Finland and Sweden, although the govern-
ments of Belgium and the Netherlands expressed their sympathy
with the idea. The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Mr. Sandler, suggested that the extension of mutual communica-
tions as proposed by Mr. Mowinckel might be put into effect at
any rate between the Northern governments without any formal
agreement, and when I had taken over the direction of Norwegian
Foreign Affairs, I sent a letter on June nth, 1935, to all the go-
vernments of the Oslo Group, suggesting the exchange of infor-
mation with them about every commercial restriction planned. In
this way the idea of Mr. Mowinckel was carried into effect at
least to a certain extent. In one particular case, in the following
year the Netherlands obtained positive advantage from being in-
formed about a plan to regulate the importation of an important
Dutch article to Norway, and experiences of this kind prepared
the ground for a renewal of the Norwegian initiative.
In the first days of 1937, the Dutch Prime Minister Dr. Colijn
in public interviews issued an appeal for the facilitation of com-
mercial exchange between the nations and, particularly, insisted on
the duty and the chances of the Oslo States to accomplish some-
thing in this direction. Some few months before the gold block had
been dissolved, and so the currency barrier between the members
of the Oslo Group disappeared. The moment for an extension of