Countries Once Delivered Each Other's Mail for Free. Repairing That Bargain Nearly Cost the Postal Union the United States.

by Marcus Lindqvist · September 1, 2026

Global Economy Reporter, The Globe Ledger

Post something to another country and you pay exactly one organisation: the operator in your own. Somebody else does the last and most expensive part of the job — the sorting, the transport across the destination country, the walk to the door. Whether that second operator is paid anything, and how much, is not a commercial matter between two companies. It is set by treaty, renegotiated at a diplomatic conference, and it has come closer than most people realise to breaking the oldest working piece of international infrastructure there is.

The Universal Postal Union dates itself to 9 October 1874, when representatives of 22 nations meeting in Bern signed the treaty creating the General Postal Union. In the Union's own account the achievement was to unify "a confusing international maze of postal services and regulations into a single postal territory" for the reciprocal exchange of letters. Membership grew fast enough that the name changed to the Universal Postal Union in 1878. Today the UPU has 192 member countries, is headquartered in Berne, and describes itself as the world's second-oldest international organisation.

The original settlement arrangement was elegantly simple, and it is the part of the story most people have never heard: there wasn't one. Each postal administration kept the postage it collected and delivered incoming foreign mail at its own expense. That is a workable rule under one condition — that roughly as much mail arrives as departs. For most of a century, it broadly did.

The year the accounting started

It stopped. According to the UPU's own explanation of its remuneration systems, terminal dues were adopted at the 1969 Tokyo Congress and came into force in July 1971, to compensate destination countries that by then were receiving substantially more international mail than they sent. The UPU defines the mechanism precisely: the terminal dues system "ensures that the designated operator of the destination country is compensated for the costs associated with the handling, transporting and delivering of the postal items it receives from the sending designated operator".

Terminal dues are one of three remuneration streams the Union administers. Inward land rates do the equivalent job for parcels. Transit charges are paid by the origin operator to an intermediary for forwarding mail onward. All are settled not by tracking individual items but on statistics of the mail exchanged between two operators, specific to the weight and item data of each flow, and all are governed by the UPU Acts, decided at a Congress held every four years.

The methodology in force through the last cycle was set by the 2016 Congress. It sorts countries into tiered groups and applies different rates according to postal development indexes, with the stated long-run aim of arriving at uniform rates everywhere. It also splits the rate structure by physical format: one set of rates for small and large letters, another for bulky letters and small packets containing goods.

That last category is where a nineteenth-century treaty met twenty-first-century retail. Under the rules, a small packet of goods bought online and shipped across a border is a letter-post item. It moves through a system whose rates were designed for correspondence, negotiated between governments, and set below what many destination operators said the delivery actually cost them.

The withdrawal notice

In October 2018, at a session of the UPU's Council of Administration, the United States announced its intention to withdraw from the UPU treaties, citing the remuneration of small packets as a driving factor; under the Union's rules the withdrawal would take effect in October 2019. The United States was preparing to leave the framework governing how mail crosses borders.

A Third Extraordinary Congress was convened in Geneva in September 2019 to deal with it. The UPU's own briefing note for that Congress sets out the options on the table. Option A would have accelerated the scheduled rate increases for bulky letters and small packets from 2021 to 2020 and unified all countries into a single rate system by 2020. Option B would have permitted optional self-declared rates for those formats from 2020, with UPU-applied country-specific ceilings derived from domestic tariffs. Option C combined higher increases brought forward to 2020 with optional self-declaration phased in between 2021 and 2025, also under ceilings.

What the Congress adopted was Option V, approved by acclamation. Its central provision was self-declaration of rates for the E format — bulky letters and small packets — for qualifying member countries from 1 July 2020, with qualification set at inbound letter-post volumes in excess of 75,000 metric tonnes based on 2018 data.

The reaction in the room captured what had just happened rather better than the technical language. UPU Secretary General Bishar A. Hussein said: "The UPU is as strong as it has always been. Today is an historical moment, where we have averted the possible exit of one of our member countries." Siva Somasundram, the Union's director for policy, regulation and markets, called it "a landmark decision for multilateralism and the Union". Peter Navarro, attending for the White House, said that a team working closely with the Director General "has more than achieved the President's goal". All three statements are true simultaneously, which is the honest summary of the outcome.

Read structurally, a system built on collectively negotiated rates had acquired an opt-out, and the volume threshold determined who could use it. A country handling 75,000 tonnes of inbound letter post is not a typical member of a 192-country union. Universality was preserved by making the price non-universal for the largest players first.

What Dubai decided

The direction has held. At the 28th Universal Postal Congress in Dubai in 2025, member countries adopted an Integrated Remuneration System for 2026 to 2030. Under it, letter-post remuneration is calculated from the content of items rather than from bulk weight averages; parcel remuneration moves gradually toward self-declaration based on each country's domestic tariffs; and by 2027 all countries fall under a country-specific remuneration methodology. Congress also adopted a first Integrated Quality of Service Plan, which among other things raises the number of mandatory item scans from six to twelve.

That is a substantial change of principle, and it is worth stating without euphemism. The 2016 methodology aimed at uniform rates for everyone. The 2025 system aims at country-specific rates for everyone. What survives of the single postal territory is not a common price but a common set of obligations to accept, carry, track and deliver each other's mail — an interoperability standard, backed by settlement that increasingly reflects domestic cost structures instead of overriding them.

One number puts the whole dispute in proportion, and it comes from the UPU's own State of the Postal Sector 2024. Cross-border traffic is a sliver of what postal operators handle: international items accounted for 0.5 per cent of letter-post volumes and 0.7 per cent of parcel-post volumes in 2024. Both shares were far higher more than a century ago, peaking at 5.5 per cent and 7.3 per cent respectively in 1913. The report also records international parcel demand through the postal channel falling by close to 60 per cent between 2019 and 2024, against a network that now serves a population of 7.3 billion, up from roughly 600 million when the treaty was signed.

So the fight that nearly cost the Union the United States was a fight over the pricing of less than one per cent of the world's mail. It mattered anyway, for a reason unrelated to volume. The single postal territory is what makes it possible to put an address on an envelope in one country and have it arrive in any of 191 others without a private contract, a customs broker or a courier account. That guarantee is maintained not by goodwill but by an accounting rule, renegotiated every four years, that decides what one country's post office owes another for finishing the job.