It’s just about the time to start getting
Christmas cards from overseas relatives, and I started wondering about
how that works. My cousin purchases the stamp in England, so who pays
the US. Post Office for delivering it? Then, while standing in line
at the post office behind several people purchasing money orders, it
struck me that there must be some international organization that makes
all this work. It turns out there is.
When government really works, we hardly notice it.
We don’t have to attend endless stakeholders meetings, write questions
during the public comment period that we know the bureaucrats really
don’t care if they answer, or heaven forbid, try and decide the
correct propositions for incredibly complex policy decisions based on
a couple of paragraphs in our voter’s handbooks. The governance
of international mail really works very well, and I love the name of
the agency that runs it, which to me sounds like something out of the
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – the Universal Postal Union.
The whole thing got started with the development
of the modern postal system in England in 1840, when Sir Rowland Hill
devised a system where, for the first time, postage on letters would
be prepaid, with a standard rate per weight of letter, no matter how
far it was to be sent. This worked so well that he topped it off by
introducing the world’s first postage stamp, and soon Hill’s
reforms were being adopted all over the world. Soon, almost anyone could
afford to write to anybody.
International mail first relied on bilateral postal
treaties, but those soon got so complicated that they got in the way,
so in 1863, U.S. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair arranged a meeting
in Paris to work out common guidelines for such treaties. This lead
to a conference arranged by Heinrich vonStephan of the North German
Confederation, hosted by the Swiss Government and on 9 October 1874,
the Treaty of Bern was signed. The world essentially became one large
postal district and the 9th was named as World Post Day (damn –
missed it again).
The Universal Postal Union has done much to
help the world communicate, developing so many things that we take for
granted, including postal money orders, registered letters and international
air mail. They also provide technical support and advice to less developed
countries. Interestingly, they are working on ways in which to facilitate
internet transactions by setting up shipping, payment and customs clearance
procedures so trade is possible between individuals even in the most
remote parts of the world.
So, when you go to the post office, think of it as
our local portal to a system that, in addition to delivering The
Light, allows people all over the world to communicate through all
but the worst of natural disasters, and even through most wars. Amazingly,
this system is run out of an office in Switzerland with a staff of only
150 people from 40 different countries with such little fuss, muss and
bother that hardly anyone ever thinks about them. Perhaps the folks
in Sacramento should figure out how they do it, and if they find out,
that would be something really worth communicating.