While the precise economic achievements of the Marshall Plan remain contested, historians nonetheless agree that the plan’s political, strategic, and even cultural impact was enormous. Like a series of concentric circles rippling outward from a central node, the impact of the plan carried far beyond the narrow scope of the aid package so vaguely outlined in Harvard Yard in June 1947.
The most immediate political-strategic impact of the Marshall Plan was visible in the United States’ German policy. The Harvard speech did not focus on Germany explicitly, but behind that message lay a sharp break with what had come before; the policy of Potsdam and the slow, heavily constrained German economic recovery it implied was now discarded. At the heart of the Marshall Plan lay an argument that European recovery as a whole could not proceed without a vibrant German economy as its engine. The corollary was true as well: the western part of Germany would not long remain quiescent and pliable unless it was given a role in the broader process of European revival. Marshall’s proposal laid bare - and repudiated - the central contradiction of American policy up to June 1947, and acknowledged that there could not be a European recovery without Germany to underpin it. From a political point of view, then, Marshall’s speech marked the birth announcement of a West German state, though in fact that achievement lay two years in the future.213
The implementation of this strategy had a number of overlapping stages: the upward revision of Germany’s level of industrial production in the summer of 1947; the inclusion of the British-American bizone (the French, for the time being, kept separate control of their own zone) in the emerging Europe-wide agreements on trade and payments that were outlined at the CEEC; the expansion of powers given to German political authorities within the bizone inJanuary 1948; and the inclusion of the bizone in the establishment of the newly formed OEEC itself in April 1948. Of the OEEC, General Lucius Clay, the military governor, noted that "for the first time since surrender, western Germany was a participant in an international undertaking."214
The new American emphasis on placing Germany at the center of a Europe-wide recovery plan was most evident at the London Conference in 1948, where the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg convened to discuss a long agenda of European issues. From February to March, and then again from May to June, the conferees negotiated precisely how the new Germany was to be both controlled and granted some political and economic autonomy. Secretary Marshall and his lieutenants pushed the argument that German recovery could bring security and prosperity to Western Europe; without it, Western Europe would continue to live in fear of an unstable, mercurial Germany, nursing grievances and playing a middle game between East and West. Using the Marshall Plan as a stick as well as a carrot - the Congress passed the ECA in April, right in the midst of the London Conference - the Americans demanded the fusion of the bizone with the French zone of occupation, and agreement on a plan to allow a Constituent Assembly in Germany draw up a federal constitution. As a concession, the Americans accepted the creation of an International Authority that would oversee and control coal and steel production in the industry-heavy Ruhr Valley - a vital French demand - though even this authority would be largely advisory, with no real power. By the end of the London meetings in June 1948, the United States had brought Britain, France, and the nascent German leadership toward a consensus on creating a West German state, partially sovereign, and linked to the West by economic integration.
Can it be said then that the Marshall Plan effectively started the Cold War? No; the chapter in this volume by Vladimir O. Pechatnov makes it clear that US-Soviet relations had already worsened severely during 1946.215 Yet the Marshall Plan surely marked a point of no return. It demonstrated that the Americans had made a clear choice to favor a strong German recovery as the engine of a West European recovery favorable to US interests. The Soviets, meanwhile, saw the plan as part of an American bid for economic and strategic hegemony that required a swift reaction. Moscow insisted that its own satellite states in Eastern Europe reject Marshall aid, and ordered West European Communist Parties to ratchet up their demonstrations, propaganda, and strikes. Within the Soviet sphere of influence in the East, Stalin became far less accommodating to any ideological deviation from the rigid line laid down by the Cominform, the Soviet-dominated association of Communist Parties, in September 1947. This played into the hands of the hardliners throughout Eastern Europe and culminated in the Prague coup of February 1948, when Stalin’s Communist allies in Czechoslovakia engineered the overthrow of the last multiparty government in Eastern Europe. The Soviets radicalized their German policy as well. They denounced the London accord of June 1948 as a breach with wartime and postwar accords, which of course it was. Using the currency reform in the western zones as an excuse, the Soviets cut off land access into and out of the western sectors of Berlin. The Berlin blockade and subsequent airlift completed the transformation of the American role in Germany from occupier to protector. Progress toward fusion of all three zones, the creation of German government institutions, and the promulgation of the Federal Republic of Germany on May 23, 1949 was swift. It may be too much to state that the Marshall Plan started the Cold War, whose many roots reached back across a wide acreage ofwartime and postwar distrust and rivalry. But from June 1947 on, the United States set a course for a western German state and a capitalist European economic revival that confirmed the division of Europe.
Just as the Marshall Plan led directly to the creation of a western German state and the division of Europe, so too did it spur new European security plans that would lead directly to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). 216 The principal architect here was not, however, Secretary Marshall, but the able British foreign minister Ernest Bevin. Bevin, who described Marshall’s plan as "a lifeline to sinking men," had played the key role in getting the CEEC up and running. Yet he also saw immediately the security implications of the plan. If Washington was now committed to a western German revival and perhaps an independent state, Bevin wanted to be sure that Washington would also deal with any adverse consequences, especially mounting Soviet threats to Western Europe. On December 15,1947, Bevin told Marshall he wanted to see the formation of "a western democratic system comprising the Americans, ourselves, France, Italy, etc., and of course the Dominions. This would not be a formal alliance but an understanding backed by power, money, and resolute action. It would be a sort of spiritual federation of the West." In a formal paper, Bevin proposed the creation of a Western Union, including not just the core West European countries but old foes such as Germany, Spain, and Portugal, as well as all the Scandinavian countries. This, he believed, was the only way "to call a halt to the Soviet threat."217 This proposal was well in advance of American ideas. The State Department, then seeking a Congressional commitment of many billions of dollars for Europe, did not want to begin lobbying for a military alliance as well. The Americans responded by giving Bevin their blessing, but refusing any outright support for his alliance scheme. This came as a blow to Bevin, who realized that, without American membership, any European security system would be a hollow shell.
Bevin’s vision for a Western alliance was given a huge and quite unintentional boost by the Prague coup, which galvanized West European leaders. On March 17, 1948, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Pact, a mutual defense agreement, and Bevin again urged the United States to join in a broader Atlantic security system to "inspire the necessary confidence to consolidate the West against Soviet infiltration." The alternative, Bevin pointedly declared in a memo to the US State Department, "is to repeat our experiences with Hitler and to witness the slow deterioration of our position."218 In what has become a case study of "empire by invitation," Bevin and Bidault were positively begging for an assertion ofUS military power into Europe to defend them from what they perceived to be a determined Soviet campaign of expansion.219 If there were any doubts about the Soviet menace, the Berlin blockade quickly dispelled them. The blockade was a massive miscalculation, for it gave Bevin yet another opportunity to plead for a formal military commitment from the United States. In mid-July 1948, the Western powers began exploratory talks on the creation of a Western alliance. The chief obstacle to the alliance was hesitation in the US Congress over weakening the constitutional authority of that body to engage the United States in a war on behalf of an ally. This issue was gradually resolved, and the result, in April 1949, was NATO, composed of twelve members.220 It would not have been created without Bevin’s determination and the bungling tactics of the Soviets; but NATO also sprang from a shared belief that the economic community being created by the Marshall Plan would be strengthened by a mutual defense pact alongside it. Like the ERP, NATO was an expression of transatlantic solidarity, a pact between the United States and Western Europe that underscored a common set of values and governing principles.
The Marshall Plan’s long-term ripple effects reached out beyond Germany and US alliance policies. The plan also shaped the evolution of internal European politics, the process of European integration, and, by legitimizing a particular economic model ofproduction and consumption, opened the way to the Americanization of Europe.
The Marshall Plan clearly impacted the internal political dynamics in a number of recipient states. In France and Italy, the powerful Communist Parties were obliged by Stalin’s Cominform to align their policies with the Soviet bloc, which proved politically disastrous for them. By championing strikes and disruptions of American shipments of grain, tractors, and aid, the Communists put themselves at odds with a needy population; they also pushed away the moderate socialist parties which, in 1945, had been eager to carry a broad left-wing alliance, Popular Front-style, into the period of reconstruction. American tactics could sometimes be crude, as in the manipulation of the Italian elections of 1948, where covert funding of antiCommunist parties may have tipped the balance toward the Christian Democrats; but usually such measures were not necessary. The Marshall Plan forced European parties to choose between Moscow and Washington: all but the Communists chose Washington. By 1948, the Left was decisively split, with the Communists in opposition everywhere and the socialist parties firmly enlisted in the pro-Western camp. The beneficiaries of this leftist strife were the Christian Democrats and affiliated liberal parties, whose rightleaning, often Catholic leaders such as Robert Schuman and Georges Bidault in France, Alcide De Gasperi in Italy, Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard in West Germany, and Dirk Stikker of the Netherlands held power and key Cabinet posts well into the 1950s. Marshall aid helped create a cadre of Atlanticist leaders who shaped postwar Europe.
The Marshall Plan also had a catalytic effect on the process of European integration. The ERP, by placing Germany at the forefront of Europe’s recovery, compelled France, Germany’s perennial rival, to seek out new methods of international control that would block the emergence of a dominant Germany inside Europe. To France’s dismay, the OEEC, on which the Americans had initially placed such high hopes, never evolved into a Europewide control authority. The British, eager to defend the integrity of the sterling bloc and their global network of financial and imperial controls, blocked any serious integration of Britain’s economy with the European continent. The OEEC remained a talking shop, with no powers to compel trade liberalization or currency stabilization. The French therefore felt somewhat bereft: Germany was recovering at a dramatic rate, but the hoped-for "web" of transnational controls was nowhere to be found. Still worse fTom the French point of view, the Americans and British were by the start of 1950 beginning to think about ways to enroll Germany into the Western alliance. The French greatly feared the rearmament of Germany and its entry into the alliance. Not only might such a policy provoke an armed response from the Soviets, but it would also tilt the balance of power in Europe in Germany’s favor; in addition to having a powerful economy, the Germans might soon possess a new, American-supplied army as well. What use would Germany have then for European cooperation? The Americans seemed determined to place West Germany at the center of its Cold War strategy, while Britain was unwilling to provide any counterweight to Germany inside a unified Europe.
Monnet, the creative, energetic director of the French economic recovery agency, suggested a solution to French foreign minister Schuman: France and Germany, and any other willing state in Western Europe, should pool their coal and steel industries, placing them under the international, binding control of a High Authority. In a stroke, Monnet believed, the long wrangle over Germany’s coal and steel production would be swept away. Germany would enter on equal terms into a novel arrangement with France, signifying a joint partnership in a program of industrial expansion. French anxieties would be eased because German industry, should it expand rapidly, would pull France and the rest of Europe along with it. The High Authority would contain Germany: by controlling coal and steel - the sinews of power in the 1950s European economy - it would in effect preside over a new balance of economic power in Europe. But it would do so in a constructive framework rather than through a humiliating military occupation. It would offer an olive branch to Germany while placating French anxieties over German recovery; and it would please the Americans, who had been urging Schuman to take just such a bold step.
On May 9, 1950, Schuman announced a proposal for the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community, which in due course became the cornerstone of the new Europe. The divergent reactions in Washington and London to Schuman’s plan reveal how far apart these two governments had drifted with respect to European integration. The US ambassador in Paris, David Bruce, hailed the plan as "the most constructive thing done by the French government since the Liberation." The response in Britain, by contrast, was hostile and peevish. Bevin seethed with anger at having been ambushed in this way; the Foreign Office felt France had "behaved extremely badly in springing this proposal on the world at this juncture without any attempt at consultation." The British feared that France and Germany were reviving an old dream of a Franco-German cartel in Europe, one with profound implications for Britain's own economy. Britain refused to join subsequent talks on the plan, in principle opposed to a scheme in which decisionmaking would be placed in the hands of a supranational body that was, as Prime Minister Clement Attlee put it, "utterly undemocratic and responsible to nobody."221
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) had six founding members: France, Germany, Italy, and the three Benelux countries. The ECSC placed the coal and steel sectors of these states under a common, supranational authority whose purpose was to rationalize and modernize production, making the industry more efficient while removing decisionmaking fTom the hands of national governments. It started operations in August 1952, headquartered in Luxembourg, and with Monnet as its first chairman. The Marshall Plan did not author the Coal and Steel Community; rather, the ECSC was called into being precisely because the American plan for continental integration through the OEEC had stalled, while German economic recovery was surging ahead. But American officials took enormous satisfaction in the fact that France had become an advocate of the principles behind the ERP: that a Europe bound together by trade and coordinated economic policy would be prosperous and peaceful.222
By promoting the rise of centrist political leaders and laying the groundwork for new international mechanisms of trade, modernization, and industrial growth, the Marshall Plan also contributed, perhaps decisively, to the Americanization of Europe. This term suggests more than simply the exchange of "productivity teams" of European and American industrialists, the screening of films about American factories, or sending traveling caravans into the French countryside to extol the virtues of American productivity - all of which were projects undertaken through the ERP. In the years during and after the Marshall Plan, on a broad front, European governments moved to change the way their peoples worked, produced, and consumed. They lowered tariff barriers to trade within Europe; they adopted American management style in their businesses; they joined in the creation and expansion of multinational corporations, developed higher productivity standards, and eventually began to adopt American-inspired antitrust, deregulation, and privatization policies. The fact that Europeans also began to drink Coca-Cola, wear blue jeans, and watch American films were only symptoms of a deeper convergence among Western states of their habits of production and consumption. Europe and the United States, so different from one another before 1939, began to merge into a genuine transnational community that valued economic growth, security, high standards of living, and mass consumption. These had been the ideas promoted explicitly by the original missionaries of the Marshall Plan.
World History
