For a general survey of political economy in the West throughout the era of the Cold War, consult Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). For the major strand of Western postwar policies, see Peter A. Hall (ed.), The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). For influential analyses by contemporaries who sought a common logic underlying the contending economic and social systems, see Raymond Aron, Sociologie des societes industrielles: esquisse d’une theorie des regimes politiques (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire [Sorbonne lectures], 1958); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, i960); and John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: New American Library, 1967). Walt Whitman Rostow's widely read The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i960) suggested a common developmental logic and chronology for industrializing societies, which at a late stage might then choose either aggressive collectivist goals or more rational consumer-oriented welfare.
The orientation of labor movements appeared to be a crucial political stake that rested on economic outcomes. Among the numerous studies in many languages, see Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, i987); Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951, trans. by Harvey Fergusson, II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Siegfried Mielke (ed.), Organisatorischer Aufbau der Gewerkschaften 1945-1949 (Cologne: Bund Verlag, i987); Peter Lange and George Ross, Unions, Change, and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945-1980 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982); and, for a view from Asia, Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, i998). Post-i970 developments allowed a new perspective on the role of labor and mass production. For issues surrounding "Fordism" and its historical contingency, see Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), Worlds of
Possibility: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
In addition to early celebratory accounts, there is a large scholarly literature on how the Marshall Plan functioned. For the concepts behind the European Recovery Program, see Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); for mechanisms, see Imanuel Wexler, The Marshall Plan Revisited: The European Recovery Program in Economic Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); for the impact, see Alan S. Milward, "The Marshall Plan and German Foreign Trade," in Charles S. Maier and Gunter Bischof (eds.), The Marshall Plan and Germany: West German Development within the Framework of the European Recovery Program (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1991), 452-87. For the European Recovery Program in the context of Cold War rivalry, see Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1947-1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and for a focus on a decisive resource, David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1974 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). The transition from a decade of dollar shortages to one of dollar surplus and its consequences for Amercan policy is the theme of Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
For US influence on economic organization more generally, see John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); the final chapters of Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 336-480; and Matthias Kipping and Ove Bjarnar (eds.), The Americanisation of European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of US Management Models (London: Routledge, 1998). For an early discussion of the politics of development assistance, see Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).
For state socialist economics in general, see Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); for its history, see W. Brus, "Postwar Reconstruction and Socio-Economic Transformation," in Michael Kaser and Lisanne Radice (eds.), The Economic History of Eastern Europe, 1919-1977, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 564-643. For early discussion of the cybernetic enthusiasm in state socialism, see V. G. Afanasyev, The Scientific Management of Society, trans. L. Ilyitskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971; Russian original, 1967?). The Soviet role in postwar Germany was dispassionately treated in J. P. Nettl's still valuable The Eastern Zone and Soviet Policy in Germany 1945-1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), and is recently assessed by Norman Naimark in The Russians in Germany: A History ofthe Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Andrew Port's Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) documents how state socialism managed to function on the local level during the Walter Ulbricht years, while the continuing failure to satisfy consumer demands is analyzed by Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), as well as in Charles S. Maier,
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Across the world, Chinese rural catastrophes under Communism emerge from Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
For the burden of military expenses, see Till Geiger, "Economic Growth and National Security: National Income Analysis, Western Rearmament, and Cold War Strategy, 19501952,” International History Review (2004); also Till Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War: The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1947-1977 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Charles S. Maier, "Finance and Defense: Implications of Military Integration, 1950-1952,” in F. H. Heller and J. R. Gillingham (eds.), NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic Alliance and the Integration of Europe (London: Macmillan, 1992), 335-51. On Soviet military spending, see David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). Environmental impacts of the Cold War are currently under scrutiny by John McNeill, who discusses the Green Revolution in that framework (see his chapter in volume III of The Cambridge History of the Cold War), while Arvid Nelson, Cold War Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), sees both the forests and the trees in his unique study of woodlands management in the German Democratic Republic. For further suggestions, see the bibliographical essays in volumes II and III.
World History
