Marshall Plan Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The Marshall Plan was a broad package of economic and commercial aid that the United States granted to European countries in the aftermath of World War II (1939–1945). The aid was intended to provide Europe with money to restart international trade in food, to avoid starvation, and to buy from the United States food, fuel, and capital goods to rebuild the continent’s devastated industrial base. It was also an effort to avoid the problems created in the aftermath of World War I (1914–1918) caused by a combination of high reparations imposed on the defeated Central powers and a wave of rising protectionism during the late 1920s and 1930s. The initiative, named after Secretary of State George Marshall and formally known as the European Recovery Plan (ERP), operated from 1948 to 1952 and was a cornerstone of the comprehensive foreign policy of the administration of Harry S.Truman in the opening days of the cold war.

The ERP was developed in reaction to proposals such as the Morgenthau Plan that argued for European reconstruction based on the extraction of resources from Germany. Marshall came away from the 1947 Moscow Conference convinced that the Soviet Union and the United States would not be able to reconcile their foreign policy priorities, and, therefore, it was imperative that the Truman administration undertake dramatic measures to rebuild Western Europe so that the region would be able to resist Soviet continental expansion and contribute to the larger needs of transatlantic security. The outlines of the plan were developed by U.S. Department of State officials, including George F. Kennan, and the proposal was approved by Truman despite concerns that Congress would be unwilling to provide the reconstructions funds. Marshall promulgated the plan at his commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. Truman was able to work with leading Republicans in Congress, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg, to gain bipartisan support, and he signed legislation authorizing the ERP in April 1948.

Multilateral planning for the Marshall Plan began in July, when all of the states of Europe, with the exception of Spain, were invited to a conference to discuss terms and conditions of U.S. aid. The Soviets declined to participate and prevented those states of Eastern Europe under their control from attending. Soviet concerns were based on U.S. demands for economic openness as a precondition for participation and the potential that the ERP could undermine Moscow’s control in Eastern Europe.

Negotiations resulted in an agreement whereby the United States would provide aid and loans to sixteen countries in exchange for economic reforms, including tariff eliminations, and oversight by an American agency, the Economic Cooperation Administration. The multilateral Organization for European Economic Cooperation was created to coordinate planning and aid distribution. (The body later became the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Over a four-year period, the United States provided more than $13 billion in aid to Western Europe. The ERP was critically important in rebuilding the shattered economies of Western Europe and binding those states to the United States during the cold war. The participating states experienced an average increase in gross domestic product of more than 30 percent and an increase in their industrial output by more than 40 percent. Subsequent U.S. efforts to develop similar multilateral or regional aid programs never met the level of success of the Marshall Plan.

Bibliography:

Dulles, Alan W. The Marshall Plan. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Europe, 1947–1952. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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