A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

(Jacob Rumans) #1

recant. The West went ahead. Ministers of sixteen
European nations met in September 1947
together with the three military governors repre-
senting the Western German occupation zones.
They agreed on the outlines of a four-year
European recovery programme. By the following
April 1948, a permanent Organisation for Euro-
pean Economic Co-operation, the OEEC, had
been set up. This in turn worked out the individ-
ual programmes of the participating countries (the
German Federal Republic, formed from the
Western occupation zones, became a full member
in October 1949). Congress meanwhile had
established an American counterpart in 1948, the
US Economic Co-operation Administration.
Through it, $12,992 million of aid between 1948
and 1952, as well as technical assistance, more
than 90 per cent of which was not repayable, was
channelled to the Western European nations. In
the event little Western European economic inte-
gration, one of Marshall’s aims, was achieved; but
the aid was a significant accelerator of the recovery
already under way before 1948.
The need the US perceived to reconstruct
Western European societies was not entirely altru-
istic of course. Americans saw such reconstruction
as the necessary condition of preventing the
spread of communism. What did converge, how-


ever, were American policy aims and the greater
prosperity and happiness of the peoples of
Western Europe. It has been argued that a desire
for American export markets was one of the
motives behind Marshall’s offer; in fact, exports to
Europe constituted only a small fraction of US
trade. More notable is the American insistence on
European economic cooperation. What most con-
cerned the Truman administration was not any
narrow US economic advantage – indeed, some of
the policies Americans now urged ran counter to
their immediate economic interests – but the
strengthening of Western Europe. American pol-
icy in this respect coincided with the hopes and
aims of the West European governments.
Relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated
to a new low point in the wake of the Truman
Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the evident
determination of Britain and the US to move
towards a separate West German state. The agree-
ments reached at Potsdam to treat Germany as a
whole were for all practical purposes dead by the
spring of 1948. Would it be possible to maintain
the Potsdam arrangements for the four-power
occupation of Berlin? The Kremlin was to test the
West’s resolve. In the summer of 1948, the Soviet
blockade of Berlin created the most serious crisis
of the immediate post-war era.

368 THE UNITED STATES AND THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR, 1945–8

Ernest Bevin,
Britain’s foreign
secretary warmly
welcomes the
Marshall Plan
and signs the
agreement a
month later.
© Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis
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