Measuring the Marshall Plan

Stacy May

From Foreign Affairs, April 1948

Summary:  Not available.

Author biography not available.

When on June 4, 1947, Secretary Marshall spoke at Harvard of the terms upon which the United States stood ready to aid European recovery, neither he nor his Commencement audience probably realized that his modest speech would lay the cornerstone of a major reconstruction of world political and economic policy.

Like all pronouncements of genuinely universal significance, the words of the Secretary of State crystallized aspirations already deeply rooted in the minds of men in many nations. After reviewing the wholesale disintegration of the fabric of Europe's economy resulting from the war, the Secretary stated that it was the purpose of the United States to contribute to "the revival of a working economy in the world, so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist." He made it clear that "the initiative must come from Europe," and that the aid of the United States would be offered to those who demonstrated their readiness to collaborate in such a general recovery but would be withheld from those who manoeuvred to block it. Finally, he stated that "any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative" to the ills that had contributed and were contributing to "hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos."

The yeast in Secretary Marshall's words lay in the promise of American aid to an indigenous European Recovery Program, designed no merely to reconstitute the state of unstable equilibrium which had preceded the last war, but rather to establish a solid economic foundation of mutual collaboration and interdependence that would preclude the recurrence of armed conflict such as had engulfed Europe and involved the United States twice in a single generation.

It was no part of Secretary Marshall's intent to make the European Recovery Plan an instrument in a war of ideologies between the Soviet Union and the United States. That result came from Russia's refusal to associate herself, or allow her satellites to associate, with the swiftly asserted initiative of the nations of western Europe to fulfill the terms which the Secretary had defined as precedent to the granting of American aid. By taking this grave step, the Soviet Union clearly placed itself in the category which Secretary Marshall denominated "governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom, politically or otherwise," and hence among those who "will encounter the opposition of the United States." It was by choice other than our own that the European Recovery Program has become a joint instrument of United States and western European policy that must be carried out in the face of avowed Soviet hostility.

No sober appraisal of the Program can afford to ignore its continuing implications. For the nations of western Europe, it means a commitment to collaborative action that must continue far beyond the restoration of the prewar status quo. Carried to its logical conclusion, it calls for a degree of economic and perhaps political unity in Europe that has never been attained in the past. For the United States is means a clear recognition of the hard truth that the conditions necessary to a stable Europe are necessary to our interests as well, for the simple reason that a major European war is certain to involve us too. Thus viewed, the European Recovery Plan does not represent for us either an investment gamble or a game to be played through to a decision and a hand-shake all round. In describing it we cannot afford the luxury we indulged in when we were awakening support for UNRRA, the Reciprocal Trade Agreement renewal, the British Loan, and the International Bank and Monetary Fund, namely of pretending that the step under consideration was the unique and final measure needed to discharge our responsibilities toward Europe.

The only tenable attitude for us is to regard the Marshall Plan as a current step toward a steadfast goal which both we and the nations of western Europe understand and are determined to achieve. Clear awareness of the objective is far more important than any detail of administrative procedure, and even more important than the dimension of the aid we propose initially to offer. The best rule for defining the terms of our assistance is that they should be flexible enough to allow accommodation to exigencies that cannot presently be foreseen. The best determination of magnitude is, to paraphrase a quip of Mr. Lincoln, that our aid should be large enough to reach from our intention to the realization of our goal.

However hot our passion for the objective -- and for Americans, at least, no conviction is truly tempered unless it has been touched by fire -- our processes of appraisal and measurement should always be conducted at low temperature. We are asked to pay the score, and we should add it up to see whether it promises to give fair value for our pains and falls within the limits of our resources.

Fortunately, the information upon which such an accounting may be based is at hand. Indeed, we in the United States who often plunge into the most momentous decisions with nothing to guide us but our faith find ourselves a thought embarrassed by the wealth of data that has been made available upon this unprecedentedly studied problem. Last summer the 16 nations which elected to enter into the conversations which we had suggested met in Paris to schedule what each could do severally, what each could contribute to the others, and what deficits must be met by outside assistance. From then on there has issued such a spate of statistical estimating, here and abroad, that even the hardiest of professionals have been put to it to ride the torrent.

The very profusion of the data offered may justify the inevitably dull exercise of making one additional attempt to marshal this welter of information in a form to answer three elementary but crucially important questions:

What is the magnitude of the burden that the United States is being asked to assume?