Marshall Plan Commemorative Section: Lessons of the Plan: Looking Forward to the Next Century

Walt W. Rostow

From Foreign Affairs, May/ June 1997

Summary:  A look back at perhaps the most important foreign policy success of the postwar period. Edited by Peter Grose, with contributions by historians Diane B. Kunz and David Reynolds, a memoir by Charles P. Kindleberger, a profile of Marshall and Acheson by James Chace and one of Will Clayton by Gregory Fossedal and Bill Mikhail. And reflections from Roy Jenkins, Walt Rostow, and Helmut Schmidt.

Walt W. Rostow, the Rex G. Baker, Jr., Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Austin, was Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and National Security Adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

The European Recovery Program did not, of course, proceed in a vacuum. The world changed a great deal between the end of the Second World War and the death of Stalin in early 1953, soon followed by the end of the Korean War. Nationalist sentiment grew more pronounced in restive colonial areas, and colonial and quasi-colonial relations were succeeded by independence in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. This sea change yielded communist-backed guerrilla wars in places like Indochina and Malaysia, and at times catapulted into power local figures, fresh from struggles against colonial rulers, for whom economic development was at best a secondary concern, such as Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Nkrumah. Just as Marshall aid started flowing, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium became caught up in colonial crises, as local groups demanded independence from their European rulers. These crises strained the European states' economies and drove them to seek military and other help from the United States.

More directly linked to the European Recovery Program was the 1948-49 Berlin crisis, a confrontation that arose from efforts to reform the West German currency and lay the foundation for Germany's comeback. When the new currency was extended to West Berlin, Stalin responded by laying down a blockade of that besieged city. The postwar allies, notably the United States and Britain, supplied West Berlin with food and fuel via an airlift. Neither side wanted a major war over this matter, and the success of the airlift ultimately compelled Stalin to back down. The communist invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, came as a shock. It was programmed to exploit gaps in American military thinking and policy that had developed after 1945. Only after the attack in Korea was National Security Council directive 68, which envisaged a tremendous increase in conventional U.S. capabilities, implemented.

Against this background, the difficult question of German rearmament arose. An immense ground force was needed in Western Europe to deter the Soviet infantry potential, backed after 1949 by a nuclear capability, and Britain, France, Italy, and the United States were all under political and economic constraints that precluded the development of a sufficient European force without a substantial German contribution. German opinion was divided for several reasons. Some feared that the Soviets would regard the arming of West Germany as sufficient provocation for beginning a war. Others were concerned that it would foreclose the possibility of negotiations with the Russians on German unity. On another front, some felt that the rearmament would revive the German martial spirit and that this reawakened militarism might set back democratic, pro-Western forces in West Germany. All Marshall Plan participants recognized that the economic and political stability of Germany was fundamental to the future of the continent, and the effects of rearmament on the German domestic situation were naturally of great concern. In France, the reemergence of German military strength generated profound instinctive opposition. Partly to ease those fears, the United States, after a searching congressional and public debate, committed itself in 1951 to maintaining four divisions in Europe -- a momentous decision, especially considering previous American reactions to French requests for a security guarantee, stretching back to Versailles in 1919.

Thus the Korean War brought about a shift in American military and political strategy, raised the irrepressible issue of German rearmament, and reshaped European security. It brought to the fore a range of new issues and responsibilities for Washington, including expanded U.S. military aid to Europe. But by that time, only four years after the beginning of the Marshall Plan, Europe had recovered and was on its way.

BINDING GERMANY

In the relative quiet that followed the post-1951 improvement in Europe's terms of trade, the death of Stalin, and the conclusion of the Korean War, Europe, including Germany, began to prosper, and thought naturally turned to the long run. The Marshall Plan had given Europe a start on dealing with two abiding problems: the acceptance of a vital Germany in a Europe that would not fear its revival -- a central problem in European security since German unification in 1870 -- and the maintenance of ties, however tenuous, to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, looking to the day when Stalin's empire would collapse. Europe's own efforts to address these issues revolved around what had been a minor Marshall theme compared with the economic recovery of the individual countries: European integration. After 1950 movement toward a greater sense of fraternity in Western Europe focused on the relations between France and Germany. The epic meeting in May 1950 between Jean Monnet of France and Konrad Adenauer of Germany was an authentic turning point in modern European history.

During a solitary two-week holiday in the Alps just before the meeting, Monnet worked out a grand European strategy to present to the West German leader. The rationale for European integration stemmed from two sources. First, as West German recovery proceeded and the increasingly intense Cold War demanded a more active German military contribution, Franco-German tensions were bound to rise. Within the existing framework, France could maintain the existing constraints on German power only through indefinite allied control, but this was inevitably a losing game as West Germany moved toward an equal role in an American-led anti-Soviet coalition. Second, neutralism had become increasingly popular in France and elsewhere in the West, but that path had to be rejected. A neutral Western Europe would be powerless to affect the course of the conflict between the two non-European superpowers. A united Europe with its own voice in the great affairs of the world could exert influence over the Cold War.

For Europe to unite, France and Germany first had to find firm common ground, and only France could initiate that process. In his memoirs, Monnet described the ensuing conversation with Adenauer:

'We want to put Franco-German relations on an entirely new footing,' I said. 'We want to turn what divided France from Germany -- that is, the industries of war -- into a common asset, which will also be European. In this way Europe will rediscover the leading role which she used to play in the world and which she lost because she was divided . . . The aim of the French proposal, therefore, is essentially political. It even has an aspect which might be called moral.'

Adenauer listened attentively and answered with warmth: 'For me, like you, this project is of the highest importance; it is a matter of morality. We have a moral and not just a technical responsibility to our people, and that makes it incumbent upon us to fulfill this great hope . . . I have waited 25 years for a move like this. In accepting it, my government and my country have no secret hankerings after hegemony. History since 1933 has taught us the folly of such ideas. Germany knows that its fate is bound up with that of Western Europe as a whole.'