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.

First, political support in the United States for the Marshall Plan was bipartisan and embraced most of the country's major interests. The United States should face the truly revolutionary problems that the next century will bring with an equally bipartisan and broad-based foundation. Second, the Marshall Plan's program was not worked out bilaterally by the United States and the individual countries of Europe but multilaterally. The behind-the-scenes influence of the United States was immense, and the staff work provided by the states differed considerably, but one cannot overestimate the importance of the Marshall Plan's multilateral character. It provided an essential element of dignity and partnership to even the smallest powers. In the 21st century, the diffusion of power makes it even more essential that plans of action be arrived at on a multilateral basis.

The 21st century will not be worth living if we neglect the lessons of the preceding century: efforts at regional or global hegemony end badly, as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union discovered. As China and India reach industrial maturity, the older industrial powers may be brought closer together, and Russia may be forced into closer association with the West. In short, as the architecture and the issues of the 21st century become clear, the West may face problems of integration on a scale larger than those of the Marshall Plan period. The Marshall Plan did not merely put the economies of Western Europe back on their feet. It was part of the effort to create a world unlike that of the failed interwar years; it was closely interwoven with the military and political campaign to deny communism's global vision; and it was the matrix within which the Europeans drew together and learned from a parochial past. This is indeed a story from which the world can garner a few lessons.