Europe After World War II

Europe after World War II

There is little doubt that ten years after World War II, Europe would have had a very different landscape had it not been for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Moreover, it is likely that many parts of Europe would not be as thriving today if these plans had not been implemented.

Given the Soviet expansion after World War II, Greece and Turkey were prime targets to have fallen under communism. This of course was the reason Truman used for granting some $400 million in military and economic aid in an effort to ward off an inevitable domino effect of acceptance of communism throughout the region (Truman pp). Without the aid, Greece and Turkey would have looked much like many of the Eastern European countries that fell to communism after the War. Today, they would most likely look much as they do today, for it is unlikely that communism would have succeeded more than a decade given the region's history of civil war.

The Marshall Plan was extremely successful and not only relieved widespread privation and averted the threat of a serious economic depression, it also enabled the West European nations to recover from the devastation of the War and maintain economic and political independence (Introduction pp). Moreover, it paved the way for other forms of international cooperation such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OCED, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, and today's European Union (Introduction pp). The two major aims of the plan was to prevent the spread of communism in Western Europe and to stabilize the international order that would aid in the development of political democracy and free-market economies (Introduction pp).

The $13.3 billion provided by the United States definitely contributed to European recovery (Introduction pp).

World War II had devastated much of the continent, leaving the local economies in ruin and millions homeless (Marshall pp). Moreover, the destruction of agriculture had led to conditions of starvation in many areas of the continent (Marshall pp). Many of the greatest cities were in ruins, others were severely damaged, and of particular concern was the damage to the transportation industry, such as railways, bridges, roads, and the number of merchant shipping boats that had been sunk (Marshall pp).