Marshall Plan and the Post

Marshall Plan and the Post 911 Global War on Terror

Many times in the history of the world, war or its aftermath has threatened catastrophe. Following the end of the First World War, the leaders of the victorious allied nations imposed punishing reparations on defeated Germany. The resultant economic depression and deep resentment has been blamed by many for the rise of Hitler and militant fascism. Hitler's ascent to power led directly to the even greater horrors of World War II. The carnage and destruction that was Europe in 1945 left impressions that were not easily dispelled. The Globe's leaders sought ways to prevent a repeat of the circumstances that had caused the two world wars. The United Nations represented an attempt to bring the nations of the Earth together in peaceful discussion. But the United Nations was not a military or economic power. Indeed, in 1945, there was only one great power in the World, and that was the victorious United States of America - a nation that dominated global affairs as had no other country before in the history of humankind. The United States; therefore, saw itself as possessed of a unique responsibility to build a safer and better world. The broken international system needed to be re-ordered, the devastated countries of Europe rebuilt as bulwarks against future military threats. The plan undertaken by the United States - the Marshall Plan - was one of joint economic and military assistance, the aim of which would be the preservation of United States security through the creation of a natural alliance between America and the nations of Western Europe and the wider Free World. For already, in the late 1940s, the world order was being challenged by the emergence of a new threat in the form of the Soviet Union and its bloc of communist allies. In a bi-polar world, the American Marshall Plan could mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death for American and Western democracy, capitalism, and social and cultural values.

Origins of the Marshall Plan

At the end of the Second World War, Europe lay in ruins. Great cities were little more than bombed out shells, particularly in Germany and Eastern Europe. Germany was entirely devastated, its economy non-existent, the country in the hands of occupying armies. As the war had drawn to a close, arguments among the Allies revolved around what to do with the country after Hitler's defeat. An early plan to divide up German territory among the victors was quickly shelved in favor of the need to rebuild and reorganize the former power, with Stalin's Russia demanding economic reparations and the Western Allies - the United States, Britain, and France - leery of re-creating the post-World War One conditions that had led to the second, more catastrophic war.

All except Stalin seemed agreed that the economic hardships imposed by reparations had played a leading role in Hitler's rise to power and the consequent success of a German revenge motivation in going to war against the other nations of Europe. Naturally, Stalin wished to recoup some of the Soviet losses at the hands of the Nazis. German depredations had been terrible, both in terms of loss of human life and materiel. Ultimately, it was decided that while the Soviets could extract reparations from their zone of occupation in East Germany, the West's priority would be the economic recovery of West Germany and its hope for participation in Western economic and political life.

Though on the side of the victors, France and Britain had been virtually ruined economically. France had been conquered, and then plundered, by the Germans. France was also the scene of much fighting, its cities and countryside still bearing the marks of modern industrial warfare. The British Empire had been brought to its knees by the strains of war, and its once great wealth was gone. Only two years after the war, the United Kingdom would be forced to let go of the crown jewel of its empire - India and all its potential riches. Italy and the smaller countries of the West were equally devastated. If economic aid was to come at all it must come from the United States. America was the only major nation untouched by the actual ravages of war. No battle had been fought on its soil, and its industry had actually expanded as a result of wartime production. At the end of the War, the United States accounted for fully half of the world's manufacturing output, and held an unbelievable sixty-one percent of its total gold reserves, and five years later American reserves were still 2.73 times as great as its liquid liabilities.

Only the United States possessed the necessary wealth, and wealth-generating capacity, to fund any sort of international recovery.

In 1946 and 1947, Europe appeared to descend deeper into collapse as even the forces of nature seemed arrayed against it. The continent that Winston Churchill described as nothing more than a "rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate" was buffeted by a severe drought followed by a severe winter, while Germans and Austrians starved in the streets, six million British subjects remained out of work, and communist forces almost triumphed in Greece.

The rampant spread of Soviet communism throughout Eastern Europe appeared to find fertile ground for further expansion in the spreading horrors of the West and South. Americans realized that something must be done if the entire continent were not to fall under the sway of Marxist ideology and Soviet-backed regimes. Seen in this light, the plan for European recovery was a form of emergency aid that was meant to prevent the strengthening of America's enemies. A nation that had risen to global preeminence through the power of capitalist know-how could not allow the reaction to the horrors of war threaten its future success and influence. The more Stalin consolidated his hold over Eastern Europe, the more American interests appeared threatened in the rest of the continent. The Berlin Airlift was but a symbol of possibly dire problems, as Soviet forces closed off access to West Berlin. General George Marshall returned from his 1947 visit to Europe convinced that Stalin was determined to overrun the West - only a firm plan for European recovery would create the necessary conditions to prevent a cataclysm, in the words of the historian Theodore White, "The Marshall Plan had won because it had linked gain with freedom, had assumed that the movement of minds and the movement of peoples must go with the movement of goods and merchants."

The plan for the economic recovery of Europe would be premised on the idea that wealth and prosperity would bring with them a respect for capitalism and democratic institutions and, most importantly of all, a commitment to a system of joint security presided over by the United States of America.

The Marshall Plan: Implementation and Specific Goals

The Marshall Plan was much more than a means to aid in the recovery of nations devastated by war. Rather it was an elaborate scheme designed to instill a complete system of values, and so create a power bloc that would be juxtaposed against the growing threat from the Soviet system. The European states that were the target of American assistance would receive sizeable grants of funds as well as technical and other forms of aid. The idea was to strengthen capitalism at the same time as the local economies were rebuilt. American methods of business were imported along with much needed cash. American know-how would be used as a tool of American propaganda. By showing what good the United States could do for the people of the "old continent," the ideas and tastes of the new continent would gain wider acceptance. American would come to set norms and goals. Everything would work toward the furtherance of American interests. Not only economic, but also political, cultural, and social alliances would be built. A kind of symbiosis would hopefully develop that would guarantee American security and predominance as far as the eye could see.

George Marshall delivered a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 in which he specifically addressed the issue of European "demoralization," speaking of how that demoralization threatened overall peace and security:

Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United

States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.

In keeping with the idea that the program was meant to benefit Americans and Europeans equally, Marshall emphasized, in addition, the notion that much of the initiative for the scheme must come, not from the United States, but from the Europeans whom it was intended to help.

Thus, paramount American interests were to be presented as being really the interests of the Europeans themselves. It would be a situation wherein America was simply helping along people who were, at present, unable to adequately help themselves. The concept had much in common with the goals of many charity or self-help organizations - people grow and are transformed by learning to help themselves. They are given assistance so as to be enabled to learn the skills and life ways necessary to improve their own conditions. Naturally, everything that was in the "real" interests of Europeans would also be in the interests of the United States. The more similar the peoples of the two continents could become, the more readily Europeans could identify their own aspirations with those of the American people, the closer would be the bond between the two sides. In effect, the new post-War Europe would be an Americanized Europe - the once colonized colonizing the motherland.

As a consequence, the United States found itself embroiled in the political and social controversies of Europe. France, in the late 1940s, was riven by dissent among the various political and social factions. Labor unrest was high and the government was in a terrible financial condition. An alliance of political parties including conservatives and socialists, the Third Force, maintained a fragile control of the state, as Americans, desperate to introduce the aid promised by the Marshall Plan, look on. Any delay in introducing the Marshall Plan was seen as a threat to future American interests, as it would prevent the United States from intervening actively in French affairs.

France faced escalating prices at home, coupled with a funds crisis that was exemplified by its perilous balance of trade. The French were producing enough to satisfy domestic needs, but there was little incentive to export goods that would offset French international debts.

While French officials proposed a process of "sterilization" of funds, in which large amounts of liquidity would be introduced from the outside i.e. The Marshall Plan, few French were willing to put up with the austerities that this scheme would demand.

Thus was another problem introduced into the American effort to turn the Europeans in their direction. By injecting itself in the middle of fundamental debates over French life, the United States was creating real difficulties at the time, and potential problems down the road. The Third Force was strongly anti-communist, but the power of the socialists within the coalition, and the continual infighting between them and the more conservative and traditionalist elements within the government showed the great strains presented by the arrangement. Socialism is not ideologically terribly far from communism. France, as was other European countries of the period, greatly affected by the lure of systems which purported to bring help to all segments of the population, and to level inequalities. If the American aid plan were to be seen as forcing Frenchmen to accept a status quo in which the masses would be compelled to accept a comparatively poor standard of living, many might turn to more radical solutions. The Communists were initially favorable to the government and participated in the first post-War coalition government, their ministers being expelled only in 1947 when the Third Force came to power, the expulsion a sign that battle lines were hardening between the right wing Gaullists and the forces of the left.

The same cleavage was opening in France as was opening in other European countries. The desperately needed infusion of funds that was represented by the Marshall Plan could prove to be a double-edge sword, hardening class distinctions and driving supporters of both sides to greater extremes, and possibly toward open conflict.

The full spectrum of Marshall Plan implications, pro and con, was demonstrated by the Italian Parliamentary Elections of 1948. The issues presented here drew into the conflict passionate voices on both sides of the Atlantic. Italian-Americans followed the developments closely as factions within their ancestral land battled for the future of Italy. The strength of the communist movement in Italy as a result of Italy's defeat and devastation in the Second World War no doubt contributed to a hardening of anti-communist attitudes among Italian-Americans. Though discriminated against by the restrictive quotas of 1920s immigration law - laws that were still in full effect in the late 1940s - they saw it worth their while to identify as completely as possible with the mores of their new country; a 1952 survey showing that sixteen percent more Italian-Americans viewed the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in a favorable light than viewed him and his crusade unfavorably.

The United States government vigorously intervened in the fight against Italy's powerful communist and socialist bloc, funneling $227 million in interim economic aid to Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi's Christian Democrats.

The aid would hopefully create the impression that the Christian Democrats could take control of the situation, and bring an end to Italy's dire circumstances. Ominously; however, the Communists and Socialists were combined under the name of the Popular Front - a clear statement of their general manifesto that they, and their Marxist ideologies, represented a genuine concern for average Italians. The United States also attacked the Italian situation in terms of international disputes. America supported Italy's claims to Istria and Trieste, both of which had been taken away from Italy after World War II. Americans also supported an end to the crushing reparations Italy had been forced to pay, advocating as well, the position that Italy should be able to receive payments from Germany - payments she had been forbidden to receive because of her former role as one of Hitler's allies - as a response to the brutal post-1943 Nazi occupation of the country.

American labor unions with large Italian memberships also worked to raise funds for the anti-communist fight in Italy, sending money to De Gasperi's campaign.

Once again, the Marshall Plan was being administered with an eye toward the Americanization of another potential friend in the larger global fight against Soviet communism. In Italy, a country considered industrially backward prior to the war, the development of capitalism as an institution appeared as a fundamental issue in American strategy. As New York Times correspondent, Michael L. Hoffman, described the situation, "The idea of persuading the low income consumer to feel the need for something he's never had, using advertising, and then to give it to him at a price he can afford, could be the Marshall Plan's biggest contribution to Italy -- if it gets anywhere."

American funds would constitute a crash course in the benefits of capitalist living. Lower income Italians, like similar populations in other European nations, would be shown that their interests lay with the system that could most easily and successfully raise their standard of living. Consumer goods would be shown as desirable, and a life of creature comforts something for which it would be worth fighting.

The Italian campaign revealed yet more of the all-embracing nature of the Marshall Plan. Targeted would be not merely the working people of Italy, those unaccustomed to the wonders of modern technology, but children across the European continent. American planners recognized the need to shape the hearts and minds of the young as being foundations upon which a future favorable to America and its ideals could be built. If American ideas were to be imported and fully embraced, a fertile ground had to be prepared for their acceptance. As part of "Operation Bambi," Mobile puppet shows, ostensibly for children, were actually also used to reach illiterate and semi-literate adults to teach them the values of a capitalist society.

By showcasing the tangible material benefits of capitalism, proponents of the Marshall Plan hoped to achieve success on a variety of levels. An appreciation of capitalist principles would prepare the way for an expansion of American businesses in Europe. In addition, these businesses would be more likely to adopt American methods if those methods were presented as part of the aid package, and taught to youngsters and those first making their way under changing post-War economic conditions. Such aims frequently faced local criticisms, as in Italy. There, the European Recovery Plan was blamed for the fall-off in hemp production, a significant industry in the area, while still others complained that the Marshall Plan put obstacles in the way of trade with the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc - potentially lucrative sources of income.

Further, Italian communists claimed that, Czechoslovakia, while not yet under the full control of Communist forces, had actually been forced to import wine, oranges, oil, lemons, and rice on American orders - a fact to which Italian Primie Minister De Gasperi had turned "a deaf ear."

The American propaganda that accompanied the Marshall Plan emphasized the strides being made by American technology, and the importance of continued bold innovation in modern economic systems. As Stephen Gundle showed, even in contentious Italy,

Communist militants and sympathizers adapted by making their own private pacts with whatever America was offering, buying the records, seeing the films, drinking Coke in bars like everyone else and in the face of militant official anti-Americanism. In Carpi, the jumper-knitters took their sketch pads to the cinema to copy the fashions of the stars. Finished products might appear in American-style boxes.

The Americans were clearly winning the battle for hearts and minds. Creeping Americanization was affecting even the way die-hard Italians lived and did business - despite the complaining and the rumors of undue pressure and official collusion and submission. European business was pushed decisively along American operational lines, cartels were diminished, and European nations were encouraged both to accept the establishment of American enterprises on their soil, and also to establish their own manufacturing subsidiaries outside of their home countries.

In a way, the America's plan for European Recovery was also laying the groundwork for the later philosophy of Globalism. By establishing a pattern of cooperation between Americans and Europeans, the Marshall Plan was reorganizing society along internationalist, and essentially, American-controlled lines. The business community that was at the very core of American life and identity was expanding into Europe, and the European business community was joining with it. The more central to European identity that Americans could make the Capitalist ethos, the more likely the symbiosis would become complete. A world populated by friendly capitalist allies would be a world that was friendly to - and safe for - American interests.

The Marshall Plan: Lessons for a Post-9/11 World

Many of the principles of the Marshall Plan have been applied in the years since. The idea of containing communism, of course, remained central to American international policy throughout the Cold War. The United States fought two wars intended to contain communism and to prevent the expansion of the spheres of influence of a communist nations. While America's chief enemy was always cast as the Soviet Union, both of these wars - Korea and Vietnam - were essentially fought to prevent the People's Republic of China from spreading its power beyond its boarders. Much Cold War policy revolved around the "Domino Theory," or the idea that if one nation in a given region became communist, others would fall to communism as well... just as one domino topples another. The Marshall Plan "imbued economists with a strong close of confidence in the feasibility of re-developing battered economies with the help of investment related policies combined with the tools of economic planning."

If the United States should be compelled to go to war to defend its interests, or should a region be devastated by war, it would be to the advantage of the United States to appear as a force of regeneration. By infusing struggling economies with large doses of cash, technical and other know-how, America would appear as the "good guy," striving to the improvement of national economies and local livelihoods. That the Marshall Plan appeared as a threat to the Communist powers was evident early on is revealed in a 1947 speech by Andrei Zhdanov to the Soviet Cominform. Zhdanov essentially compared passive acceptance of the United States aid represented by the Marshall Plan to the Western Powers' acceptance of Hitler's machinations at Munich.

Financial aid, as much as overt military intervention, constituted a real attempt to expand American power and influence around the globe. A physical presence could be complimented by a psychological presence in the form of American capitalist institutions and ways of thinking. The Marshall Plan was a very powerful weapon indeed, whether in Europe, or in altered forms in later years and in other parts of the world.

Nonetheless, as shown by the Soviet reaction, the Marshall Plan and similar re-building schemes could produce an effect opposite to that intended. By 1980, the United States had given some $6 billion in non-military aid to South Korea in an attempt to turn that country into a Western-style democracy with Western capitalist values.

Though the transformation was ultimately successful, in American eyes, the process took a peculiar route through the authoritarian regimes of pliable strongmen and military dictators; rulers who were willing to accept South Korea's "proper place" in America's world scheme.

Other regions of the world would not prove so amenable to American plans for their "reformation." The Middle East was clearly one of these regions - an area to which democracy was alien but for one nation of essentially Western origin, the State of Israel. From the time of its foundation in 1948, the United States poured money into Israel, seeing it as a bulwark against an ever-resilient and expanding communism. Home to a population composed primarily of European Jews; the country was immediately at odds with the neighboring Arab nations, who saw in the Jewish State a remnant European colony on Middle Eastern soil. As well, they claimed to favor the cause of the Palestinian Arabs who had, for various reasons, been forced to flee their homes in Israel. The Palestinians and their cause would prove to be an enormous stumbling block in international relations for decades to come, exercising the passions of governments and radical groups even after the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. In just one brief period, from 1978 to 1982, Israel received forty-eight percent of all United States military aid and thirty-five percent of economic aid, while in 1983, the administration of Ronald Reagan requested a further $2.5 billion dollars for Israel out of a total foreign aid budget of $8.1 billion, the aid to include $500 million in direct grants and $1.2 billion in special low interest loans.

Furthermore, the United States supplied Israel with numerous high-tech weapons systems and tax-deductible "charitable" contributions that constituted, in effect, a forced tax.

The blatant favoritism represented by these arrangements has only exacerbated the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Arab peoples - and in a wider sense, Muslim peoples - feel discriminated against by American policies, the victims of plans that seek only to ensure continued Western domination of the globe through a combination of direct and indirect methods. While Israel, a Western nation, receives massive infusions of American aid, the Islamic nations, only recently modernized or still industrial and economic backwaters, struggle to find their place in the modern world. Treated as little more than pawns of either the United States or the Soviet Union during the years of the Cold War, and as sources of oil then and now, the Muslim nations of the Middle East revolt against what they see as unequal preferential treatment. According to Graham Fuller,

The deepest underlying source of Muslim anguish and frustration today lies in the dramatic decline of the Muslim world, in over just a few centuries, from the leading civilization in the world for over one thousand years into a lagging, impotent and marginalized region of the world. This stunning reversal of fortune obsessively shapes the impulses underlying much contemporary Islamist rhetoric.

The Islamic peoples revolt against a world that seems to have left them behind, to have reduced them from the position of conqueror to conquered. Though direct Colonialism has long since left the Middle East to its own devices, Israel remain, in the eyes of Muslims, a visible reminder of continued attempts at Western dominance and control. The horrors of September 11, 2001 were direct outgrowths of this tendency by Muslims to blame others for their predicament.

Since 9/11, the threat of Islamic terrorism and of terrorism in general, has emerged as the major motivating force of United States foreign policy. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the Cold War came to an end. In a continuation of the grand design expounded by the Marshall Plan of more than four decades earlier, America rushed to insinuate itself into the new, capitalist Russia, and its former satellites. American companies invested all across Eastern Europe, bringing with them American techniques and outlooks together with American fiscal resources. Peace would have appeared to have been in the air but for the mergence of new threats. American policy, so successful in the past, appeared only to be exacerbating an already bad situation. American diplomats seem to have difficulty grasping the failure of Many Muslim peoples to grasp the "gifts" of Western civilization. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and now diplomatic elder statesman, sees America in terms of buzzwords like "freedom," "democracy," "social justice," "gender equality," and the all important "quest for human dignity" that is represented by cultural pluralism.

As with the earlier Marshall Plan, America's current day efforts are meant as attempts to bring these values to those to whom they are denied. In this view, the Islamic World languishes in the grip of secular or religious tyrants, all of whom in some measure espouse a world view that is at odds with the demands of modernity. Islamist terrorism is merely the most extreme expression of this rejection of American values. The United States invaded Iraq ostensibly to overthrow a ruthless dictator and to bring democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people. The quick American victory of March and April 2003 has degenerated into a seemingly unending civil war as faction fights faction, and religious zealots attempt, in many regions, to impose a fanatical, fundamentalist form of Islam. Saddam Hussein's regime was relatively tolerant of the rights of women and religious minorities. As long as these "others" did not cause trouble for the dictator they were left alone. Women enjoyed the ability to pursue higher education and careers outside the home. Fundamentalist Islam denounces all these things. In particular, each sect, whether Shia or Sunni, believes itself absolutely correct, and will tolerate no alternative interpretations or practices. Islamic fundamentalism particularly attracts exactly the people who feel most threatened by the West and its values, and who are ironically most able to initiate a terroristic response to its perceived incursions: