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This chapter summarises the far and near origins of the Marshall Plan project, and the American and European contexts in which it was born and developed. Emphasises the evolution of the Plan in practice, as ever more meanings and objectives were projected on to it, ending with a complete blueprint for the modernization of western Europe's economy as a whole via the two key watchwords: productivity and integration. Special attention is drawn to the information and propaganda effort devoted to putting over these propositioins, and responses to them. Italy, already a key Cold War country in 1948, is treated as a special case, where a wide range of responses to the Plan in general can be traced; comparisons are made with responses in other participating nations, and comments on the Plan's short and long term results are included.

This chapter examines the New Left argument that the Marshall Plan evolved out of the corporatist framework of American foreign economic policy-making set before the Second World War. It also challenges the notion that the economic goals and programmes of the Marshall Plan enhanced and remained compatible with the thrust of cold war strategic defence. As evidence to the contrary, this chapter focuses on one Marshall Aid programme, the US Productivity and Technical Assistance Programme (USTA&P), and its struggle to advance business reform overseas in the face of shifting cold war military objectives and European reactions.

This chapter discusses the impact of American industrial practices on the Italian steel industry in the post-war period. The chapter is organized into three sections. Firstly the chapter provides some basic background information on the structure and performance of the Italian post-war steel industry. It then examines the impact of the Marshall Plan on post-war reconstruction investment. The central part of this section deals with the negotiations over the allocation of US funds to the state-owned sector, but there are also brief accounts of Marshall Plan aid to other steel producers, particularly the Falck group and Fiat. The final section in the chapter looks at the attempts made by Italian managers, particularly in Cornigliano, to copy and follow the ‘American model’.

Peace is not only difficult to build, but, like war, it has important economic and financial consequences. Unlike the post-World War periods when policymakers, scholars, and practitioners debated the ‘transfer problem’ of paying war reparations, as well as the Marshall Plan, post-Cold War economic reconstruction failed to generate a rigorous theoretical and practical debate. In fact, because countries were at low levels of development, reconstruction followed a misplaced ‘development as usual’ approach, ignoring that national reconciliation is a key goal during the transition to peace in countries coming out of internal conflict. Chapter 2 argues that, given the reversal of the peace process in Lebanon and Sri Lanka and the failing transitions to peace in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and others, it is not too late to initiate a debate about alternative policies and practices for effective economic reconstruction in the new context.

Gordon is back at his teaching duties in January 1948 but continues to work with his colleagues in the State Department on European recovery. He was forewarned by his friend Richard Bissell that Paul Hoffman would call to offer him a post in the new Washington ECA headquarters, and Hoffman does offer Gordon a key position, but Gordon has a counterproposal. He suggests that he establish the ECA Program Division, recruit staff and a deputy who will succeed him after the office is up and running, recruit for the mission posts, and then be allowed to depart for Paris to help implement the Marshall Plan in Europe. In August 1948 Gordon joins Harriman in Paris and participates in critical negotiations with the European Marshall Plan recipient countries. Harriman asks him to stay on, but Gordon asks if he can defer the appointment until early in the next year because of his wife’s difficult pregnancy. Gordon arrives in Paris with his family (now with four children) in early 1949, and the family has difficulties. Two of the children contract polio, and Gordon is away from home early mornings to late evenings. Harriman is a demanding boss. The relations between Harriman and Hoffman are initially strained, and the relatively smooth implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe results in considerable measure from the constant contact and frequent visits between Richard Bissell, the number-three official in Washington, and Lincoln Gordon, the number-three official in Paris. Their biggest achievement, the European Payments Union, is consummated in 1950; it is the crowning achievement of the Marshall Plan and instrumental to European recovery.

This chapter investigates the prospects for Europe to truly unify and form a pole in the international system. It tracks the ebb and flow of European integration from the Concert of Europe to 2010. It finds that realism offers the most parsimonious explanation of events and predicts that optimists and pessimists exaggerate the future course of the European Union. The United States is a fine idol for would-be European unifiers, but they face daunting tradeoffs with respect to democracy and the use of force. The causal logics of ever-closer union that were supposed to draw the continent closer are found to be too weak. Outside threats are the critical ingredient to European integration.

The particular circumstances of the Cold War that swiftly succeeded World War II highlighted the problem of an unpalatable regime in a country with a desirable attribute, in this case, Spain's geostrategic importance. Dean Acheson's assertion that in relation to foreign policy towards Spain, Britain had become the ‘tail of the kite’, was not entirely accurate. Britain held firm convictions on the matter which, backed by strong political feeling in France, Belgium, and Norway, were sufficient to prevent the inclusion of Spain in the Marshall Plan or NATO. Thus, the bilateral agreements between the United States and Spain were largely a reflection of the implacable opposition of those governments towards a regime aptly described by one Spaniard as ‘a country occupied by its own army’. Spain's role in Anglo-American relations in the post-war period illustrates the far wider problems which still lie behind United Nations efforts to deal with pariah regimes and which, more than fifty years on, neither the international community nor its leading powers have been able to resolve.

This chapter highlights the German economic and political crisis and the social market situation during the 1947–8 period. Modern industry suffered during the crisis period due to a concentration of power. Free markets and convertible currencies replaced export and import quotas, bilateral trade deals, trade embargoes, and foreign-exchange controls. The Marshall Plan, announced in 1947 as a measure to stabilize the economic crisis, had its fair share of critics, as it was considered to be an exercise in American imperialism, or a capitalist manoeuvre to undermine socialism, and was considered to be responsible for worsening the Cold War. In spite of the progress made by the neo-liberals in propagating their ideas, the situation still looked very gloomy by the end of 1947, since the twelve months between the announcement of the Marshall Plan in June 1947 and the implementation of currency reform can hardly be described as a period of optimism in Germany.

Could Spain participate in the Marshall Plan while at the same time it was politically otracized at the United Nations? While the State Department monitored warily the fortunes of the monarchists, the more practical question of Spain's integration into international trade and commerce was rekindled in June 1947 with the launch of the European Recovery Programme, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. The problem of integrating Spain into the new Western commercial system, designed to prop up the economies of Western Europe and prevent capitulation to communism, epitomizes the increasing division of interests created between Britain and the United States on that issue, and subsequently the North Atlantic Treaty. This chapter discusses the question of economic sanctions against Spain, the O'Konski amendment that would have allowed Spain to participate in the Marshall Plan, Francisco Franco's response to Spain's exclusion from the Marshall Plan, and Spain's improving commercial relations with several countries such as France and Britain.

The final historical case is that of Pax Americana, the supposed role of the USA as a hegemon after 1945. The central argument is that if that were so, the USA was a hegemon in only part of the world. This forms the basis of its presentation as a coalitional model of hegemony, insofar as it constituency was limited in scope. If it provided collective goods, these were club rather than public, and were created within the context of a containment order. However, most of the claims to US hegemony are little more than claims to its primacy. These are also caught up in debates about US decline, and the ambivalent evidence of the crisis of Bretton Woods in 1971. Nonetheless the US did promote a uniquely institutional order, and these can be seen as evidence of a kind of bargain that pointed to a more fundamental institution of hegemony. It also forged a coalition that incorporated a type of state, captured by the notion of embedded liberalism.

This chapter describes how Wallace's views, particularly on foreign policy, came under closer scrutiny as the New Party's fortunes appeared to be on the upswing. Since late 1947, the former vice president had been denouncing the Marshall Plan in particular as an imperialist plot hatched by Wall Street bankers. Wallace had initially supported Secretary of State George C. Marshall's proposals for European aid, but when the Soviets refused to participate, he concluded that “warlords and moneychangers” had perverted the plan's good intentions and planned to use it to divide Europe. Thereafter, Wallace sharpened his critique of the Truman administration's “bipartisan reactionary war policy” while trying to place Soviet moves in the best possible light.

This chapter, by Katarina Loukopoulou, discusses the Marshall Plan (MP) documentary films about Greece in the post–World War II geopolitical context. Drawing on archival research, it explores documentaries that propagated the beneficial impact on Greece of the U.S.-funded European Recovery Program (1948–52, widely known as “Marshall Plan”) both in terms of economic reconstruction and geopolitical stability. It then analyses the audio-visual rhetoric of two MP films about Greece—Victory at Thermopylae (1950) and Island Odyssey (1950)—in relation to the ideological context of the Greek Civil War (1945–49), during which U.S. military intervention played a decisive role. The chapter contributes to the growing literature about the MP publicity campaign and Cold War cultural propaganda.

This chapter begins by looking at Harry Truman's speech during his oath taking for his second term as the thirty-third president of the United States of America on January 20, 1949. As the fourth point in his program, he launched a policy of making US scientific advances and industrial progress available to underdeveloped areas in order to fight misery, malnutrition, and illness. Truman's Point Four, as it soon became known, was presented as an absolute novelty. Enthusiastically acclaimed by his contemporaries, it is sometimes considered the start of a new era of world history. With Point Four, President Truman interpreted the spirit of the times and condensed ideas from many places, bringing together humanitarianism, the concept of development, and the Cold War. Moreover, Point Four has been described as the first case of implanting the Marshall Plan outside its original European framework. They shared the same goals: peace, plenty, freedom, and the hope of keeping communism at bay by offering growth as the cure for social hardship. The differences between the Marshall Plan and Point Four were, however, huge. Unlike emergency measures like the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the Marshall Plan, and despite its limited funding, Point Four was meant to carry on for longer.

In the spring of 1947 Gordon becomes active with some Harvard colleagues in the cause of European recovery and gives some speeches to local civic groups. He does not attend Secretary of State George Marshall’s June commencement speech at Harvard but receives call from a State Department friend to come to Washington and discuss Marshall Plan implementation. Gordon is drawn into the planning effort and again receives a leave of absence from Harvard. He becomes a member of a three-man steering committee headed by Paul Nitze to plan the government-wide implementation of the European recovery effort, including emergency aid and the Marshall Plan. Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett names him chairman of the committee, the administrative structure for the Marshall Plan. After much struggle with the US Bureau of the Budget, the State Department prevails. When Gordon leaves home for his assignment in Washington and more sixty- and seventy-hour-work weeks, he does not see his family again until Christmas. Congress approves the European Recovery (Marshall Plan) legislation in January, and President Truman shortly appoints Paul Hoffman and Averell Harriman as the senior officials of the new agency designed by Gordon’s committee.

This chapter details Vandenberg’s positions on UN policies, the reconstruction of Western Europe, and suppression of the Soviets. He knew that the future of the UN depended on ongoing relations between the East and West, just as America’s future depended on bipartisanship. In Vandenberg’s eyes, the dangers of Soviet aggression trumped China’s threats in East Asia, and he again demonstrated his allegiance to bipartisanship by supporting the Truman Doctrine. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he worked to ensure that the program would move forward and indeed make the nation’s policies toward Greece and Turkey applicable to other peoples. He believed that the Truman administration had responded to his lingering concerns about the doctrine with the creation of the Marshall Plan, but remained a critic as well as an advocate of the administration. Moreover, this chapter discusses how meeting the challenge of military assistance to a still fearful Western Europe while adhering to the UN Charter would become a primary problem in Vandenberg’s approach to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

A key domestic issue in the United States in 1949 was the continuing post-war overproduction of commodities in a world of increased competition, especially American cotton. This problem focused Senate grievances on Spain as a potential market. In the months leading up to the United Nations vote in May 1949, Francisco Franco had had good reason to suppose that the vote would go his way. He had ample evidence from visiting Americans that big business in the States was more than ready to welcome Spain back into international trade and commerce. Unless Spain could earn dollars or be given a dollar loan, it would not be considered a viable trading partner as a result of its exclusion from the Marshall Plan. The cotton issue in its wider, symbolic sense therefore became a power struggle between president and Congress. This chapter also looks at the United States cotton industry and the Spanish textile industry, along with the appointment of Stanton Griffis as U.S. ambassador to Spain.

Post-war Western Europe converged towards an American model of high-wage consumerist capitalism, considerably attenuating class conflict. In Western Europe, Christian democracy and Social Democracy cooperated in constructing a democratic constitutional order. In the Soviet buffer-zone states of eastern Europe, bourgeois civil society was eliminated slice by slice: by a sequence known as ‘salami tactics’. This was partly in reaction to the perceived Western aggression of the ‘Marshall Plan’. Western Cold Warriors – drawing the lesson that Popular Frontism was only a means to the end of totalitarian communisiation – characterised Communist ‘subversion’ as an endemic corruption of leftist movements. This was considered to be a particular problem in the under-developed ‘Third World’. Fearing both subversion and outright war, a gigantic ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ grew up in the United States, placing pressure upon that country's traditions of democratic and free-market civil society.