Status Updates From The Marshall Plan (Studies ...

Left off at beg of ch 4, will finish as it is a really good book.

Bevan’s litany...played down the Soviet threat and attacked the tendency...to seek military rather than economic and political solutions to outstanding problems...it...was feeding a fantastic arms race...It was also generating inflation, reducing social expenditures, and widening political cleavages, not only between rich and poor in Western Europe but also between developed and underdeveloped countries.

The goal, as it emerged from a [Economic Cooperation Administration] study, was to enhance Western Europe’s military strength without eroding living standards and making participating countries vulnerable to a resurgent Communist threat from “within.”

…timely concessions were needed if the Federal Republic was going to be brought into the Western community. The only alternative according to the State Department, was a new Rapallo Pact or a neutral Germany that played West against East to the detriment of European recovery and security.

The Americans wanted to harness free-market forces to the cause of economic integration and multilateralism. The British wanted to bottle them up in a socialist empiricism that sheltered their economy, kept them at arms-length from the Continent, and safeguarded their reserve position and ties to the Commonwealth.

The Bizone’s rapid economic progress in the months following currency reform in June aroused new fears in Paris that American policy placed Germany’s recovery above that of France and other participating countries.

According to those who testified on behalf of the [European Recovery Program], the political isolation of the United States would lead to a militarization of American society. In a hostile world, the American people would have to live in an armed camp and bear the burden of skyrocketing defense expenditures.

The British also objected to the integrationist thrust of American recovery policy, specifically to what appeared to be American emphasis on a structural integration that did not take account of Britain’s position in other areas of the world. After all, they insisted, Great Britain was not ‘just another European country.’

The strategic assumptions behind this policy held that an integrated economic order, particularly one headed by supranational institutions, would help to control German nationalism, reconcile Germany’s recovery with France’s economic and security concerns, and thus create a balance of power in the West sufficient to contain Soviet power in the East.