The Most Noble Adventure: the Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe
Greg Behrman
Aurum Press, 464pp, £25
The Marshall Plan was born of horror at Europe's plight at the end of the Second World War and the fear that it would "go communist". It was also something more. It became an inspiration, particularly in the United States, where George Marshall's enlightened and moving determination to help Europe get back on its feet led scores of exceedingly able people to abandon top jobs and high salaries to work for the European Recovery Programme.
One of the merits of Greg Behrman's book is his skill in recalling the spirit of these people, where they came from and what they did. Over its four years, from 1948 to 1952, almost $13bn (the equivalent of more than $100bn today) was disbursed in economic and technical assistance and by the end of the programme the economy of every participating country, except Germany, had grown to well past pre-war levels. There were giants in Europe, too, in those days, who responded to Marshall's initiative with more than the desperation of battered beggars: Ernest Bevin, Jean Monnet, the undervalued Georges Bidault and later Konrad Adenauer. Behrman is also good at recalling what a lot of hard work was needed, particularly in getting the US Congress and press to understand what Marshall had seen and sensed when he visited Europe in 1947.
Getting the plan off the ground in the US was not just an emotional crusade. It was a most unusual and intricate political and diplomatic exercise. Whether Europe was really going communist is another question, but a number of well-informed people thought it was. The key moment was the 1948 election in Italy, in which American money and other pressures - and the proof that the US remained seriously present in Europe - played a significant role in pinning back the Communist Party.
The second part of Behrman's book deals with the plan in action and with, at least by implication, its long-term consequences. George Canning once famously proclaimed that he had called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. Did George Marshall do something similar? He would have been the last person to make such a claim, but history may perhaps make it for him. Postwar Europe's most salient features have been the rapid rehabilitation of a democratic Germany and the beginnings of a European Union. The first looks firm; the second is still weak - no longer in danger of disappearing, but still a long way from solving the problems of coexistence of state and superstate.
Both were opportunely nurtured by the Marshall Plan and it is hard to imagine what Europe would be like today without them. To that extent, Marshall did not achieve one of his ostensible aims: not to interfere in Europe's affairs. And a good thing, too, says Behrman. He is an enthusiast with a good story to tell and he tells it with verve and clarity.
However, part of the subtitle of Behrman's book is The Reconstruction of Postwar Europe. In the event, Europe has been reconstructed twice since the end of the Second World War, the second upheaval being the dissolution of the Soviet empire in Europe. This second act has raised the question of how far and in what directions Europe's astonishing postwar recovery and audacious venture into a novel sort of union are conditioned by changes in other continents that used to be held to be second-class participants. Europe's interests remain worldwide, but its power and influence are not.
Behrman's subtitle finds an echo in his final paragraph, which implicitly reminds us how much Europe's postwar recovery depended on American generosity and statecraft. The assumption in those days was that the US would remain the leading superpower for as long as anyone cared to think, but that is no longer a sound basis for long-term prognosticators, as is proved by the divisions within Europe today over European and extra-European crises. The US has already stultified the United Nations and it may still divide what it set out to unite.
There is also a cautionary tale here. In little more than half a century the United States has descended from the heights of power and glory and statesmanship, through the fearful profligacy of Ronald Reagan to the abject unfitness of George W Bush, to a position in the world still great, but uncertain and febrile. Marshall and Bush seem hardly to belong to the same planet, but perhaps the wheel of fortune is turning to hand the reins of power back to the Marshalls rather than the Bushes: there are many of both species around. The Marshall Plan is now history. World affairs are dominated by three pol itical issues: the failure of the attempt to control the spread of nuclear weapons; the end of the inviolability of the US to non-nuclear attack; and the dawning perception that just as victory in two world wars entailed the end of the British empire and of the supremacy of the pound sterling, so victory in the Cold War has threatened the global hegemony of the ultimate symbol of US power, the dollar.
Peter Calvocoressi is co-author of "The Penguin History of the Second World War"
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