Twenty Years Later

On a spring morning in 1948, the U.S. freighter John H. Quick eased into the harbor of Bordeaux, her holds heavy with 9,000 tons of wheat. The scars of war still showed in the prostrate Europe that lay beyond the Quick's bows.

As the vessel's golden cargo hit the dock, an act of giving and building unparalleled in history got underway. The Marshall Plan had become a reality.

Last week, in ceremonies from Brussels to Bonn, the U.S. and its onetime beneficiaries quietly marked the 20th anniversary of the plan's conception.

Burden of Reconstruction. It was in the course of a Harvard Commencement Day address by then Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall that the plan was officially born. "I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious," began Marshall in his precise, low-key style. "The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for foreign food and other essential products--principally from America --are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social and political deterioration."

Though it is fashionable nowadays to deride American altruism as "unconscious imperialism," or worse, the U.S. had realized--even before combat in Europe ended on May 8, 1945--that as the world's wealthiest nation and the only major power that had endured the war unscathed, it would inevitably have to shoulder the burden of reconstruction. Until early 1947, Marshall had hoped that the Soviet Union would cooperate; he later offered aid to war-wracked Russia and Eastern Europe.

Stalin, resentful of U.S. influence in a Europe that seemed ripe for Communist plucking, denounced the plan--and within a year of its inception, Czechoslovakia and Poland, both of which had been eager for its benefits, had fallen to Red putsches. In the Hotel Ritz in Paris last week, the U.S.'s most seasoned envoy, Averell Harriman, who was Ambassador to Russia during the last days of World War II, recalled before a 20th anniversary banquet a meeting that he had with Stalin in Berlin at war's end. "It must be a great satisfaction for you to be in Berlin," remarked Harriman. "Czar Alexander," growled Stalin, "got to Paris."

No Replay. It was dollars, not army divisions, that thwarted Stalin's hopes of a czarist replay. Over the four years from April 2, 1948, when the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly enacted Marshall Plan legislation, until June 30, 1952, when the last shipments of materiel and talent--ranging from vitamins to valuta, feed grains to corporate planners--reached the Continent, the U.S. had pumped $13.5 billion into 16 European nations,* an amount that averaged a bit more than 1% of the U.S.'s gross national product each year. The major beneficiaries were Great Britain ($3.2 billion), France ($2.7 billion), Italy ($1.5 billion) and West Germany ($1.4 billion). Washington insisted that U.S. aid had to be organized on a pan-European basis rather than as a congeries of bilateral arrangements. Thus, with the same economics-before-politics approach that was to lead a decade later to the Common Market, the U.S. helped pave the way to European cooperation. As Belgium's Paul Henri Spaak, a founding father of the Common Market, observed at a Brussels anniversary colloquium last week, the U.S. showed "a clearer awareness of what Europe must do to save herself than many Europeans themselves."

Today Western Europe is the wealthiest complex of nations in the world, with a combined gross national product of $508 billion, v. the East Bloc's $443 billion. Only two former Marshall Plan members--Greece and Turkey--are still receiving U.S. economic aid, most of it in P.L. 480 food surpluses and low-interest loans. Out of the ashes of World War II, the nations of Western Europe have forged not only a Common Market but also a sense of common interest that, for all the disruptions and distractions caused today by Gaullist France, may be destined to achieve the economic force and political cohesiveness that--thanks to envy and enmity--have eluded the Continent since the birth of time. If a United States of Europe emerges in the future, its conception may well be traced to the United States of America in an all-but-forgotten past.

* Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey.

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