Marshall Plan Announced
On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall delivered the Harvard commencement address in which he outlined a proposal for massive American economic assistance to rebuild the war-devastated economies of Europe. The European Recovery Program — universally known as the Marshall Plan — ultimately channelled approximately $13 billion (equivalent to over $150 billion today) to sixteen Western European nations between 1948 and 1952. Its aims were simultaneously humanitarian, economic, and strategic: prevent communist parties from exploiting economic desperation to win democratic elections, particularly in France and Italy, and bind Western European economies together in a way that would make future European war economically irrational. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov attended the initial planning conference in Paris but walked out when it became clear that the plan required recipient nations to open their books to American oversight and coordinate their recovery plans — conditions that were incompatible with Soviet control of Eastern European economies. Stalin then pressured Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had expressed interest, to withdraw. The Marshall Plan thus became not only a tool of Western recovery but a dividing line: Western European nations that accepted it built market-integrated economies that would eventually converge into the European Community; Eastern European nations that rejected or were barred from it remained isolated in the Soviet economic bloc. West Germany's inclusion, which Stalin had hoped to prevent, anchored the Federal Republic firmly in the Western camp.
- Year: 1947 CE
- Category: Economic
