STWR - Share The World's Resources

Sixty years ago on April 3, 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law. It was the official start of the most important foreign aid undertaking in modern American history - a success that both Democrats and Republicans now praise. Today, with America isolated from old allies and bogged down in an Iraq war costing an estimated $12bn a month, the Marshall Plan provides us with a valuable reminder of what American foreign policy can do when it is based on a genuine liberal internationalism.

4th April 08 - Nicolaus Mills, The Guardian (UK)

Over a four-year period the United States poured more than $13bn into England and Western Europe (roughly $579bn as an equivalent share of current GNP) and helped foster the kind of economic cooperation that would lead to today's European Union. "It was like a lifeline to sinking men," Ernest Bevin, the ruling Labour party's foreign minister from 1945 to 1951, observed of the Marshall Plan.

Bevin was not guilty of hyperbole. It took just nine months from the June 5, 1947 Harvard University commencement at which Marshall outlined his plan, for it to pass Congress. And just 11 days after President Truman signed the legislation making the Marshall Plan law, grain elevators in Galveston, Texas began readying the first Marshall food shipments.

But what makes the Marshall Plan, which remained untainted by administrative scandal during its four years, most worth celebrating at a time when the new US army operations manual has given the mission of stabilising war-torn nations equal importance to victory on the battlefield, are the lessons it provides in hubris. Marshall, who before he become secretary of state in 1947 served as army chief of staff throughout the second world war, was convinced that the US could neither win friends nor retain allies by playing the bully. Virtually every foreign policy lesson that America ignored when it entered Iraq - from the need for committed allies to the importance of understanding the culture of the country it was dealing with - was fundamental to the success of the Marshall Plan.

At the core of Marshall's thinking lay his belief that America would fail if it tried to dictate to Europe a plan for European recovery. "It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for our government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a programme designed to place Europe on its feet economically," Marshall insisted. "This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe."

From this core idea, it followed that America could not aid a single European nation, such as England, and then expect the rest of Europe to follow that nation's example. Marshall did not believe that nations fell into line like dominoes. Any plan for European recovery had to be regional in nature. As Marshall put it: "There must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government."

Unlike the Bush administration, which saw America as the saviour of Iraq, Marshall saw America helping Europe in the way that one family member helps another in tough times. In 2003 vice-president Dick Cheney predicted that in Iraq "we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." By contrast in 1948 Marshall reminded the Senate: "We will be working with a group of nations each with a long and proud history. The peoples of these countries are highly skilled, able and energetic."

As a result, only after the nations of Europe reached a preliminary consensus on the problems they faced and formed themselves into a Committee of European Economic Cooperation, did Marshall move ahead with his plan, and even then he was cautious, emphasising that aid patronisingly administered would cause resentment. He had no qualms about telling the Senate foreign relations committee: " To be quite clear, this unprecedented endeavour of the New World to help the Old is neither sure nor easy. It is a calculated risk." Marshall made sure that the European nations, not the US, were the ones who finally determined how Marshall aid was apportioned.

Marshall thought that it was essential for America to supply Europe with "a cure rather than a mere palliative" for its economic woes. He did not attempt to win political support by downplaying the expensiveness of his plan, as the Bush administration did in 2003 when deputy secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz said of Iraq, "There is a lot of money there," and assured Congress that the costs of reconstructing and stabilising Iraq could be contained. Trying to help Europe on the cheap was, in Marshall's mind, a recipe for disaster. "This programme will cost our country billions of dollars. It will impose a burden on the American taxpayer. It will require sacrifices today in order that we may enjoy peace and security tomorrow," he told Congress, while at the same time warning, "An inadequate programme would involve wastage of our resources with an ineffective result. Either undertake to meet the requirements of the problem or don't undertake it at all."

In treating the European nations as partners rather than as needy dependents, Marshall was, however, never a sentimentalist. In contrast to the Bush administration, which has refused to give a departure time for leaving Iraq, Marshall was very clear about America's expectations. At home and abroad, he stressed that American aid was not open ended. It was only going to last until the end of June 1952. The nations of Europe would have limited time to make the most of the help they got, and along the way there would be constant reviews of the progress they were making. They could count on America's generosity, but they should not take America for granted.

Sixty years later, especially in its Middle East policy, America is so far from Marshall's combination of tough-mindedness and humility that it is tempting to attribute the success of the Marshall Plan to Marshall himself and a time in American history when there was both a strong bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and a belief in sacrifice for the national good. But the differences between then and now, between the cold war and the current war on terrorism also let us see that the principles behind the Marshall Plan were not time bound.

Marshall's refusal to underestimate the cost of his recovery plan, his willingness to acknowledge its limits, his belief in bipartisanship (he got along famously with Arthur Vandenberg, the leading Republican senator of his day) and his insistence that foreign aid must be administered with, not just to, other nations would be more difficult to manage today, but an updated version of such an approach to foreign affairs is hardly beyond reach.

In the Western Europe of 1948, Marshall had advantages that the United States does not now have in the Middle East. The nations he was dealing with had a long experience with democracy, established social welfare systems and sophisticated market economies. But these differences only make the principles on which the Marshall Plan rested all the more important to apply to our current situation. They promise what the lessons of the immediate past do not - a fresh start.

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