Few US government programs have had so good a press as the Marshall Plan, which delivered some $12.3 billion in aid to Europe between 1948 and the end of 1951. The fiftieth anniversary of the plan, in 1997, produced a flood of studies and conference reports that all shared the view, as one Marshall Plan official put it in his memoir, “that Marshall Plan dollars did save the world.” Calls for subsequent “Marshall Plans” for troubled regions such as the Balkans, post-1990s Russia, the Middle East, and Africa reveal the talismanic quality the very name has attained. For some decades now, scholars have been working to historicize the Marshall Plan and to take this legendary program out of the realm of myth and submit it to historical analysis. In doing so, they have significantly revised early accounts that saw the Marshall Plan as a beneficent rescue plan for war-torn Europe. For example, the economic impact of the plan has been significantly downgraded as scholars concluded that the crisis of 1947 in Europe was less grave than American policymakers had thought. Furthermore, the role of the Marshall Plan in exacerbating, perhaps precipitating, the division of Europe is now recognized, despite Marshall’s initial claim that his offer of aid was not directed against any country or doctrine. The role of the Marshall Plan in promoting European economic integration has been questioned, and the demise of the plan in 1951, at a time when European economies were again facing economic crisis, inflation, and budget deficits, suggests a less-than-perfect performance. These critiques must be taken seriously. Yet in focusing narrowly on the short-term impact of the plan, they often fail to capture its historical significance. It was far more than a foreign aid program. It represented the first stage in the construction of that community of ideas, economic links, and security ties between Europe and the United States we know simply as “the West.”

Though it grew into an ambitious project for European recovery, the Marshall Plan emerged primarily from the evident failures of American policy in occupied Germany. At the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union had agreed to govern defeated and occupied Germany as a single economic unit, even though they also agreed that Germany was to be divided into four zones (the fourth going to France). This contradiction, obvious even then, nonetheless was accepted as a workable program to guide a slow and carefully constrained German economic recovery while also ensuring that no central German administration would emerge to threaten the peace of Europe again.