Abstract
Recent historiography on the Marshall Plan has tended to diminish its previously assumed role in the French economic takeoff following the Second World War. Instead, analysts have focused on its political effects: internally, the stabilization of democratic political regimes, and internationally, the promotion of European integration. Even in these realms, however, the effects were minimal, and the Europeans, particularly the French, were consistently able to take affairs into their own hands despite the heavy hand of American attempted interference. In part this was because the French understood that American aid was a built-in aspect of postwar development, since the reconstruction of Europe and the prevention of its fall to communism were in the American interest. The French were able to use this state of affairs very much to what they thought to be their own advantage, and in fact diverted the overwhelming part of their economic aid from 1948 to 1954 to their futile wars in Indochina, while the military aid Washington lavished upon Paris was also used in their equally useless and costly effort to hold on to Algeria. The Algerian struggle in turn brought about the fall of the Fourth Republic and the coming of de Gaulle, precisely the long-term result that the Americans, in proffering their aid in the first place, had hoped to avoid.
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Notes
Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–1951 (London: Methuen, 1984). Milward argued that European economies were enjoying a boom in 1947, rather than exhibiting the crisis American analysts perceived at the time. The Marshall Plan was, in his view, of minimal importance for the long-term growth of the European economies, and primarily represented the skill of European diplomats in convincing the Americans to help finance aspects of their industrial recovery.
See Barry Eichengreen, ed., Europe’s Post-War Recovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Also R. Dornbusch, W. Nölling, and R. Layard, eds., Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), and
Barry Eichengreen and Marc Uzan, “The Marshall Plan: Economic effects and implications for Easter Europe and the former USSR,” Economic Policy, Vol. 14 (1992), pp. 14–75.
Pierre Melandri, Les Etats-Unis face à l’unification de l’Europe, 1945–1954 (Paris: A. Pedone, 1980).
Chiarella Esposito, America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948–1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994);
Irwin Wall, The United States and Making of Postwar France, 1945—1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Abraham Boxhoorn, The Cold War and the Rift in the Governments of National Unity: Belgium, France, and Italy, a Comparison (Amsterdam: Historisch Seminarium van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1993). On the French case, see Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, pp. 67–71.
Denis MacShane, International Labor and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992); Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, pp. 96–113.
Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially pp. 212–15; also
Alan S. Milward et al., eds., The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945–1992 (London: Routledge, 1993).
Francis M. B. Lynch, France and the International Economy from Vichy to the Treaty of Rome (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 103–10 and passim.
John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976);
William Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Hitchcock, p. 177 and passim stresses that the policy of Mendès France and of Mollet in 1956 was to anchor the construction of a small Europe of the six, excluding England, around a Franco-German partnership that it was hoped could provide the basis of a European policy independent of the Americans, after 1956 of The United States and Great Britain. One sees here the outlines of the future policies of Charles de Gaulle. This is also the conclusion of the excellent dissertation by Paul Marsh Pitman III, “France’s European Choices: The Political Economy of European Integration in the 1950s” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1997). For a much less enthusiastic assessment of the Schuman Plan from the French point of view, however, see John Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Interestingly, one need not look to the Marshall Plan literature for the hypothesis of American hegemony and influence in Europe through aid: It was present in the literature on the British loan and the Blum-Byrnes agreements. For Britain, contrast Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1970) with
Peter Burnham, The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction (London: Macmillan Press, 1990). On the Blum-Byrnes agreement, Irwin Wall, “Les accords Blum-Byrnes, la modernisation de la France, et la Guerre Froide,” Vingtième Siècle, No. 13 (Janvier-Mars 1987), pp. 45–62. Neither Britain, which received a loan of $3.75 billion in 1946, nor France, which got much less, capitulated to the United States as condition for the aid.
Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, pp. 190–91; Gérard Bossuat, La France, l’aide américaine et la construction européenne, 1944—54 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1992), Vol. 1, pp. 429–36.
The French also bargained their commitment to the European Defense Community in exchange for American assistance in Indochina: see the interesting thesis by Jasmine Aimaq, For Europe or Empire? French Colonial Ambitions and the European Army Plan (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996).
Roger Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 293–94.
See also Jacob J. Kaplan and Günther Schleiminger, The European Payments Union (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 266.
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© 2001 Martin Schain
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Wall, I. (2001). The Marshall Plan and French Politics. In: Schain, M. (eds) The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After. Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62748-6_10
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