Conclusion: America made the European way

Summary

“The Americans want an integrated Europe looking like the United States of America – ‘God's own country.’” This assessment, offered by Robert Hall of the British Treasury, sums up the central theme of the preceding chapters. Of course, the “Americans” to whom Hall referred did not include Henry Wallace, Henry Hazlitt, and other critics who accused the Truman administration of leading the nation down the garden path to economic ruin and world war. The Marshall Plan, as these critics understood, was the brainchild of a particular political coalition, the so-called New Deal coalition, which was strong enough to prevail against opponents on the Left and the Right. The outgrowth of underlying changes in the industrial structure and the concomitant political realignment of the 1930s, the New Deal coalition included at its core a bloc of capital-intensive firms and their allies among labor, farm, financial, and professional groups. Its leadership combined the technocorporative formulations of the 1920s with the ideological adaptations of the 1930s in a policy synthesis that envisioned a neo-capitalist reorganization of the American and world systems. It was this synthesis, what I have called the New Deal synthesis, that inspired the Marshall Plan to remake Western Europe in the image of “‘God's own country.’”

At the center of the New Deal synthesis was the vision of an integrated Western European economy much like the large internal market that had taken shape in the United States under the Constitution of 1787.