Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Introduction: Toward the Marshall Plan: from New Era designs to New Deal synthesis
- 1 Searching for a “creative peace”: European integration and the origins of the Marshall Plan
- 2 Paths to plenty: European recovery planning and the American policy compromise
- 3 European union or middle kingdom: Anglo–American formulations, the German problem, and the organizational dimension of the ERP
- 4 Strategies of transnationalism: the ECA and the politics of peace and productivity
- 5 Changing course: European integration and the traders triumphant
- 6 Two worlds or three: the sterling crisis, the dollar gap, and the integration of Western Europe
- 7 Between union and unity: European integration and the sterling–dollar dualism
- 8 Holding the line: the ECA's efforts to reconcile recovery and rearmament
- 9 Guns and butter: politics and diplomacy at the end of the Marshall Plan
- Conclusion: America made the European way
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Holding the line: the ECA's efforts to reconcile recovery and rearmament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Introduction: Toward the Marshall Plan: from New Era designs to New Deal synthesis
- 1 Searching for a “creative peace”: European integration and the origins of the Marshall Plan
- 2 Paths to plenty: European recovery planning and the American policy compromise
- 3 European union or middle kingdom: Anglo–American formulations, the German problem, and the organizational dimension of the ERP
- 4 Strategies of transnationalism: the ECA and the politics of peace and productivity
- 5 Changing course: European integration and the traders triumphant
- 6 Two worlds or three: the sterling crisis, the dollar gap, and the integration of Western Europe
- 7 Between union and unity: European integration and the sterling–dollar dualism
- 8 Holding the line: the ECA's efforts to reconcile recovery and rearmament
- 9 Guns and butter: politics and diplomacy at the end of the Marshall Plan
- Conclusion: America made the European way
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Truman administration had asked Congress in January 1950 to renew the ERP for another year, the third of four years that had been planned from the start. Conservative opponents mounted the usual arguments. Pointing to an anticipated budget deficit of several billion dollars, they were now more convinced than ever that the ERP and other programs were paving the way to economic ruin and a regime of government controls. Senator Taft said the recovery of production and the restoration of financial stability in Western Europe made it possible to reduce the amount of American assistance by 16 percent. Others said that cuts in Marshall aid would encourage the Europeans to end “costly experiments with socialist devices” and to devote a greater share of their resources to productive investment. Complaints that American aid subsidized socialism in England mixed with charges that neither European nor American recovery planners had done enough to rebuild West Germany, where the new government was committed to private-enterprise capitalism and where the revival of production would do much to reduce the need for American dollars. As in 1948 and 1949, the conservatives also linked the Marshall Plan to the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, the International Trade Organization (ITO), and other measures that aimed to lower tariffs and organize a multilateral system of world trade. They identified these measures with the alliance of “internationalists” that had taken shape under the New Deal and went on to warn that “free trade” would destroy noncompetitive firms in the United States, throw workers off the job, and subject government policy to control by the ITO and other “super-states.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Marshall PlanAmerica, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, pp. 336 - 379Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987