World War II was bad for Europe. A comedian once said of the first World War that it would have been better for all concerned if the countries involved had simply stayed home and shot fifty thousand of their own people every week, and that sentiment also gives some idea of just how devastated Europe was after the war that followed the war to end all wars (Blackadder Goes Forth 1989). If anything that falls short of it; “unlike World War Onethe Second War—Hitler’s War—was a near-universal experience” (Judt 2005, p. 25). As many as thirty-six and a half million Europeans died in the course of the war, and the human death toll was compounded by material damage to the cities and infrastructure of the countries involved (Judt, 2005, p. 25). Millions more were displaced, either through the destruction of the towns and cities they had lived in or deliberate expulsions by conquering governments. Almost no country came out of the experience unscathed, be they the victors or the defeated. War had also shredded many of the most important economic ties and trade agreements between nations. Almost nothing was being made, there was no reliable system to transport what was made and even when there was people could not afford to buy it. This was not a good beginning for an economic revival.
The most immediate issue was food. In 1947 French farms were producing as little as 20-25 percent as much grain per acre as they had pre-war, and much of that either was not harvested and collected or was not transported to urban markets once it was (Hindley 1998). Further east, the situation was even worse. World War II’s Eastern Front “had been fought across some of the Soviet Union’s best arable land,” and the damage in both material and human terms had been immense (Judt 2005, p. 166). In Germany, the average daily ration for the typical German adult was a mere 860 calories worth of food, and in some countries it was even worse. For contrast, the pre-war consumption for the average citizen in countries like France and Germany was over two or three thousand calories a day (Judt 2005, p. 17). People were starving left and right, and the lack of food was exacerbated by the destruction of transport infrastructure and the massive devaluation of most major European currencies. Farmers were unwilling to sell their harvests to urban dwellers due to the perception that the money they would be paid with was not worth the paper it was printed on.
Between the German invasion, the German occupation and the German withdrawal France came out of World War II with less than a fourth of its trains functional and in service, and two-thirds of their merchant vessels had been destroyed (Judt 2005, p. 17). Great Britain’s industry and population centers had been repeatedly bombarded by air during the war and Germany’s cities and transport networks had been the subject of sustained carpet bombing. The Nazis had adopted a policy of systematically looting conquered nations both to supply the German war machine and to insulate the German population from the shortages and other privations that they would have otherwise suffered due to the massive expense of their military campaigns (Judt 2005, p. 25). The Soviet Union took this practice to even further heights, going so far as to dismantle entire factories in countries such as Germany and Poland to be transported wholesale back to the USSR. In short, postwar Europe had a shadow of its former industrial output, the transportation networks that would have carried resources and finished products had been blown up, the cities those goods would have been brought to were varying degrees of blown up and many of the people who would have worked in those factories and bought those products were dead.
The Marshall Plan was an American program aimed at changing this situation. It began in 1947 under the name European Recovery Program and by 1951 12 billion dollars word of aid and loans had been sent to Europe under its auspices. Most of that aid took the form of fuel, food, farming supplies, raw industrial materials and machinery (Hogan 1987 p. 414-415). It was geared at first alleviating the immediate dangers of starvation and displaced people and then more generally at facilitating the participating countries’ efforts to rebuild their industrial and economic bases in keeping with George Marshall’s observation that it had “become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the fabric of the entire European economy” (Hindley 1998). As such, in addition to material support the plan also had a goal of “liberalizing intra-European trade, making currencies convertible, and using central institutions to coordinate national policies” (Hogan 1987, p. 54). The collective economy of Europe was in many ways starting over from scratch in the postwar period. Because of this there was an opportunity to alter the fundamental structure of the how the postwar economy of Europe would function, and by extension the political framework of relations between European nations. The Marshall Plan’s focus on integration and free trade between European nations laid the framework for what became the European Union.
The limited resources forced difficult choices for state planners when it came to where to focus efforts in the reconstruction. “In eastern Europe the emphasis was inevitably upon basic expenditures—on roads, railways, factories, utilities,” with “very little left over for food and housing, much less medical, educational and other social services; and nothing at all for non-essential consumer goods” (Judt 2005, p. 71). And Eastern Europe, meaning the Soviet Union and the countries under its sway, rejected the Marshall plan. In its stead the Warsaw Pact countries instituted their own economic recovery programs managed top-down from the USSR and based on authoritarian Marxist-Leninist economic and political ideology. Thus, the economic aftermath of Europe following the 2nd World War mirrored the political divisions that characterized both Europe and the rest of the world in the decades that followed.
References
Blackadder Goes Forth 1989. BBC One, television series, United Kingdom, 2 November 1989.
Hinley, M, 1998. How the Marshall Plan Came About 1998. Available from: http://marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/05/How_the_Marshall_Plan_Came_About_000.pdf . [17 May 2016].
Hogan, M, 1987. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. Cambridge University Press.
Judt, T, 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Press.
