Assess The Relative Significance Of Marshall Aid To Moves Towards European Integration Between 1945 and 1954.

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Assess The Relative Significance Of Marshall Aid To Moves Towards European Integration Between 1945 and 1954.

        The Marshall Plan lasted for four years between 1948 and 1952, and offered $22 billion in American aid to Europe. This essay believes that Marshall Aid was significant in moves towards integration in the post war years, and will show this by looking at the Marshall Plan, the Schumann Plan and the Pleven Plan.

        The Marshall Plan (1947) was, effectively, a result of US self-protection, designed both to bring West Germany back into the diplomatic process and to bring together Western Europe on the side of America – as Lundestad (1998, p29) puts it, “The Soviet Union and Communism had to be contained; the western zones of Germany had to be integrated with a revitalised Western Europe in general, and with France in particular.” The offer of aid was open to all countries of Europe but, as the USA must have anticipated, the USSR and its allies turned it down: nonetheless, all European countries urgently needed the aid. The main condition of Marshall Aid was that the countries receiving it should work together to distribute it, and so the Committee of European Economic Co-operation, originally set up to report on the Marshall Plan, evolved into the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), enhancing the perception of Marshall Aid as being politically motivated – “…it was apparent that to all intents and purposes the programme was the economic complement of President Truman’s expressed political intent to organise Western Europe in an ideological alliance against the Soviet Union and Communism.” (Urwin, 1995, p18). The OEEC was essentially an intergovernmental body, but it did have some institutional organisations, especially the Council of Ministers, which had one representative from each of the 16 member states. However, it was not “…as France for instance had wished, a supranational authority with the ability to control national economies.” (Urwin, 1995, p20) However, despite the limited extent, the Marshall Plan took the significant first step towards European integration with the creation of the OEEC.

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        The Schumann Plan (1950) came from the ideas of Jean Monnet, and was French in origin. In post war Europe, France was very nervous of West Germany, and wanted guarantees that it would not become an aggressor for a third time. The best way to do this, from both the French and the American viewpoints, was to integrate West Germany back into Europe. France had previously considered a customs union in Europe without Britain participating was dangerous, however “...the West German economic recovery which sucked in imports from France, Holland and Belgium…” (Dedman, 2000, p42) changed their minds, with ...

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