August 23, 2007
Assessing the Marshall Plan Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:25 PM EST There’s an article in this week’s New Yorker by Niall Ferguson that is nominally a review of Greg Behrman’s new book, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. While it does discuss the quality of Behrman’s work, in generally favorable terms, Ferguson’s piece also functions as an independent consideration of the Marshall Plan’s historical impact. As a historian of the global economy, Ferguson seems qualified to judge the post–World War II plan for aiding liberated Europe. The Harvard professor is indeed effective at rendering the financial scale of the initiative: “The total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech. . . . A Marshall plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars.” I’m sure that was not a difficult calculation for Ferguson to make, but it’s an impressive and illustrative sum all the same. Ferguson is clearly an admirer of the Marshall Plan—at least of its spirit, if not of all its details. In framing his own judgment of the aid program, however, he indulges in the kind of counterfactual speculation that’s almost sure to diminish its reputation. At the time of Marshall’s speech announcing the proposal, Ferguson writes, one member of the House of Representatives asked, “What would it cost not to aid Europe?” “That remains the key question,” Ferguson continues. “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Western Europe’s economies have failed to recover from the postwar crisis? It would seem not.” His argument proceeds by asking and answering a series of more specific questions, such as: “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Stalin have brought some or all of Western Europe into the Soviet imperium? Again, no; the principal deterrent to Stalin was not American dollars but American firepower.” This is a rather frustrating and not entirely persuasive method of argument. Ferguson scrutinizes the Marshall Plan by acting as though its proponents expected it to single-handedly win the Cold War. His questions are leading, and they set unrealistic expectations for a foreign-aid program that was an important but not solitary instrument of American international policy. Using a similar rhetorical method, one could ask about another Cold War program: How important was the creation of the Peace Corps, really? Could America have succeeded in promoting democracy and fighting tyranny without it? I think it’s fairly obvious that, yes, we could have, but that conclusion lacks a certain subtlety. Perhaps more problematically, Ferguson fails to imagine the wider consequences of a hypothetical postwar America prioritizing budgetary parsimony over vigorous international engagement. It’s good to challenge widely accepted versions of history, and questioning the success of the Marshall Plan is a worthy task. A number of Ferguson’s conclusions, in the end, are good ones, with this as the most convincing: “The Marshall Plan was . . . to West Europeans struggling to make ends meet . . . the most visible manifestation of American good will—and a mirror image of the Soviet policy of mulcting Eastern Europe. This, more than its macroeconomic impact, explains its endurance in the popular imagination.” However, the practice of counterfactual and counterintuitive assertion through which Ferguson reaches this conclusion is less than perfectly sound. Imaginging alternative historical outcomes is an interesting and challenging exercise, but it’s not always a reliable way to approach truth.
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