Rebuilding Europe - 1: Background

History always ignores peacetime leaders and glorifies or vilifies wartime leaders. And yet, as this great book, Saving a Continent shows, peacetime leaders can often have a much bigger impact on history. The book is about the Marshall Plan, the American plan to rebuild World War II-torn Europe.

The backdrop to all this involved some things I knew, and others that I didn’t:

-         All of Europe, Western and Eastern, was in shambles in 1945.

-         Only America remained untouched, because of its geographical isolation.

-         The Soviet Union was not considered an enemy.

-         Many European countries, even France and Italy, had communists in varying degrees of power via coalitions with democratic parties.

-         America was isolationist by nature at the time, i.e., it liked to stay away and not get involved in European (let alone world) affairs!

When Roosevelt died in office, Harry Truman became the new American President. Truman was unhappy with the Soviet violation of the agreements made earlier at Yalta, specifically to respect democratic principles in Eastern Europe. He voiced it to the Soviets, and began appointing people with his views.

Europe in shambles, with high inflation and unemployment, was a perfect breeding ground for communism. And so Soviet “influence” was inevitably rising in Europe. This was a huge economic (not military) risk for America: if all of Europe fell to communism, who would be left to trade with the US? And without trade with Europe, would America’s economy collapse? And so came the Truman Doctrine: America wouldn’t recognize any limitations to its interests and would protect its interests everywhere. In other words, America was declaring itself a global power and was abandoning its isolationist stance.

It followed that America needed Europe to be revived economically. No problem, said the Soviets, but the USSR needs to be revived too and for that, reparations from Germany are a must-have. But reparations would hold up Germany’s recovery, and Germany was the “spark plug”, argued the Americans. Our citizens wouldn’t accept a German recovery to happen before a Soviet recovery, countered the Soviets. It didn’t look like the Americans and the Soviets could agree on how to proceed on Europe, on economic grounds.

France didn’t want a German recovery either. Ruled by Germany during World War II, the French wanted reparations from Germany. Going one step further than the Soviets, the French wanted to keep Germany down for good so they could dominate Europe. What better way to achieve that than by splitting Germany into 4 parts, each part based on the Allied ruler of that region (US, Britain, France and the USSR), went the French thinking.

America had a mountain to climb if it wanted to rebuild Europe economically.