7 - Between union and unity: European integration and the sterling–dollar dualism

Summary

Because 1950 was a watershed in the history of the Marshall Plan, a year that marked the plan's greatest triumph in the European Payments Union and its denouement in the wake of the Korean War, it is important to begin this chapter covering the first half of the new year with an introduction that also reviews the major themes of the narrative so far. As we have seen, much of American recovery policy was dominated by a corporative view that compressed the lessons supposedly learned from both ends of American history. American Marshall Planners aimed to bring to pass in Western Europe “the miracle wrought by the Founding Fathers” and the New Dealers in their own country. They wanted to replace the old European system of separate sovereignties and redistributive politics with a unified and productive order similar to the one that had evolved in the United States under the Constitution of 1787 and the corporative neo-capitalism of the twentieth century. They were committed by political philosophy and economic doctrine to a policy that combined the principle of federalism with the New Deal synthesis. The first entailed at least some merger of economic sovereignties. The second blended an older faith in the rationalizing power of the market with a modern belief in economic planning and bureaucratic management.

So far as European recovery was concerned, American ideals translated into practical plans for liberalizing trade and payments, building central institutions of coordination and control, and devising public–private partnerships for greater growth and efficiency.