Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Introduction: Toward the Marshall Plan: from New Era designs to New Deal synthesis
- 1 Searching for a “creative peace”: European integration and the origins of the Marshall Plan
- 2 Paths to plenty: European recovery planning and the American policy compromise
- 3 European union or middle kingdom: Anglo–American formulations, the German problem, and the organizational dimension of the ERP
- 4 Strategies of transnationalism: the ECA and the politics of peace and productivity
- 5 Changing course: European integration and the traders triumphant
- 6 Two worlds or three: the sterling crisis, the dollar gap, and the integration of Western Europe
- 7 Between union and unity: European integration and the sterling–dollar dualism
- 8 Holding the line: the ECA's efforts to reconcile recovery and rearmament
- 9 Guns and butter: politics and diplomacy at the end of the Marshall Plan
- Conclusion: America made the European way
- Bibliography
- Index
Editors' preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editors' preface
- Preface
- Introduction: Toward the Marshall Plan: from New Era designs to New Deal synthesis
- 1 Searching for a “creative peace”: European integration and the origins of the Marshall Plan
- 2 Paths to plenty: European recovery planning and the American policy compromise
- 3 European union or middle kingdom: Anglo–American formulations, the German problem, and the organizational dimension of the ERP
- 4 Strategies of transnationalism: the ECA and the politics of peace and productivity
- 5 Changing course: European integration and the traders triumphant
- 6 Two worlds or three: the sterling crisis, the dollar gap, and the integration of Western Europe
- 7 Between union and unity: European integration and the sterling–dollar dualism
- 8 Holding the line: the ECA's efforts to reconcile recovery and rearmament
- 9 Guns and butter: politics and diplomacy at the end of the Marshall Plan
- Conclusion: America made the European way
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The decade of the 1940s was a decisive moment in modern American history, as important for developments at home as for changes in U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The Second World War pulled the economy out of its worst depression, and in subsequent years the federal government for the first time in the nation's history took explicit responsibility for controlling the aggregate level of economic activity in the United States. A new style of foreign policy also emerged during and after the war. A nation that had in the 1930s turned its back on the European powers and belligerently proclaimed its neutrality, now became the leading power in the Allies' wartime coalition and in the postwar phalanx of Western, non-communist nations. These remarkable developments have received a great deal of attention from scholars – and deservedly so. But few historians have stressed the causal links between foreign and domestic events during these decisive years; of those who have, none has done so as convincingly as Michael Hogan.
Hogan's The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, places this important policy innovation in a framework that he traces back to the 1920s, when Americans began to develop their particular brand of “associative state.” This new style of commonwealth brought organized interests into the state. Competition was qualified by new patterns of cooperation designed to shape the state as well as the capitalist system.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Marshall PlanAmerica, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987