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No Replay. It was dollars, not army divisions, that thwarted Stalin's hopes of a czarist replay. Over the four years from April 2, 1948, when the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly enacted Marshall Plan legislation, until June 30, 1952, when the last shipments of matériel and talent—ranging from vitamins to valuta, feed grains to corporate planners—reached the Continent, the U.S. had pumped $13.5 billion into 16 European nations,* an amount that averaged a bit more than 1% of the U.S.'s gross national product each year. The major beneficiaries were Great Britain ($3.2 billion), France ($2.7 billion), Italy ($1.5 billion) and West Germany ($1.4 billion). Washington insisted that U.S. aid had to be organized on a pan-European basis rather than as a congeries of bilateral arrangements. Thus, with the same economics-before-politics approach that was to lead a decade later to the Common Market, the U.S. helped pave the way to European cooperation. As Belgium's Paul Henri Spaak, a founding father of the Common Market, observed at a Brussels anniversary colloquium last week, the U.S. showed "a clearer awareness of what Europe must do to save herself than many Europeans themselves."
Today Western Europe is the wealthiest complex of nations in the world, with a combined gross national product of $508 billion, v. the East Bloc's $443 billion. Only two former Marshall Plan members—Greece and Turkey—are still receiving U.S. economic aid, most of it in P.L. 480 food surpluses and low-interest loans. Out of the ashes of World War II, the nations of Western Europe have forged not only a Common Market but also a sense of common interest that, for all the disruptions and distractions caused today by Gaullist France, may be destined to achieve the economic force and political cohesiveness that—thanks to envy and enmity—have eluded the Continent since the birth of time. If a United States of Europe emerges in the future, its conception may well be traced to the United States of America in an all-but-forgotten past.
* Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey.