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04 June 2007
Legacy of Marshall Plan Includes U.S.-European Partnership
Film historian tours Europe with Marshall Plan documentaries
Washington -- The Marshall Plan, announced 60 years ago, pledged massive U.S. aid to rebuild Europe, provided a significant morale boost to a war-torn continent and helped lay the groundwork for European unity.
Historians and scholars say that, without the Marshall Plan’s $13 billion in aid, it is unclear how European politics would have evolved. What is clear is that modern Europe -- thanks in part to the Marshall legacy -- is a close partner with the United States in bringing health, education and jobs to other parts of the world.
“The underlying notion of the plan” was to “empower the partner” and show “respect for the other,” says Sandra Schulberg, a filmmaker who is currently on a State Department-sponsored tour of Europe, where she is showing historic films made in the late 1940s to promote the Marshall Plan. Schulberg was born in Paris when her father was chief of the Marshall Plan Motion Picture Section.
By announcing the Marshall Plan, the United States signaled that it would not retreat into isolationism, as it had done three decades earlier at the end of World War I. However, rather than being a welfare program, the Marshall Plan included important elements of partnership such as requiring participant nations to match U.S. contributions with funds from their own national currencies. And, with Marshall’s prodding, Schulberg said, Europeans were encouraged to “speak with one voice” by cooperating with each other on a regional plan that would meet with U.S. approval.
U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall announced the European Recovery Program (ERP) on June 5, 1947, during a speech at Harvard University in Massachusetts. (See related article.)
Edwina Campbell, a scholar and historian for the U.S. Air Force, said it always is challenging to ask “what if” questions about historic events. “It’s still possible, of course, to postulate that, even without the ERP, Europe would still look pretty much as it does today,” Campbell said June 1 in a State Department-sponsored online discussion. “Because,” she added, “the shock of not receiving political and economic support from the United States might have led to the creation of some effective alternative.”
However, she said, “it’s also possible to construct a very negative scenario, in which post-World War II Europe goes down the same path of economic and political chaos that followed World War I. That’s what leaders in Europe and the United States feared in the late 1940s, and I tend to agree with their assessment.”
Economic and political chaos had led to fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s, Campbell said, and there was a “realistic fear” in the late 1940s that “it might lead to Soviet-dominated communism” throughout Europe. Campbell is a professor of national security studies at the Air University’s Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, as well as a visiting senior lecturer at the King's College International Policy Institute in London.
Campbell said that a German professor has described the U.S. role in postwar recovery as being a “midwife to Europe.” “When a birth is complex and difficult,” Campbell said, “an engaged and effective midwife is crucial -- and the Marshall Plan was one of the most creative things that the American midwife did 60 years ago.”
Schulberg, the filmmaker, has been touring the United States and Europe for more than three years showing a selection of short documentary and fictional films made six decades ago to explain the Marshall Plan to European audiences. Approximately 300 films were made from 1948 to 1954 to explain the Marshall Plan and its philosophy of Europeans working together to build prosperity and political stability.
“What is compelling about the films [is] they were undertaken by people who were enormously talented and given a great deal of freedom,” Schulberg said. Financed by European countries, the films were mainly made by European directors and were released in multiple languages. Viewed by millions of people, they helped put in pictures and words the ideas of a unified Europe putting itself back together. For example, one film, Me and Mister Marshall, is narrated by a German coal miner who explains how the Marshall Plan was reviving industry. Another film, The Story of Koula, tells the story of a Greek boy who befriends an American farm mule shipped to his country as part of the Marshall Plan.
The films typically steer clear of heavy-handed propaganda, Schulberg said. Europeans in the late 1940s had endured years of Nazi propaganda films, and the Marshall films also were competing with a well-financed Soviet attempt to convince Europeans that the Marshall Plan represented American economic imperialism.
The films make their point with “gentle prodding and encouragement” and are “timeless lessons in international diplomacy,” Schulberg said. The films are in the public domain but largely were forgotten until recent years. In 2004, Schulberg helped organize the showing of 40 Marshall Plan films at the Berlin Film Festival. She since has been touring the United States and Europe with a retrospective known as “Selling Democracy.”
For more information on the Marshall Plan and its impact, see The Marshall Plan's 60th Anniversary.
A transcript of Campbell’s webchat on the Marshall Plan is available on Webchat Station, which also has information on previous and upcoming webchats
More information on Marshall Plan films can be found on the Selling Democracy Web site.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
