Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In France, Marshall Aid very much served the goals of the ‘planners’. As Pierre Uri, one of Monnet’s associates, later acknowledged: ‘we used the Americans to impose on the French government what we deemed necessary’, ignoring the American desire for liberalization but responding enthusiastically to US exhortations to invest and modernize. ERP dollars—$1.3 billion in 1948–49 and a further $1.6 billion in the next three years—financed almost fifty percent of French public investment under the Monnet Plan during the Marshall years, and the country could never have managed without it. It is thus more than a little ironic that it was in France that the Marshall Plan faced the greatest popular criticism. In mid-1950 only one French adult in three acknowledged having even heard of the Marshall Plan and of these 64 percent declared it to be ‘bad’ for their country! The Plan’s relatively poor image in France represented a partial public relations success for the French Communists, perhaps their greatest.4 In Austria the local Communists—backed by Soviet forces still occupying the eastern region of the country—never made any dent in the popularity of Americans and their aid; the latter put food in people’s mouths and this was what mattered most. In Greece the situation was clearer still. In the circumstances of a brutal civil war Marshall Aid, extended to Greece in April 1948, made the difference between survival and destitution. The $649 million of American aid to Greece under the...