Revisiting the Marshall Plan
DESPITE ongoing efforts to catalyze global development cooperation, there have been significant obstacles to progress in recent years. Fortunately, with major international meetings set for the second half of 2015, world leaders have an important opportunity to overcome them.
Such a turnaround has happened before. At the turn of the century, international negotiations on economic development had also come to a grinding halt. The Seattle ministerial of the World Trade Organization ended without decision, and after two decades of the Washington Consensus, developing countries were frustrated at the US-led international financial institutions. Negotiations for the inaugural United Nations Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico, seemed to be headed nowhere.
Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, the US was hit with major terrorist attacks — a tragic development that somehow catalyzed progress. World leaders agreed to begin the Doha Development Round to ensure that trade negotiations would serve developing countries’ development aspirations. And the 2002 Monetary Conference produced major breakthroughs on foreign and domestic investment, foreign debt, international cooperation, trade, and systemic governance issues.
Of course, tragedy is not needed to kick-start progress. But the right program is key. The world needs a well-designed and farreaching strategy to stimulate industrialization, modeled after the European Recovery Program — the American initiative that enabled Europe to rebuild after WWII.
The Marshall Plan’s impact was felt far beyond Europe’s borders, developing over the following decade into what is probably the most successful economic-development assistance project in human history. Similar policies were introduced in Northeast Asia following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the Korean War.
Of course, there was a political motivation behind the Marshall Plan’s expansion. At its core, however, the Marshall Plan was an economic strategy — and a sound one at that. Crucially, it represented a complete reversal of its predecessor, the Morgenthau Plan, which focused on de-industrialization — with poor results. By late 1946, however, economic hardship and unemployment in Germany spurred former US President Herbert Hoover to visit the country on a fact-finding mission.
Hoover’s third report of March 18, 1947, called the notion that Germany could be reduced to a pastoral state an “illusion,” which could not be achieved without exterminating or moving 25,000,000 people out of the country. The only alternative was re-industrialization. Less than three months later, Secretary of State George Marshall made his landmark speech at Harvard University announcing the policy reversal.
Marshall made three other important points in his short speech. First, in noting the role that the breakdown of trade between urban and rural areas played in Germany’s economic slowdown, he recalled a centuries-old European economic insight: All wealthy countries have cities with a manufacturing sector. “The remedy,” Marshall explained, “lies in…restoring the confidence of the European people,” so that “the manufacturer and the farmer” would be “able and willing to exchange their products for currencies, the continuing value of which is not open to question.”
Second, Marshall argued that participatory institutions emerge from economic progress, not the other way around — the opposite of today’s conventional wisdom.
Third, Marshall emphasized that aid should be comprehensive and strategic, in order to foster real progress and development.
Marshall’s vision offers important lessons for world leaders seeking to accelerate development today, beginning with the need to reverse the effects of the Washington Consensus on developing and transition economies — effects that resemble those of the Morgenthau Plan.