Book Review

Comparative/World

Geir Lundestad. "Empire" by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 2000. Cloth $77.00, paper $18.95.

Each of these short monographs addresses the central debate in postwar European historiography about the extent to which the subsequent development and current political and economic posture of Western Europe may be ascribed to American influence. The traditional argument has been that American influence was of very great importance; that position suffered a sustained assault in the 1980s, however, from a minimalist position asserted by Alan Milward and a school of historians under his influence. Milward argued that economic recovery would have occurred in Western Europe pretty much as it did had the Marshall Plan never existed, and that European integration was a pragmatic policy initiated by the European nations to do collectively what they were unable to do satisfactorily for themselves. These two books reassert the "traditionalist" perspective of the centrality of American influence.	1
Of the two, John Killick's is the more effective. He grants that Marshall Plan aid was small as compared to the gross domestic product of the European nations but insists upon its critical importance at the moment when it was implemented. True, Europe was experiencing rapid recovery from the effects of the war by 1947, but the winter of 1946–1947 and consequent shortages of food and fuel threatened economic collapse and political instability. France produced 6.7 million metric tons of wheat in 1946 but only half as much in 1947, and the bread ration was reduced to 250 and then 200 grams per day. Investment could not have continued in these conditions; small in relation to French GDP, the Marshall Plan provided up to fifty percent of Monnet Plan investment in 1948. More importantly, what William Clayton correctly perceived from Washington was a breakdown in the structure of European markets, with peasants withholding their grain from the cities and feeding it to cattle. Killick assures us that the crisis was real, and, as it worsened during 1947, the Americans were obliged to step in with "interim aid" even before the Marshall Plan could be put through Congress in 1948.	2
Killick presents a multicausal argument for the Marshall Plan and concludes that its goals were attained, whereas without it, alternative outcomes were possible and even likely, ranging from an autarchic and closed European system of trade characteristic of the interwar period to total collapse and communism. The Marshall Plan met the British financial crisis of 1947 and provided for German reconstruction and integration into the Western bloc. Marshall aid helped the reestablishment of markets and stimulated the revival of intra-European trade, of critical importance to the smaller European countries. The plan was also motivated by the American desire to see a European economy of scale, a dose of federalism à l'américaine, and American-style corporate capitalism with labor relations based on a politics of productivity rather than class conflict. Killick draws freely from arguments put forward by Michael Hogan and Charles Maier, but his central point is that without the Marshall Plan France and Italy could have collapsed, dragging down the European system, while with substantial doses of Americanization in every sphere of politics and economics (about culture Killick is silent), Europe achieved the best of possible outcomes.	. . .