Cold War Europe - Integration By Threat?

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             It was clear that previous programs of piecemeal assistance had failed to bring economic and political stability to Europe. Economic conditions there actually worsened in the wake of the winter crisis of 1946-47. .
             Marshall Aid was offered by the USA in 1947 to European countries to help fight the problems each nation was suffering in the post war period. The USA had offered European nations a number of smaller loans before the Marshall Plan was devised but it appeared to them that these loans were having no effect at all, as shown in the above quote from Michael J. Hogan. Marshall Aid was offered to all European nations but in accepting the package, each country had to share the aspirations of the American way of life'. .
             While a plan for economic aid that was open to all European states, including the Soviet Union, the Marshall Plan was clearly politically as well as economically motivated: the United States must have taken into account that the offer would be rejected by Moscow and its satellites as indeed it was. .
             Urwin's quote summarises everything the Marshall Plan stood for in four lines. At first glance it appears to be a humanitarian package designed to rescue the ailing European economy but in fact the Marshall Plan benefited the USA greatly because in strengthening the European economy, they were creating new markets for their goods and therefore strengthening their economy too. It was also a politically motivated system designed to unite the West against the East. The American planners knew that the Soviet Union and a number of Eastern European nations would turn their proposals down but they also knew the West would accept their plans because if they did not, they were prone to attack from communism, either externally or internally. Marshall Aid was crucial to Western European integration but at the same time it was born out of the threat from the Soviet Union and the Cold War.