ABSTRACT
When General Marshall chose to announce on Commencement Day at Harvard University in June 1947 the readiness of the United States to provide further aid to European economies he appeared to impose only one condition.1 This was that the aid should be used by the European countries in a co-ordinated way rather than be allocated individually to specific countries for specific purposes. There was, as all historians of the subject have shown, no Marshall Plan before Marshall spoke, only the decision that a systematic programme of aid for western Europe was in America’s real interest. There was also, and on this historians have been altogether more reticent, a firm resolve that American aid should achieve a political as well as an economic purpose, that it should serve to ‘integrate’ western Europe, making it into a more closely united area over which certain common forms of economic, social and political existence proper to democracy and the ‘free’ world would prevail. No matter how nebulous the ideas when Marshall spoke the political and economic intentions behind the decision to announce the provision of aid were extraordinarily far-reaching and ambitious. The United States did not only intend to reconstruct western Europe economically, but also politically.
