The illusion of consensus: American business, Cold War aid and the industrial recovery of Western Europe, 1948-1958

From 1948 to 1958, the United States extended approximately {dollar}30 billion in technical and industrial aid to Western Europe through the European Cooperation Administration and its successor agencies, the Foreign Operations Administration and the International Cooperation Administration. This study traces the political and administrative evolution of U.S. technical aid and its impact on the recovery efforts of European nations and industries after World War II. In particular, it examines how the Cold War forced the dramatic reorientation of European aid policy from liberalized economic recovery to NATO military production. While dozens of aid programs operated over the decade, one program, the United States Technical Assistance and Productivity Program (USTA&P), provides the most comprehensive portrayal of the complex, and often tortured, progression of U.S.-European aid administration and relations during the early Cold War.; A close examination of the USTA&P reveals that a small but vocal group of American aid administrators and European leaders consistently resisted the total redirection of technical assistance away from economic reform towards anti-Soviet defense. As the former framers and supporters of the European Recovery Program, they held to the view that Cold War aims, such as the formation of an East-West trade split, belied the original postwar mission of the United States to advance greater global economic integration and redevelopment. In their opinion, the best defense against communism in Europe was U.S. support of increased industrial productivity, the spread of management and labor reform, and greater cultivation of mass consumer enterprises and overseas markets. In an attempt to maintain the illusion of U.S.-European consensus, the Eisenhower administration retained both European domestic and military assistance under the Mutual Security Administration upon taking office in 1953. By doing so, it perpetuated the incongruous and paradoxical arrangement of U.S. aid policy, which called for the simultaneous advance of Cold War containment alongside postwar global economic integration and trade liberalization.; As an additional consequence, European nations received after 1953 an unprecedented, and unanticipated, amount of domestic industrial aid, enhanced by even greater exposure to U.S. business activities and methods through the USTA&P and the NATO offshore procurement program. It is argued here that such programs provided a crucial "blueprint" upon which Western Europe revived and rebuilt its infrastructure of industrial capitalism and trade after World War II.