The speech that made Europe

[airiefairie]

When George Marshall, Truman's secretary of state and former commander in chief of the US army visited Harvard to receive his honorary title in June 1047, the decision wasn't deemed too important by the press. The historians say his hosts at the university didn't know what he would say in his speech. But that speech marked the beginning of changes

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

Thank the gods for George Marshall.

We all signed up, even though we pretty much could see that West Germany, as it then was, unsaddled with debt, would be the winner of the peace.

We bankrupted ourselves and lost our dubiously-obtained empire to fight the Nazis. As did the French, who were overrun. We needed those loans; and we needed Germany back on its feet; and we needed to stand together against the Soviet bloc. The Marshall plan gave us all that. But it also gave the British a sense of resentment over the sacrifices we made, and the impossibility of recouping those sacrificial losses; and that resentment took decades to come to fruition, but when it did we shot ourselves in the foot and rejected the European project... and that process is still ongoing.

There are no sunny uplands here for us, alas. But maybe for others, which is some small consolation.

[htpcl]

There's also something like a new Marshall plan being proposed and possibly carried out soon for the Balkans, now initiated by Germany itself. Germany is not just returning the favor, it's making a strategic move, a new Drang nach Osten. It has always seen Central and East Europe as a space where it could expand its influence, and it's doing just that