Twenty Years Afterward Revive the Spirit of the Marshall Plan
Reuss, Henry S.
Twenty years afterward revive the spirit of the Marshall Plan by HENRY S. REUSS " O N E OF T H E WORST effects of U.S. involvement in Vietnam is to hypnotize us in almost everything else we do....
...4) machinery for achieving full employment and price stability throughout the cooperating community of nations, by a radical upgrading of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...
...The Eighty-ninth Congress, in its closing days, enacted an excellent project of research and development for whole new systems of urban mass transport designed to move people about our metropolises speedily, safely, without fouling the atmosphere, and in accord with sound city planning...
...Aid needs grow even as willingness to help shrinks...
...Again, action is needed and needed now...
...If it is not solved soon, we face a spiral into catastrophe that is all too well known in economic history...
...Our wholehearted participation in such a conference would be a needed reminder to the world—and perhaps to ourselves—that our interests in the world far exceed the narrow boundaries of military action in Southeast Asia and military alliances in Europe and elsewhere...
...The industrial nations of the West go each their own way, at varying speeds, in arriving at trade arrangements with the Communist world...
...The nations of Europe, as Marshall proposed, got together and agreed upon their common needs...
...Yet today the will of the industrialized nations to help those less favorably situated is much eroded...
...The best hope in this field is that about a year from now everyone except France will be in agreement on what ought to be done if the world runs into serious financial trouble...
...2) an aid policy that would see a real transfer of goods and services from the advanced countries to developing ones on a scale commensurate with their actual needs...
...And our attempts should be guided by the certain knowledge that if we do not do so now, in freedom, we shall be compelled to the same decisions later, under much less favorable circumstances and under the necessities induced by economic chaos...
...The material progress in the world over the last twenty years has largely come from the initiative and impetus of the Marshall Plan...
...The concept of international aid is too noble, the prospects it holds for mankind are too fair by far, to let it now wither and die for lack of interest...
...The first is trade...
...The second great area in need of international order and cooperation is that of aid...
...In this country, voices in Congress that once were raised to further the cause of aid are now silent, or speak of doubt or delay...
...There is no agreement on what actually ought to be done...
...But the exhilaration of the dawn has given way to the languor of high noon...
...It is time to get back to that spirit of goodwill and cooperation...
...The areas of drift in international economics are easy enough to list...
...What we get, mostly, is the rapid conversion of foreign-held dollars into gold by countries such as France, and endless lectures by foreign central bankers that we should slow down our $750 billion economy in order to fix up our $1 to $2-billion annual payments deficit...
...If we learn anything from economic history, however, it is that economic trouble does not give much real warning of its approach...
...But this country should certainly be ready to welcome and support such an initiative wherever it originates...
...5) a pooling of resources for scientific research and development to accomplish a great breakthrough in the interests of all...
...In the light of such dismal realities of the dismal science of economics, it is not surprising that heads of national treasuries and central banks have been talking international monetary reform for more than five years...
...It is time to decide whether that trade is to be conducted with some semblance of order, or whether the helter-skelter free-for-all of the present is to continue, with its inevitable political consequences...
...Action is needed here as elsewhere...
...The benefits for the United States would even go beyond those of the actual points at issue...
...It will be a long task, but the time to begin is at hand...
...Hence, we had better have the machinery for monetary reform set up and working...
...Notably, we stand paralyzed in the very international economic cooperation where once we shone...
...It is upon us before steps can be taken to deal with it...
...Our own unilateral efforts to achieve balance still have not done so, after seven years...
...Once more, action is needed...
...Our European partners, themselves the first and greatest beneficiaries of aid, act now as if little obligation existed to extend the benefits of that system to other parts of the world...
...Representative from Wisconsin since 1954, w a s deputy general counsel of the Marshall Plan in 1949 and chairman of the International Finance Subcommittee rehabilitation of war-torn Europe...
...In fact, scarcely one-half of this goal is being met...
...At the end of five years of price stability, the United States views with dismay the steep rise in prices of recent months...
...Aid programs must be aimed at bringing the emerging nations to some degree of self-sufficiency...
...At the start of this decade, the United Nations called upon the industrialized nations to devote at least one per cent of their gross national product to economic aid...
...The original Kennedy round of international trade negotiations moves ponderously toward its conclusion next June with little or no hope of achieving the goals set when President Kennedy initiated it five years ago...
...Given Vietnam, the initiative for such a conference and plan could much better come from outside America...
...Whatever happens to the Kennedy round, the trading world will need a new trade policy after next June when the round ends...
...Yet the streets of Paris and Rome are as congested as those of New York and Los Angeles...
...Germans still remember with horror their disastrous inflation after World War I. Britain's stop-and-go cyclical economic policy is once more in its stop phase...
...To many Americans the outcome resembled something like the old Quaker vision of the Peaceable Kingdom...
...Instead of weekend bilateral visits to the European heads of state, with the same dreary agenda of who pays for arms or flirtations with multilateral nuclear forces, why not a heads-of-state conference of the twenty-odd leading industrial nations, looking toward a renewed plan of international cooperation to be activated on June 5, 1967, the twentieth anniversary of Secretary Marshall's speech...
...There is agreement only on brilliant exegeses of alternatives: what will happen if we do this, what will happen if we do not...
...3) a program of international monetary reform, through the International Monetary Fund, to reconcile the interests of reserve-currency countries with those of the rest of the world, and to minimize the destructive impact of balance of payments adjustments...
...At a minimum, such an anniversary conference should produce: (1) a trade policy to succeed the present round of Geneva negotiations...
...and the United States, as Marshall predicted, joined the recovery effort...
...The third area of drift in international relations is that of the balance of payments...
...I propose that we free ourselves from the transfixing cobra stare of Vietnam...
...The easy and willing adjustment and the facilitation of settlements that marked the early postwar years have now given way to rigid exchange rates embellished by recriminations as to which nations ought to adjust to keep the system in balance...
...Twenty years after, preoccupied by Vietnam, a mood of complacency and drift has replaced our former urgency and dedication...
...It was one of those dawns in man's history when the intelligent person with knowledge of man's past and hope for man's future finds it a joy to be alive...
...In recent years the industrialized nations have been noting an unwelcome product of their unparalleled prosperity: steadily rising prices and the inflation they signal...
...None of the industrialized nations has solved the problem of how to maintain prosperity without inflation...
...Aid is the late Twentieth Century's transition from the Nineteenth Century's policies of colonization in the non-industrial world...
...There is a similar lack of policy on the thorny question of trade between East and West...
...It is foolish to pretend that these are goals easy to achieve...
...Why don't the two sides of the Atlantic combine their efforts to turn science loose on the real problems of mankind...
...Twenty years ago next June 5, Secretary of State George C. Marshall made his memorable Harvard speech inaugurating the Marshall Plan for the HENRY S. REUSS, a U.S...
...A most promising prospect for renewed economic cooperation on a grand scale lies in scientific research...
...It has come, that is, from international economic cooperation...
...Nor is it surprising that nothing much has come of the talks...
...The nations of the world have it in their power to build a new world of unparalleled prosperity and lasting peace...
...not simply agreed upon in principle...
...But it is imperative that we try...
...I propose that we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan by reviving, on a grand scale, the 1947 spirit of international economic cooperation...
...and it approved a breakthrough program of research into new methods of combatting water pollution...
...And the Rhine and the Danube are as polluted as the Hudson and the Potomac...
...Such a policy should aim toward what the Kennedy round aimed at in its conception, but is badly missing in its conclusion: a nondiscriminatory free trade area as broad as the industrialized free world—mainly the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan...
...President Johnson plans a European trip this spring...
...France and the United Kingdom are as busy pouring their resources into the Concorde supersonic transport plane as we are into our own SST...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
