Towards the Marshall Plan
It never seemed likely that the 16 European countries meeting in Paris to draw up a schedule of joint requirements and a plan for self- help would have an easy task, and now that the day for reporting progress is near it does not look much easier. The provisional estimate of aid required over the next four years was some $29,000,000,000, a figure which not only exceeds American willingness to help, as was shown by a statement of the Acting Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Lovett, last week, but probably exceeds American capacity as well. The programme of future European production must secure American approval, but the proposals for close economic co-ordination between the 16 countries are full of awkward gaps and contradictions. It could hardly have been otherwise. Western Europe, after all, is not a self-sufficient economic unit, and since the pre-war balance of exchange of manufactures for the primary products of Eastern Europe has been upset by the descent of the iron curtain, the estab- lishment of a new balance with raw material suppliers outside Europe must necessarily present a number of uncertainties which cannot be removed in Paris. It is impossible to believe that the Americans do not understand and sympathise with all this, and therefore it is possible to hope that tire group of senior officials now in Paris will aim at smoothing out the difficulties of the Conference. But even if this powerful lever can be counted upon—and if Mr. Marshall has full faith in his own proposals it must be counted upon—the mass of difficulty to be moved is still most forbidding. But if it can be proved to Mr. Marshall that his dirnarche was not in vain, and that the United States is not being asked to pour money down a drain, that will be enough. The task of convincing Congress is an American task, in which the House Select Committee, now also in Europe, can play an important part.
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