At the beginning of 2022, experts on the Marshall Plan were not in huge demand. Most people did not believe an entire European economy might suddenly be smashed apart by conflict, so the postwar reconstruction programme spearheaded by US secretary of state George Marshall in 1948 occupied a firmly retro niche. The details were, says Adam Tooze, a history professor at Columbia University and an expert on the plan, a “pretty geeky issue”.
But the war in Ukraine has caused the world, particularly the west, to look to the past for answers. The British prime minister Boris Johnson has called for a Marshall Plan to help Ukraine. So too has Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who has vowed to rebuild the besieged city of Mariupol. In the US, meanwhile, a recent report by Tooze has been circulating among policymakers and Wall Street financiers. In Washington last week, where meetings of the World Bank and IMF were in full swing, I repeatedly heard the plan name-checked. Marshall Plan history is no longer a niche.
Is this premature? My first reaction was to think so. Fighting continues in Ukraine, and not even the most optimistic of western officials think it will end soon. “My best guess is that we will end up with a long, frozen conflict, like Georgia,” a seasoned former western military leader told me.