As thunder follows lightning, so calls for a “Marshall Plan” follow major disasters. It’s the symptom of a global economic discourse still in thrall to the promise of the immediate post-WW2 period, when we’d seen off Great Evil and were pretty confident that economics as a scientific enterprise that could guarantee results.
It turned out that there were a few more evils to come and that economics was embarrassingly low on scientific rigour; fast forward to economic collapse models, but the Marshall Plan remains inviolate. The Marshall Plan worked! and so calls for a Marshall Plan are, at root, calls for something that works.
Unfortunately this is the equivalent of porn for policy makers – long on skin but short on content, something that everybody can hang their own particular fantasies on. Calls for a Marshall Plan for [insert country name here] tends to come in three flavours:
a. Deliberately vague rhetoric.
b. Historically illiterate rhetoric.
c. Hilariously transparent rhetoric to ensure that funding will be channeled through the speaker’s own bureaucracy and/or replicate the speaker’s own institutional structures.
I tend to give credence to De Long and Eichengreen’s view that the Marshall Plan is best seen as a shot in the arm to recovery processes that were already underway in postwar Europe, rather than the genesis of that recovery. In this light, the idea of a Marshall Plan for Haiti makes no sense, because the various institutions aren’t in place to actually recover.
Tags: haiti, marshall plan
interesting sidepoint is that Marshall Plan led (in part) to Mcarthyism: in order to get congress to approve it, Marshall et al had to play up the threat from Soviet Union…. (source for this is Clive James – Cultural Amnesia)
The Marshall Plan speech is interesting reading. Actually, it’s not, but there is this:
“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist… Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”