Marshall Plan - Areas Without The Plan

Areas Without The Plan

Large parts of the world devastated by World War II did not benefit from the Marshall Plan. The only major Western European nation excluded was Francisco Franco's Spain, which did not overtly participate in World War II. After the war, it pursued a policy of self-sufficiency, currency controls, and quotas, with little success. With the escalation of the Cold War, the United States reconsidered its position, and in 1951 embraced Spain as an ally, encouraged by Franco's aggressive anti-communist policies. Over the next decade, a considerable amount of American aid would go to Spain, but less than its neighbors had received under the Marshall Plan.

While the western portion of the Soviet Union had been as badly affected as any part of the world by the war, the eastern portion of the country was largely untouched and had seen a rapid industrialization during the war. The Soviets also imposed large reparations payments on the Axis allies that were in its sphere of influence. Austria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and especially East Germany were forced to pay vast sums and ship large amounts of supplies to the USSR. These reparation payments meant the Soviet Union received about the same itself as 16 European countries received in total from Marshall Plan aid.

In accordance with the agreements with the USSR shipment of dismantled German industrial installations from the west began on March 31, 1946. Under the terms of the agreement the Soviet Union would in return ship raw materials such as food and timber to the western zones. In view of the Soviet failure to do so, the western zones halted the shipments east, ostensibly on a temporary basis, although they were never resumed. It was later shown that the main reason for halting shipments east was not the behavior of the USSR but rather the recalcitrant behavior of France. Examples of material received by the USSR were equipment from the Kugel-Fischer ballbearing plant at Schweinfurt, the Daimler-Benz underground aircraft-engine plant at Obrigheim, the Deschimag shipyards at Bremen-Weser, and the Gendorf powerplant.

The USSR did establish COMECON as a riposte to the Marshall Plan to deliver aid for Eastern Bloc countries, but this was complicated by the Soviet efforts to manage their own recovery from the war. The members of Comecon looked to the Soviet Union for oil; in turn, they provided machinery, equipment, agricultural goods, industrial goods, and consumer goods to the Soviet Union. Economic recovery in the east was much slower than in the west, and the economies never fully recovered in the communist period, resulting in the formation of the shortage economies and a gap in wealth between East and West. Finland, which did not join the Marshall Plan and which was required to give large reparations to the USSR, saw its economy recover to pre-war levels in 1947. France, which received billions of dollars through the Marshall Plan, similarly saw its average income per person return to almost pre-war level by 1949. By mid-1948 industrial production in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia had recovered to a level somewhat above pre-war level.