Aufgabe GE BIL E GK HT 3 · Abitur NRW Geschichte GK · Haupttermin · bilingual Englisch 2021

Abiturprüfung 2021 – Geschichte bilingual-englisch, Grundkurs

Aufgabenstellung

Aufgabenstellung:

Analyse the text. (26 Punkte)

Explain the post-war economic, social and political conditions Judt mentions (16 Punkte) and present the reasons that led the USA to launch the Marshall Plan (12 Punkte). (28 Punkte)

With a focus on Germany's development, assess the claims made by Judt. (26 Punkte)

Hinweis: Weitere 20 Punkte werden für die Darstellungsleistung vergeben. Gesamtpunktzahl: 100 Punkte.

Materialgrundlage:

Tony Judt: Introduction. In: The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After, hrsg. von Martin Schain, New York 2001, S. 2 – 5.

(Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zum Autor: Tony Judt (1948 – 2010) was a British-American historian, essayist and university professor who specialised in European history.

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[T]he Marshall Plan did not come out of nowhere. It has a number of distinct contexts, which help explain both its origin and its objectives. By 1945 the collapse of Europe – first into depression, then war – had led many commentators to the conclusion that something quite new and different would be required if Europe (and therefore the world) were to break out of the cycle of economic stagnation and political frustration that had characterized the continent for the previous two decades. If another unsuccessful postwar era was to be avoided, and political extremists of all kind prevented from coming to power once again, democratic governments would need to take a quite different and more activist view of their capacities and responsibilities.

The experience of war contributed its own lessons. As in World War I, wartime governments had taken responsibility for economic mobilization, planning, controls, and the national direction of people and resources in ways that would hitherto have been unthinkable in time of peace. As a result, by 1945 there were many in Europe, by no means only on the Left, who took the view that the advantages of wartime planning and government intervention could translate into sustained peacetime administration. In Britain and France, as in Germany and the Benelux countries (though to a lesser extent in Italy) a new political and administrative elite was thus much more receptive to the sort of planning and cooperation that would be required of them by the Marshall Plan than would have been the case for their predecessors in an earlier generation.

But even if the old orthodoxies 1 had not taken such a beating at the hands of history, the postwar circumstances would in any case have paved the way for significant American involvement in European affairs. Like it or not, the West Europeans after 1945 needed the United States. [...]

The peculiarity of the Marshall Plan was rooted in the distinctive circumstances of its emergence. 1947 was a year of crisis throughout Europe. The steady onward march of Communism appeared to many to be inexorable. [...]

In the short term the achievement of the Marshall Plan is clear. The guarantees of aid from America, and American encouragement for the establishment of domestic and international agencies capable of putting that aid to good use, transformed first the expectations and then the institutions of Western Europe. Production increased, the financial stability of America’s West European partners improved, and before the end of the Plan all the major West European recipients of Marshall aid had exceeded their 1938 output levels and were already embarked upon the first stages of what we have come to see as the post-World War II era of sustained prosperity. [...]

It is a little harder to be quite so confident about the long-term effects of the Marshall Plan, at least upon the economy. Without any question the Plan brought the United States back into Europe in a quite unanticipated manner, and there it has remained ever since. How far this close interweaving of European and American concerns can be attributed to the Marshall Plan alone is a matter for legitimate debate. [...] But at the very least one can say that the European Recovery Program was a fundamental building block in the forging of this transatlantic relationship.

Similarly, the process whereby the continental states of Western Europe came together first to form a Coal and Steel Community (in 1951) and then, after 1955, to forge the European Economic Community and its successor institutions in Brussels is not directly attributable to anything undertaken or intended by planners in Washington. The origins of the European Coal and Steel Community lie as much in the domestic needs of France and the unusual circumstances of Germany as they do in American strategy. Nonetheless it remains true that the Americans were enthusiastic early proponents of European cooperation, and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was manifestly influential in forging habits of cross border discussion and information exchange that would have been altogether unthinkable before 1939.

Finally, the Marshall Plan helped divide Europe. This, of course, was far from being its intention (though there are grounds for believing that in offering Marshall aid to the Eastern half of Europe as well the Americans at least half-anticipated and perhaps hoped that it would be rejected). But because the Eastern half of Europe was constrained to reject the Marshall Plan, the tremendous injection of confidence and dollars that it represented was confined to Europe’s Western half, which thereby took a great leap ahead of the rest of the continent. [...] The Plan itself did not contribute by its design to the definitive drawing of Cold War lines in Europe, but its timing and implementation served to accentuate the significance of these divisions at a crucial moment.

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1 Reference to pre-war economic thinking with regard to tackling economic crises: On the one hand deflation policy, counter-cyclical deficit financing on the other hand.

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