After the end of World War II and the rise of Soviet influence in Europe, the high strategy of the United States for the post-war period required not only the containment of communism but also the creation of a world open to American political, cultural, and economic influence. Western European economies, on the other hand, needed American aid for their reconstruction and, through it, to limit communist influence.

Thus, the effort to perpetuate the prosperity and security of the United States was based on the establishment and management of a new economic order. As a fundamental component of this effort, the Marshall Plan served as a means of correlating American economic assistance with changes in European institutions and practices, and at the same time an attempt to roll back communist influence in the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.

The subject of this volume is the contribution of the Marshall Plan to the reconstruction and division of the European continent two years after the end of World War II. The first part focuses on the relations of American national ideology with American foreign policy, the long-term causes and short-term motivations of the Marshall Plan, and the new realities that Americans were called to manage immediately after 1945.

The second part concerns the functioning of the Marshall Plan as a tool for the economic, social, and political reconstruction of Western Europe as a whole, but also for a number of individual countries - Italy, West Germany, France, and Greece. The third part explores the shocks caused by the Marshall Plan in the communist world and the division of Europe after the winter of 1947-1948.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]