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Liberal America and the Third World
Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science
By Robert A. Packenham PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07549-5
CHAPTER 1
Political Development Doctrines, 1947-1960
The Fifteen Weeks was one of those rare times in history when shackles fall away from the mind, the spirit, and the will, allowing them to soar free and high for a while and to discover new standards of what is responsible, of what is promising, and of what is possible. It was a time when men thought not in terms of what could be done but of what should be done, when only the timid idea was banished and all others welcomed, a time of courage, of bold decision, of generous response. It was a time when American democracy worked with unexampled efficiency and inspiration to produce national agreement. It was a great time to be alive.
The Fifteen Weeks went from February 21 to June 5, 1947. They began the day Great Britain informed the Department of State of its inability to maintain its commitments in Greece and Turkey, and ended when General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, delivered his famous commencement address at Harvard University. Out of those hundred days two programs emerged: the Truman Doctrine for aid to Greece and Turkey, and the Marshall Plan of aid for the economic recovery of Europe. Moreover, the planning that was done, the statements that were made, and the actions that were taken by the U.S. government in relation to these two programs formed the basis for much of the continuity in American foreign policy during the next two decades. Among the many subsequent policies and actions that "had their roots [in part] in the national conversion of the Fifteen Weeks" were the Point Four Program, the Mutual Security Program, the Development Loan Fund, the composite Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the Alliance for Progress, and the whole range of massive American aid programs and intervention in South Vietnam.
The Truman Doctrine
On March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman stood before a special joint session of Congress and requested $400 million for economic, technical, and military assistance to Greece and Turkey. Journalists, comparing its boldness and sweeping implications to the Monroe Doctrine, promptly dubbed the speech the "Truman Doctrine." They had a point. For the Truman Doctrine signaled a fundamental change in the grand foreign policy strategy of the United States. It was the first clear public statement of what came to be known as the "containment policy." (The containment label came from George Kennan's formulation which was published a few months after Truman's speech.) The policy was directed especially at the Soviet Union, but it was stated in general terms: "I am fully aware," Truman said, "of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey. ... I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." And he added: "I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes."
The immediate stimulus for President Truman's request had been the precarious economic and political situation in Greece and the decision by Great Britain in late February 1947 to withdraw its economic and military support from Greece and Turkey. The main concern was Greece. The war had almost literally decimated the Greek economy. Virtually all the railways, roads, port facilities, communications, and merchant marine were destroyed. Inflation was rampant. A thousand villages had been burned, and almost all livestock had disappeared. Eighty-five per cent of the children were tubercular. Moreover, guerrilla bands, thought by the American government to be led by Communists directed from Moscow, roamed the northern mountains; in the cities and towns, "Communist newspapers and agitators carried on a scarcely less effective war of words against the Greek government." All of this occurred against the background of increasing friction and deteriorating diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1947. The situation seemed urgent. As Truman saw it, "Greece must have help to import the goods necessary to restore internal order and security so essential for economic and political recovery. ... Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and self-respecting democracy. The United States must supply this assistance. ... There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn." After considerable discussion, Congress appropriated about $300 million for Greece and about $100 million for Turkey.
The broad rationale for the Truman Doctrine was not pure humanitarianism but the national interest of the United States. This was not novel; foreign policies are almost always justified in terms of national interest. What matters is how that interest is defined. Truman's speech was ambiguous on this score. He defined the American interest in both relatively narrow security terms and in broader developmental terms. He included the support of not just Greece and Turkey but other "free peoples" as part of the U.S. interest. In short, he defined the American interest in both specific and universal terms on both geographic and Cold-War/development dimensions. The ambiguity was in some measure intentional in order to warn the Soviet Union. But another consequence was to pave the way for other aid programs to other areas for broader development purposes according to uncertain criteria.
The most salient political development objective of the Truman Doctrine was that of maintaining and strengthening non-Communist, pro-American governments in Greece and Turkey. "The United States had to make a choice between supporting temporarily a bad democratic government and allowing an armed minority under Soviet direction to fasten a Communist dictatorship permanently on Greece," is the way Joseph Marion Jones, who wrote the original draft of Truman's speech, explains it: "It was not a choice between black and white, but between black and a rather dirty grey." The anti-Communist objective seemed important enough to justify publicly minimizing the undemocratic character of the Greek regime. Jones, who wrote later that the Greek government was "corrupt, reactionary, inefficient, and indulged in extremist practices," nevertheless drafted a speech which had Truman note only briefly that the Greek government was "not perfect," and then point out that it represented 85% of the members of Parliament chosen in a fair election the previous year. (Others have contested the fairness of the election; no one has disputed the liabilities of the Greek government.) There is also some question as to whether the rebels were "under Soviet direction" or even receiving aid from Russia. Certainly there was little time in late February and early March 1947 for a searching inquiry into the character of the rebel movement, its raison d'être, or its relations with Communist countries. To the American government the answers seemed obvious at the time.
The combination of the broad language of the Truman Doctrine and the loose definition of a "free people" in the Greek case had important consequences. As George Kennan was later to remark:
Throughout the ensuing two decades the conduct of our foreign policy would continue to be bedeviled by people in our own government as well as in other governments who could not free themselves from the belief that all another country had to do, in order to qualify for American aid, was to demonstrate the existence of a Communist threat. Since almost no country was without a Communist minority, this assumption carried very far. And as time went on, the firmness of understanding for these distinctions on the part of our own public and governmental establishment appeared to grow weaker rather than stronger. In the 1960s so absolute would be the value attached, even by people within the government, to the mere existence of a Communist threat, that such a threat would be viewed as calling, in the case of Southeast Asia, for an American response on a tremendous scale, without serious regard even to [the] main criteria that most of us in 1947 would have thought it natural and essential to apply."
And aid to Greece on the premise that it was a free people fighting off a coercive dictatorship opened the door to aid to other dubious democracies, also in the name of freedom.
A second salient political development objective was democracy. The desire to promote freedom in Greece and Turkey was not all rhetoric. If the United States had to stretch the definition of democracy in Greece in order to support it at the outset, this did not mean the Americans would not try to bring about a more genuine democracy later on. In Jones's words, "With United States aid and pressure the gray might become a respectable white." The effort was made, not once but repeatedly. For example, at the end of the civil war American officials found the Greek version of democracy "very hard to take." They "embarked upon a determined and distinctly high-handed effort to get a government that would more nearly suit their wishes." They insisted that elections be held immediately, and in March 1950 they were. The American hope was that a group of democratic centrist parties would win, organize a stable government, and carry on reform, recovery, and development programs. Their hopes were not realized: no clear majority resulted, and the new prime minister was unacceptable to them. They pressured him into resigning, but the next man was no better. Other techniques were tried — economic pressures, pressures on legislators, changes in electoral laws — but they were equally unsuccessful. In September 1950 a new American ambassador, John Peurifoy, "declared that the United States government was completely neutral in matters of internal Greek politics. This pious falsehood was in effect a public confession of defeat." Thus the explicit efforts to engineer democracy from the top in Greece were frustrated.
The final set of political development objectives were vague and diffuse hopes for freedom, world peace, stability, and community. As American involvement around the world increased and our aid programs expanded, these objectives continued to be prominent. Economic and technical assistance were seen as important for economic development in the Third World, and economic development in those countries was regarded as conducive to a host of other good things.
The main instruments by which the goals of the Truman Doctrine were to have been achieved were economic: funds, materials, technical assistance. In Turkey, funds were used to enable the Turks to spend their own money for military purposes: thus economic aid to Turkey was an early version of what came to be known later as defense support (i.e.
economic aid for security purposes). In Greece, the assumption was that economic aid would strengthen the economy, and that the strengthened economy would produce greater political stability and reduce the appeals of Communism. However, events in Greece made this theory obsolete even before its implementation began. Full-scale civil war broke out in July 1947 between the government and the rebels. Consequently, "willy-nilly the American mission found itself compelled to wage war also." From 1947 to 1949, military considerations and programs came first and almost everything else had to wait.
What were the results? The main objective of the program — containing the Communists — was achieved. The national army, with American help, won the civil war in Greece. But the cost was great. The original sum of $300 million had swelled to appropriations totaling more than a $1½ billion through fiscal year 1950/51; still more followed later. And this was only part of the real cost. "The country as a whole was worse off in 1949 than it had been in 1944 and 1945, when the severe losses of the occupation years were still fresh. Clearly, the task of reconstruction and construction was going to be much larger than United States officials had estimated in 1947. Except for main roads and ports, which had been rebuilt and improved during the course of the fighting, almost everything planned in 1947 still remained to be done in 1949." Almost two decades later, when the total amount of American military and economic aid is said to have reached almost $4 billion, socioeconomic inequities and political instability were still grave problems. An out-and-out military dictatorship came to power in April 1967. American aid had ended, or at least deferred, civil war, and it had prevented a Communist takeover; but these were the only unambiguous successes of the Truman Doctrine and its successor programs in Greece.
The Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was part of the same grand strategy and had the same general rationale and political development objectives as the Truman Doctrine. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and President Truman were already thinking about a program for European recovery and other aid programs even as the Truman Doctrine was being formulated. When speechwriter Joseph Jones was drafting President Truman's address and found himself perplexed over whether to restrict references specifically to Greece and Turkey or to include more sweeping and general policy statements, he went to Acheson for advice. Acheson told him: "If F.D.R. were alive, I think I know what he'd do. He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey." Truman, asked almost two years later by newsmen for some "background on the origins of Point Four," replied: "The origin of point four has been in my mind, and in the minds of members of the government, for the past 2 or 3 years, ever since the Marshall Plan was inaugurated. It originated with the Greece and Turkey proposition. Been [sic] studying it ever since. I spend most of my time going over to that globe back there, trying to figure out ways to make peace in the world."
There were some important differences, of course, between the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. In the first place, the scale of the problem and of the eventual solution was much greater. There were many European countries — the original invitation by Secretary Marshall extended even to the Communist East European countries — and much more aid would be required. Western Europe was even more important strategically than Greece and Turkey. We had closer and more long-standing ties there, and probably humanitarian and economic motives played a greater role in the Marshall Plan than they had in the Truman Doctrine. Last but certainly not least, notwithstanding its grave economic difficulties, in 1947 Europe had a far more advanced technical, social, and political base than did Greece or Turkey; and it offered much better prospects for efficient use of aid resources and for coordinated regional planning and implementation among the recipient nations.
The fundamental theory about political development contained in the Marshall Plan was explicitly and unambiguously that political health in Europe depended on economic medicine. In all the planning memoranda, speeches, and legislation connected with the Marshall Plan — from Acheson's relatively little-noticed but important speech in Cleveland, Mississippi in May 1947 through the Economic Cooperation Act passed in March 1948, which legislated the European Recovery Program into existence — there was remarkable agreement on this basic proposition. The same fundamental theory underlay the implementation phase. The aid instruments were almost exclusively economic: raw materials, industrial equipment, and international liquidity. These were allocated to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), a planning agency which in turn reallocated the aid, subject to final American approval, among the 16 member nations. Political progress meant a whole array of things: anti-Communism, pro-Americanism, stability, democracy, and popularly supported center and left-of-center political leadership. All the goals were salient. If anti-Communism and pro-Americanism were the first goals, they were a sort of first-among-equals, at least until the Korean War changed the foreign policy posture of the United States.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Liberal America and the Third World by Robert A. Packenham. Copyright © 1973 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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