The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 140

an goal was, as Dean Acheson put it in reference to the EDC, “to reverse incipient divisive
nationalist trends on the continent.” 87 American congressional support for the Marshall Plan
was also premised, at least in part, on encouraging integrative political institutions and habits.
When Marshall Plan aid was provided to Europe, beginning in 1948, the American gov-
ernment insisted that the Europeans themselves organize to jointly allocate the funds. This
gave rise to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was the
institutional forerunner of the European Community. This body eventually became respons-
ible for Europe-wide supervision of economic reconstruction, and it began to involve the
Europeans in discussion of joint economic management. As one American official recalls, the
OEEC “instituted one of the major innovations of postwar international cooperation, the sys-
tematic country review, in which the responsible national authorities are cross-examined by
a group of their peers together with a high-quality international staff. In those reviews, ques-
tions are raised which in prewar days would have been considered a gross and unacceptable
foreign interference in domestic affairs.” 88 The United States encouraged European integra-
tion as a bulwark against intra-European conflict even as it somewhat more reluctantly insti-
tutionalized its own security commitment to Europe. As Michael Mastanduno argues: “The
Marshall Plan was prompted by proximate and enduring security concerns, including the risk
of internal communist subversion or external Soviet aggression against the fragile economic
and political systems of Western Europe, and the need to solve the long-standing Franco-
German problem by binding West Germany and France into a more integrated European and
Atlantic community.” 89
The various elements of the institutional bargain among the Atlantic countries fit together.
The Marshall Plan and NATO were part of a larger institutional package. As Lloyd Gardner
argues: “Each formed part of a whole. Together they were designed to 'mold the military
character' of the Atlantic nations, prevent the balkanization of European defense systems,
create an internal market large enough to sustain capitalism in Western Europe, and lock in
Germany on the Western side of the Iron Curtain.” 90 NATO was a security alliance, but it
was also embraced as a device to lock in political and economic relations within the Atlantic
area. After the Atlantic security treaty was signed, Secretary Acheson was asked by Senator
Claude Pepper if NATO had given the “Western European nations some confidence against
a resurgent Germany as well as Russia?” “Yes,” was Acheson's response. “Yes, it works in
all directions.” 91
It was thus that the American vision of an open liberal order was transformed into an
American-centered hegemonic order. The initial American project—to construct an open lib-
eral order—gave way to a focus on rebuilding and reconstructing Europe, creating a Western-
centered order. As the Cold War emerged, America's other project was to build alliances and
construct a containment order. By the late-1940s, these two projects became fused. Open-
ness and containment went hand in hand. The type of open system that the United States was