Why there can be no 1997 Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe
by George Lewinski and Peter Laufer
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Anniversaries offer accommodating backdrops for political posturing, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan to rebuild post-war Europe is packed with flags and speeches, appreciation from the Europeans, and concern for the future.
"America stands with you," a serious-looking President Bill Clinton told Europe at The Hague ceremonies. "For America, the commitment to our common future is not an option, it's a necessity."
But instead of a Marshall-like plan to add rooms to the 'European House' by rebuilding the former Soviet bloc countries, President Clinton and most of his western European collegaues seem content to hope private investors will fix decayed and abused economies.
We watched Clinton's speech and the accompnaying celebrations from our rooms high in eastern Berlin's Forum Hotel. Built in 1969, the Forum -- now part of the Intercontinental chain -- is a stark example of the different problems faced by Marshall Plan recipients in western Europe in 1947 and eastern Europe in 1997. Our Soviet-style hotel was completely refurbished after the Berlin Wall fell, from the rooftop casino to the luscious breakfast buffet. But the refitting is somewhat superficial. The rooms are still tiny, the hallways reek of a distinct communist-era disinfectant, and maneuvering in a western car through the parking garage is a driving challenge -- the ramps and spaces were designed for tiny East German Trabants.
Only blocks from our hotel, and stretching eastward to Moscow, the story
is much worse than puny rooms and parking spots. Russia sapped eastern Europe
for war reparations (the opposite tactic of the Marshall Plan) and any
rebuilding that occurred under "the Workers' and Peasants" dictatorships
resulted in ugly and poorly constructed architecture, and an environment
poisoned with industrial pollution.
Fifty years ago Rotterdam, Cologne, Berlin and so much else that lay in Hitler's path of attack and retreat was bombed and burned to rubble. People were homeless and starving. The Marshall Plan was, as the post-war British Foreign Secretary Ernes Beven said, "a life saver" that enabled western Europe to rebuild from devastation. But critical differences make the reconstruction challenges in eastern Europe today more confounding than the work the Marshall Plan financed back in 1947.
People today are not psychologically defeated after years of war. Instead they are overanxious for the middle-class stuff they see advertised day and night. T hey are not satisfied with any less after years of just getting by on communist junk. Consequently, the expectations of eastern Europe in 1997 are high. They want fast cars, color TVs, and tropical vacations.
Fifty years ago their western cousins just wanted to eat. "We have to change the way they think," says Citibank's German CEO Friedrich Menzel, who is working with the German government on Marshall Plan commemorations. Menzel remembers the largess of the aid program from personal experience as a young child. He feels a responsibility to help eastern Europeans but believes mistakes were made after the Wall fell when the West literally gave money to easterners.
"How do you merge a people whose two halves have lived under totally different ideologies?" wonders German political journalist Thomas Kielinger. "In the divided city of Berlin this problem is being felt with particular poignancy."
Indeed -- as the example of our unfortunate hotel makes clear -- the east is shackled with inferior post-war reconstruction. From our rooms we look down on Alexanderplatz and see block after block of drab, crumbling Soviet apartment and office buildings. The square looks just about the same as it did before the Wall came down, except for the huge signs on roofs now advertising Fanta and Panasonic and Kodak. No one is suggesting these blights be torn down. There is not enough money for such a project.
Eastern Europe is covered with developments like Alexanderplatz. And these are the showcases. Behind them, in the suburbs that ring every large city in this part of the world, are lines after lines of towering apartment buildings. They look as bad as the public housing projects that mar cityscapes in the U.S. Like their American counterparts they're deserts: covered with grafitti and not much else -- without adequate services, stores, and entertainment.
"Our challenge," the Czech-born U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright says, "is to do for Europe's east -- in our own self-interest -- what we could only do for Europe's west a half a century ago." Hers is a nice sentiment, but as the view from Alexanderplatz makes obvious, it is an impossibility.
George Lewinski is MARKETPLACE foreign editor. He and journalist Peter Laufer are in Berlin covering European integration for MARKETPLACE as it broadcasts during the first week of June from the new German capital in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
