Politics & Power Quote by W. Averell Harriman

A bureaucratic sentence that quietly telegraphs a revolution: Harriman is pointing to the Marshall Plan’s lesser-sung ambition, not just to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies but to rewire how Europe functioned. The “second authorization act” matters because it signals maturation. By the time Congress is writing preambles about “breaking down barriers,” the program is no longer framed as emergency charity; it’s becoming a lever to reshape the continent’s internal rules of trade, movement, and coordination.

Harriman’s phrasing is doing diplomatic work. “Showed the direction Congress was ready to take” is a measured way of saying: Washington had decided European recovery would be conditional. The money came with an idea of Europe as a system that needed integration, not merely stabilization. “Barriers within Europe” is intentionally broad and sanitized, avoiding the hot words - tariffs, sovereignty, German reindustrialization, national planning. It lets Congress endorse integration without openly picking fights with European governments or American isolationists wary of foreign entanglements.

The subtext is Cold War realism dressed as economic common sense. Integration isn’t just prosperity; it’s strategy. A Europe stitched together through shared markets and coordinated policy becomes harder for communist parties to exploit, harder for nationalist rivalry to reignite, and easier for the U.S. to treat as a coherent partner. Harriman, a consummate operator, frames it as congressional “direction” rather than U.S. pressure, laundering geopolitical intent through legislative language. That’s why it works: it makes a new order sound like mere administration.