Shaping the Eastern Bloc through the Economy
Type de matériel :
42
For a long time, political and military cooperation of the People’s Democracies and the USSR was the only focus of historical research on communist international organizations. Yet economy was central in Marx’s philosophy, which was the theoretical basis of the political and social models in Eastern Europe. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance’s (Comecon) history helps to deconstruct the idea of an Eastern bloc through the analysis of the construction of a transnational space of economic expertise, the only one in which the People’s Democracies had a strong possibility to challenge the Soviet model. It established a real horizontal circulation of economic issues and models. Comecon itself continually asserted its autonomy and promoted the idea of a common interest, which was more than the addition of the national interests of the member states. As a permanent discussion forum it led to a progressive, limited but real, transnational acculturation of the experts who were assigned to work with it.
Réseaux sociaux