be regarded as the economic equivalent to theWarsaw Pact. The dominance
which the Soviet Union had over COMECON made this latter analogy
perhaps the more appropriate. It was founded byStalinin 1949, and he
initially used it mainly as a weapon in his attempt to bring Yugoslavia to heel by
economic boycott. The original members were Albania, Bulgaria, Czecho-
slovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and
the Soviet Union; Mongolia, Cuba and Vietnam joined in 1962, 1972 and
1978 respectively. Albania ceased to be a member in 1962 as part of its general
severing of relations with the Soviet Union after forming too close a link with
China at the time when the Sino–Soviet split began to emerge.
After Stalin COMECON came to be seen as a useful way of countering the
increasing integration, especially through the EC and EFTA, of the Western
European economies, and above all, as a way of enforcing supranational
planning in the interest of the Soviet Union. Little developed in practice until
the early 1960s when, despite opposition from some members, a general
Eastern European regional plan was enforced at the Soviet Union’s insistence.
The basis of this plan was to concentrate industrial production in East
Germany and Czechoslovakia, while Romania and Bulgaria were to remain
essentially agricultural. However, in reality economic development, and parti-
cularly the plans for industrial development in East Germany and Czechoslo-
vakia, did little more than accept what would inevitably have happened. The
member nations were crucially dependent on trade with the West, and
required Western credits to provide their liquidity, as is demonstrated by
Poland’s huge debts to Western banks.
COMECON was probably less popular with its members even than was the
Warsaw Pact and, rightly or otherwise, there came into being a widespread
belief in Eastern Europe that it functioned to cream off the best of industrial
production, especially in East Germany, for export to the Soviet Union. In
addition, as with Cuban membership, it was used partly as a tool of Soviet
propaganda and as support for Third World countries whose membership in an
international communist movement was of less interest to Eastern Europe than
to the Soviet Union. COMECON had no role to play with the collapse of
Soviethegemonyin Eastern Europe, and with applications not only from
former European COMECON members but also from the newly-indepen-
dent republics of the former Soviet Union itself for membership in pan-
European bodies, the organization was wound up in June 1991. Nevertheless,
the economies of former COMECON members in Europe are still closely tied
together and geographical reasons, if no others, may still lead to the creation of
some successor organization, or at least to a recognition that the former
members occupy a ‘single economic space’. In particular the dependence of
many Eastern European economies on cheap energy supplies from Russia is a
physical fact that cannot be ignored.
COMECON