The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

The Formation of the Soviet Bloc's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance: Romania's Involvement

Journal of Cold War Studies ◽

10.1162/jcws_a_00190 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 34-47 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Elena Dragomir

Keyword(s):

Division Of Labor ◽

Soviet Bloc ◽

Economic Assistance ◽

Mutual Economic ◽

Mutual Economic Assistance ◽

The Creation ◽

1960S And 1970S ◽

The 1960S

This article discusses Romania's role in the creation of the Soviet bloc's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in January 1949. The article explains why Romanian leaders, with Soviet approval, proposed the creation of the CMEA and why the proposal was adopted. An analysis of Romania's support for the creation of the CMEA sheds interesting light on the stance taken by Romania in the 1960s and 1970s against the Soviet Union's attempts to use the CMEA in forging a supranational division of labor in the Soviet bloc. Romania's opposition was largely in accord with the objectives originally envisaged by Romanian leaders when the CMEA was formed.

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Chairman cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s cotton trade with African countries during the early Cold War (1946–70)

Journal of Global History ◽

10.1017/s1740022821000280 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-19

Author(s):

Jan Zofka

Keyword(s):

International Trade ◽

Cold War ◽

Foreign Trade ◽

Economic Assistance ◽

African Countries ◽

Mutual Economic ◽

Mutual Economic Assistance ◽

Globalization Studies ◽

The Cold War ◽

Cotton Trade

Abstract This article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

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