A Political Perspective of Economic Relations in the Communist Camp

Abstract

CONOMIC INTEGRATION across national frontiers is becoming the rule instead of the exception. The economic advantages of cooperation for comparably developed industrial neighbors are generally recognized, with efforts and rumors of efforts to emulate Western Europe's Common Market forthcoming from all parts of the world. These include groups of new and relatively primitive nations as well as nations in diverse stages of economic development. One of the more important efforts at regional economic integration is the association of nine countries of the Communist Camp in the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). The thesis presented here is that the Soviet Union manipulates economic regionalism not as a device for general economic welfare but as an instrument intended primarily to strengthen and perpetuate its own threatened political primacy within world communism. Formed in 1949 but of very minor importance until after Stalin's death, CMEA has been steadily increasing in stature to the point of becoming the major organizational instrument in the Soviet effort to retain control in the face of threatening communist polycentrism. CMEA embraces both the carrot of mutually desired economic goals and the stick of coercive pressure for members to concert their energies under Soviet guidance. The function of CMEA today signifies a major realignment of Stalinist policy, which has important implications for evaluation of day-to-day Soviet foreign policy activity. It is a trend compatible with the apparent preference of Nikita Khrushchev to advance communism by economic means and to de-emphasize the totalitarian terror that characterized the regime of his predecessor. It is not necessary to conceive the world in Marxist terms in order to accept the intimate connection between economic and political interdependence. The heralded economic side of CMEA as a cooperative association of sovereign states is thus inseparable from the unpublicized aspects of CMEA as a political instrument. Few can doubt that for the foreseeable future the Soviet Union will remain far and away the most economically powerful country in the Communist Camp. The status enables Khrushchev to speak platitudes about an association based upon the sovereign equality of its members, and even to allow some real equality in procedural matters, without fear of losing the economic leverage that means effective Soviet political control. Unhindered by the Marxist conception that politics is simply economic superstructure, we in the West may see a latent but potentially dangerous element within this organization of equals that could bring trouble for the Soviet Union. Such a possibility, however, probably seems unlikely to Mr. Khrushchev.