Life Without CMEA: Foreign Trade in Eastern and Central Europe

Abstract

Since the fall of the Soviet Union the answer to the question, “What comes after the CMEA?” has become even more complicated than it was in June 1991 when the CMEA officially ceased to exist.1 An analysis of economic relations within and between major post-CMEA blocs (such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland often called the Visegrad Group; the latecomers Bulgaria and Romania; the three Baltic states; the CIS states excluding Russia; the regions in Russia; the separate Czech and Slovak republics) is far beyond the scope of this paper. Its purpose is, first, to investigate the recent development of the mutual economic relations of the five Eastern European economies (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, referred to as the EE5), with a special emphasis on the Visegrad Group economies,2 and, second, to deal with the motives for and viable forms of intra-regional economic cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe.