The Council of Mutual Economic Assistance and UNIDO: in Search of a Bright Industrial Future

Abstract

On the basis of COMECON archive stored in Moscow the author for the first time analyzes mechanism of common decision making among socialist countries regarding UNIDO — the UN body in charge of industrial development in 1970s — 1980s. The article is in a scientific first to represent the story of the Permanent Working Group (PRG) of the COMECON Executive Committee as a special body responsible for working out of collective politics in UNIDO. For the first time the reader can grasp the concept of World economic security which had been worked out and promoted in UN structures by the COMECON member states in the second half of 1980s. On the basis of the PRG materials author comes to the conclusion that the International economic security concept had been seen by socialist states as “elastic mutually acceptable compromise” — part and parcel of the New world economic order, promoted by the Third World countries in 1980s. The author believes that “new thinking” in international economic relations which caused the appearance of the International economic security, strategy of COMECON in UNIDO and other program documents was the idealistic attempt to build the failed socialist project of globalization of which one heard in various publications about alternative scenarios of more fair world order, yet without analysis of key strategic documents of 1980s before. The nowday search of a new model of global development invite the readers to throw a new light at the theoretical baggage of 1980s and allow us to come to new conclusions about the rise and fall of collective actions by COMECON members at the world stage.