REVIEWS 191 Trecker, Max. Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War. Routledge Studies in Modern History. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020. x + 244 pp. Notes. Sources. Bibliography. Index. £120.00. The study of relations between the socialist bloc and the extra-European world, variously described as the Third World or, in this case, the Global South, has grown extensively in recent years. By focusing on these connections via the bloc’s trade and development organization, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, commonly referred to as Comecon), this ambitious monograph seeks to fill a number of lacunae and address some of the key questions within this emerging body of literature. First, it seeks to uncover the motives that drove cooperation between the two parties, arguing for a complex intertwining of both political and economic motives. Secondly, the book seeks to contribute to the sparse existing literature on Comecon by making the case for the agency of its smaller members, drawing similar conclusions to Laurien Crump’s work on the Warsaw Pact. Third, Trecker charts the process of change over time in East-South relations, situating this relationship within the broader story of the global economy. This is an ambitious work, making use of the archival record of the CMEA in the RGAE in Moscow, the German Federal Archives and the Hungarian National Archives, as well as the National Archives of India. While occasionally falling short of its aspirations, it represents an important contribution to the literature. In ten chapters divided into four parts, Trecker charts the story on a largely chronological basis. The first chapter deals with Comecon’s dysfunctional early years during the period of late Stalinism. Comecon is often held up as a counterpart to Western European integration, although as Trecker notes, unlike the EU, political union preceded economic integration in the Eastern bloc and the founding aim of the Comecon — wholesale economic coordination — never fully trumped national interest. For the nations of the Global South, the benefits of cooperation with the socialist world — as opposed to the former colonial metropole — were obvious. But as Trecker shows, Comecon-South trade was mired in difficulty from the very beginning, hampered by dollar hegemony and the inequities of global trade. In the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent states were often committed to import substitution industrialization, and shared socialist concerns regarding the potential for US and European neo-colonial economic domination. By offering the nations of the Global South the construction of turnkey plants in return for raw materials, Comecon members hoped to prevent such domination, while benefiting economically in the process. As Trecker shows, the Soviets hoped to use Comecon to promote intra-bloc cooperation in this regard, weaning the SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 192 Eastern Bloc states off Soviet resource dependency in the process. Although all of this is not necessarily new information for scholars familiar with the burgeoning literature on development in the Cold War, Trecker’s work reveals valuable insights into why it failed so spectacularly, using the archival record to highlight dysfunction between Comecon member states and Soviet weakness. At points, this text feels like it is attempting to answer too many questions and would have benefited from a reduction in scope: a largely superfluous chapter devoted to the question of whether or not Comecon was an instrument of Soviet empire is an example of this. Retaining focus on East-South relations would have been preferable, for it is here that the book is most original and insightful. In particular, Trecker provides important evidence regarding the effect that the early 1970s oil price shock had on East-South relations: scholars have long wondered why both sides — who often found themselves in a similar situation as rising inflation and fuel costs triggered crises of liquidity in the 1970s and 1980s — were not able to forge a common response. In highlighting the effects of the crisis, Trecker shows that East-South relations were severely hampered by the supremacy of the dollar: the debt crisis increased the thirst for hard currency across the globe, damaging the socialist world’s prospects for trade, which relied upon barter agreements. As Trecker notes...
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Jul 26, 2021
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica 
Open Access
