Crearea sistemului comercial socialist
The setting up of the sociaistl commercial system

Summary/Abstract: From 1955 to 1990, the international economic relations of the Eastern European states were dominated by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON or CMEA) which was officially established in 1949, at the height of confrontation between West and East and of the division of Europe during the Cold War. Together with Cominform (established in 1947) that activated on the ideological front and Warsaw Pact (1955-1991) that operated on the political and military front, COMECON contributed to the strengthening of cohesion and “international solidarity of proletariat” within Soviet Camp. Although COMECON disintegrated in the years 1990-1991, the COMECON experiment deserves attention at least from two reasons: first, because in 1984 COMECON member states were responsible for a third of the world industrial production and, with its 455 millions inhabitants (385 millions from the European member states), 10% from the total world population; and second, representing the only major attempt of non-capitalist integration, COMECON showed the advantages and disadvantages of capitalist and non-capitalist approaches of international integration. The purpose of this article is to analyze from both a historical and economic perspective the evolution of the strategies of development and economic cooperation experimented by COMECON during its existence of almost half a century. In order to capture the key elements of this evolution I used several works of economic history published mainly in Western Europe and the United States both before and after 1989. I attempted to support the theses formulated in these works as well as my own ideas with statistical data published both in Western Europe and in the former Communist countries. Although the fall of the Iron Curtain allowed publishing several data that were secret before 1989, there is still a lot to do in the field of economic history of the Communist Eastern Europe.

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