Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

Specters of Comecon: The Legacies of an International Organization in Central Europe

This sub-project investigates the legacies of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon/CMEA), the economic organization of the Eastern Bloc. Even before Comecon's eventual dissolution in Budapest on June 28, 1991, economic experts, both from the East and the West, imagined possible future scenarios.
Referring to Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" and his concept of hauntology, I contend that the legacies of Comecon haunted Europe after 1989/1991. Thus, these legacies can be read not only as institutional and personnel continuities but also as "lost futures" that materialized in diverging pathways.
Regarding partial dysfunctionality as an inherent factor of IOs rather than an aberration, particular areas of Comecon became functional only after its end, within a fundamentally altered political and economic framework, tough.

Case studies include the afterlife of Comecon's international currency, the transferable ruble, in the Federal Republic of Germany, the formation of the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1992, as well as the economic rapprochement of Romania and the Russian Federation in the first half of the 1990s.