Until lately, success stories about the Western European economic integration and supranational economic organizations spearheading capitalist globalization have made the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) seem like a dead-end street deserving little, if any renewed scrutiny. Hence, this attempt to boost cooperation between the socialist planned economies has received only marginal research interest since the end of the Cold War. Max Trecker seizes the recent trend of (re-)tracing worldmaking alternatives to the Western-dominated global institutions and takes a fresh look at the archives of the CMEA. Focusing on the CMEA’s Permanent Commission for Technical Assistance (PCTA), he is interested in the economic exchanges between the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the various postcolonial states in the Global South.
Whereas much of the current research on East-South connections looks at the exchanges in the realms of architecture, art, education, or labor1, Trecker’s work tackles more traditional themes of Cold War studies. The book looks at the motivation of communist and postcolonial elites for cooperation, the interplay of ideology and pragmatic economic policies on the ground, and questions to what extent these economic interactions differed from the colonially inflected capitalist trade relations. What makes this contribution stand out, however, is a crisscrossed view of CMEA from various national archives amounting to a genuinely transnational perspective on the planned economies in Eastern Europe. The author relies his findings on an impressive number of sources collected in the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Hungarian National Archives, and the German Federal Archives, but also the National Archives of India.
A strong reliance on the sources produced inside the CMEA member-states from Eastern Europe leads Trecker to tell the story of intra-bloc relations, as much as that of exchanges between Eastern Europe and the Global South. The book questions presentations of CMEA as a mere instrument of the Soviet empire, showing how smaller communist states successfully insisted on their particular economic interests in relations with Moscow. Furthermore, it describes models of joint appearance on the foreign markets, but also instances of conflict between Eastern European states with different levels of industrial development (GDR and Czechoslovakia vs. Bulgaria and Romania). Still, Trecker is cautious not to present East-South relations in a one-sided manner. He is using every appearance of voices from the developing nations in the sources, to balance the narrative and reconstruct the motivations and agency of the CMEA partners in the Global South.
The book is organized in four parts and ten chapters, chronologically following the evolution of CMEA and its policies toward the Third World, with various aspects of their collaboration illustrated by case studies of projects implemented in countries as diverse as Syria, Mexico, and India. The variety of countries and projects presented is informative but can also bewilder with repetitive points and digressions. The final chapter dedicated to the Soviet construction of steel plants in India, for instance, illustrates a few features already covered extensively in the case of the Syrian cement industry. The author’s arguments could have made an even better impact with a more streamlined narrative and fewer facets covered. Sometimes, however, the snippets of information on more marginal projects and never-realized collaborations prove to be the most intriguing parts of the story. The smaller states in the Global South and attempts of relatively short-lived post-revolutionary governments (Ethiopia, Nicaragua, or Grenada) to establish closer connections with CMEA leave the reader asking for more in-depth accounts of these neglected histories.
A report compiled by the delegation of the People’s Republic of Congo after a visit to the Secretariate of CMEA in 1981, cited extensively by Trecker (p. 145), provides a good overview of why choosing CMEA over capitalist trade initiatives could have been an appealing prospect for developing nations at the time. The report mentions no pressure to delegate nation-state prerogatives to supranational bodies and the possibility of catching up with the more industrialized planned economies. Indeed, in its propaganda efforts, CMEA stressed respect for economic sovereignty and generous extension of development aid which would contribute to the creation of basic industries in the Global South. Trecker, however, is very critical of the very notion of „economic aid,“ pointing out how long-term credit with below-market interest rates still had to be paid back. Furthermore, he shows how CMEA influenced its Third World partners’ independence, offering more favorable terms of trade to those states willing to model their development along socialist principles and follow its foreign policy.
Paradoxically, the book shows how the apparent advantages of economic cooperation within the „socialist world system“ became a handicap exactly when the oil shocks triggered a profound crisis of the world capitalist market. The lack of tighter integration and binding institutional mechanisms made the socialist economies increasingly dependent on the Western banks for overseeing and implementing loans in the Global South. As Trecker shows, in the thrifty atmosphere of the debt-ridden 1980s, the recipients of CMEA loans and technological transfers in the Global South might have held the upper hand. As a rule, the developing countries first chose to repay their Western creditors as the state-socialist countries had very little supranational institutional soft power. They could also try to play different CMEA countries off against each other or rely more on the rising industrial might of larger countries in the Global South, such as India or Brazil.
Max Trecker thus succeeds in highlighting the importance of the debt crisis in the Global South for the ultimate failure of regimes in Eastern Europe, an aspect routinely neglected in the accounts of the „rise and fall“ of state socialism. Despite the author’s effort to balance the narrative, the book offers much less insight into the impact and meanings of these collaborations in the receiving countries. Even with these inconsistencies, the book represents an excellent overview of East-South economic exchange during the Cold War. Red Money for the Global South is an important milestone in research heading beyond single case studies of bilateral relations toward a more comprehensive, interconnected transnational study of „socialist globalization.“
Note:
1 See James Mark / Artemy M. Kalinovsky / Steffi Marung (eds.), Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, Bloomington 2020, reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by Arianna Pasqualini, 26.11.2020, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-50232 (02.10.2022).