Suchergebnisse

In the early 1970s, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) began to revise its trade policy towards the outside world. It needed to counter the European Community's bid to implement its Common Commercial Policy and thereby change East-West trade practices. Foreign trade priorities became at once a crucial issue on the socialist countries' political agenda. The key question was whether they would have to open their system to the global economy - and bear the consequent pressures and competition that this decision entailed. Based on newly declassified archival sources, this study show

The Soviet Union had tied Finland to its security system through the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (FCMA) signed between the two in 1948. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate at the end of the 1980s, Finland exited the Soviet sphere of influence – the region controlled through a system of bilateral and multilateral agreements. This article analyses the Soviet–Finnish negotiations to discard the FCMA treaty as a case study of the changing Soviet European neighbourhood policy. It gives important insights into the disintegration of the Soviet foreign policy mechanism during the Gorbachev era as it elaborates on both the intra-bureaucracy conflicts between the Kremlin and the Soviet foreign ministry, MID, and later between the Soviet central government and the Russian republic. As Finland was part of the Soviet security system, analysing Finland's exit from it sheds light onto the crucial change that took place in the Soviet foreign policy doctrine during the perestroika years. The Gorbachev leadership's decision not to defend its sphere of influence with force paved way for the upheavals of 1989 which led to the Cold War's end. ; Peer reviewed

Book Review: Reviewed Book: Germuska, P.: Unified Military Industries of the Soviet Bloc. Hungary and the Division of Labour in Military Production. Lanham, MD & London: Lexington Books, 2015. ; Non peer reviewed

Europe is a continent whose history has, in one form or another, long been dominated by integration. And yet the European integration process is often treated as synonymous with the evolution of just one particular, and until recently geographically quite limited, Western-centred organisation: the European Union (EU). This trend obscures the multitude of ways European states have acted collectively on both sides of the Iron Curtain – and continue to do so throughout the continent today. With contributors drawn from history and political science, this book explores some of these diverse integration efforts 'beyond Brussels'. We shine a light on international organisations, trade frameworks, and various political, social, scientific and cultural forms of unity in both Eastern and Western Europe. In so doing, the book seeks to redefine the history of the European integration process not only as a less purely EU-centric phenomenon but as a less strictly Western European one too.