The View From the Urals: West European Integration in Soviet Perspective and Policy

Robert M. Cutler

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The View From the Urals: West European Integration in Soviet Perspective and Policy

This chapter concerns Soviet relations with West Europe. It deals with West Europe as a unit and does not emphasize the relations of individual countries with the USSR. Since we can better understand Soviet policies toward West Europe by first attending to Soviet views of world politics, the introductory section of this chapter sketches the basis for those perspectives. The second section analyzes Soviet attitudes specifically toward economic, political, and military integration in West Europe in the 1970s.

In the third section, I address Soviet foreign policy proper, paying special attention to the role of East Europe in Soviet policy toward Europe generally, and as an intermediary between West Europe and the USSR. Two subsections compose this section: one provides necessary background by reviewing events between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1970s; the other concerns that decade recently ended. The final section of this chapter provides an evaluation and criticism of Soviet perspectives and policies toward West Europe, drawing some conclusions therefrom.

Introduction

Soviet Thinking About World Politics

After having been eclipsed for the better part of the 1950s, international studies reemerged during the last years of that decade as a

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legitimate subject for scholarly inquiry in the Soviet Union. Soon thereafter, international relations began to be considered a separate field, distinct from diplomatic history and global economics. Studies at the reopened Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO) expanded in scope, and that Institute spawned a number of more specialized research institutes devoted to the study of world politics. Two of special note here are the Institute of the USA and Canada and the Institute of the International Workers’ Movement (IMRD). Each institute publishes its own research journal: IMEMO, Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia (The World Economy and International Relations); the USA Institute, SShA: ekonomika, politika, ideologiia (USA: Economics, Politics, Ideology); and IMRD, Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir (The Working Class and the Contemporary World).[1] The researchers at these institutes also publish monographs on world politics. Those in positions of administrative responsibility contribute to the formation of Soviet foreign policy by writing not only in their specialized publications but also in the daily Soviet press, as well as by consulting with responsible officials in the Soviet government.

The opinions of these Soviet policy advisers often diverge markedly among themselves, as well as from those expressed by writers in, for example, the military press. Responsible cadre in the research institutes also hold political positions: e.g., the director of the USA Institute, G.A. Arbatov, is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). He and his colleagues work closely with Foreign Minister Gromyko on strategic matters. Likewise, V.V. Zagladin, who works in the International Department of the CPSU as chief assistant to the man responsible for relations with nonruling (including West European) communist parties, publishes fairly regularly in the IMRD journal. Thus, the relationship between these institutes and the Soviet government is not unlike that of American “think tanks” to the US government. Institute researchers have even, on occasion, been appointed to serve in Soviet embassies abroad as political attachés.

Although Soviet researchers’ interest in Western political science increased during the late 1960s, the field of comparative politics remained little developed in Soviet writings. The title of the 1975 English-language book published by Soviet authors for general foreign distribution, Fundamentals of Political Science, would mislead the Westerner. The last word of the Russian title, znanii, is more akin to the German Wissenschaft than to the English “science.”[2]

However, the detente between the US and the USSR has increased the importance which the Soviets attribute to the ideological struggle. That has, in turn, provided an impetus in the 1970s for the serious study of the domestic politics of capitalist countries. Thus, shortly after the close of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU in 1971, at which was launched the foreign policy initiative called the Peace Program, one Soviet research journal pointedly editorialized that “Soviet literature on state and law clearly lacks work devoted to the analysis of reformist

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concepts regarding the problems of state and law, and of the influence of these concepts on the practice of the Social-Democratic governments which are coming to power.”[3]

As military force is progressively devalued in world politics, the ideological struggle becomes more important. In that struggle, the Soviet Union attempts to use public opinion in capitalist countries (but not just in capitalist countries) as an instrument of Soviet foreign policy.[4] In the age of linkage between a state’s domestic politics and its foreign policy, the Peace Program would play upon their connections. One Soviet scholar stated the matter this way:

The grafting together of internal and international relations in the age of imperialism makes it possible, to a certain degree, to change the methodology of approach to the socialist potentials of the revolutionary masses. The success of socialist changes within national borders may at the outset be determined specifically by the state of worldwide productive forces and also by the state of class forces on a world scale. …
[Because, in Brezhnev’s words, “socialism has become the dominant trend in the development of humanity”] …, the narrow “country-by-country” approach is increasingly being invaded in Marxist sociology by an approach based on consideration of the possible grafting of social relations within a country to the international relations in which that country is actually participating.[5]

A Note on Terminology

There are two sets of terms to be clarified: Atlanticism/Europeanism and microintegration/macrointegration. Atlanticism refers to the belief in or condition of cooperation between the US and West Europe, in contrast to Europeanism, which refers to West European autonomy in world politics and economics. Microintegration refers to the extension of contacts and cooperation among subnational units across national borders (e.g., of the various national Social-Democratic parties) or to that within transnational nongovernmental units (e.g., transnational corporations), whereas macro integration refers specifically to intergovernmental contacts and cooperation. As used in this chapter, both may occur in the economic, political, and military spheres with reference to West Europe and Europeanism. The distinctions between this usage and Soviet terminology are indicated where appropriate.

Assumptions of the Soviets’ Analytical Framework

That capitalism—and its foreign policy, imperialism—is in perpetual crisis is axiomatic to Soviet analysts. The “general crisis of capitalism”

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goes through cyclical phases, and since 1945 we have been living in the epoch of its “third stage.” Soviet writers attribute to the scientific-technological revolution (STR) those developments since 1945 which Western political economists attribute to the liberalization of global trade: the internationalization of capital, the intensification of the international division of labor, and increased inflation and unemployment in the capitalist countries. In the Soviet perspective, the first two of these aspects produce capitalist macrointegration in the economic sphere, resulting in the third aspect. By this reasoning, inflation and unemployment are expressions of the deepening of the third stage of the general crisis of capitalism.[6]

The first two stages each ended in a world war, but the third “began and developed under qualitatively new conditions,” i.e., imperialist states conducted mutual relations with socialist states.[7] This fact is exhibited as a manifestation of the “Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence” (a doctrinal innovation, in fact, of J.V. Stalin which was given its present connotation by N.S. Khrushchev), which is itself asserted to be the “principal factor” in bringing about changes in the “correlation of forces” between socialism and capitalism. In West Europe, the result of these developments is the tension between Atlanticism and Europeanism, the former decreasing in influence while the latter has increased.

The existence of “interimperialist contradictions” is the second axiom of Soviet analyses of contemporary international affairs. The STR deepens interimperialist contradictions and intensifies the general crisis of capitalism. In particular, it has brought about a situation where the United States has lost its controlling influence in the capitalist world system but remains the leading capitalist state. As a result of the disintegration of the United States as the major center of world capitalism, two other centers—Japan and West Europe—have risen.[8] However, the establishment of a West European “grouping of powers” (gruppirovki derzhav) as one of the three centers of interimperialist contradiction “by no means signifies the elimination of contradictions among the members of this same grouping.”[9]

Soviet Analyses Of West European Integration

Economic Integration

Reflecting the two opposing motive forces in Soviet foreign policy—the desire of the CPSU in keeping with its revolutionary heritage to transform the world; and that of the USSR qua superpower to preserve at least some aspects of that world—Soviet writers on capitalist integration in Europe differ concerning its importance. Those whose main concern is to argue that socialist (East European) integration is superior, are more likely to contend that “the EEC … has no real future.”[10] Those, however, who make capitalist integration their primary concern and thus consider it at greater length, tend to the view

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that, on the macrolevel in the economic sphere, it “appears not as a temporary or accidental phenomenon, but as a long-term tendency” which, moreover, the international communist movement must fully consider in developing its strategy.[11]

There is, nevertheless, a consensus among Soviet analysts that capitalist economic integration occurs on both the macrolevel and the microlevel. But because these analysts write out of an intellectual tradition which treats economic phenomena as the cause of political phenomena, they find the fact “paradoxical” that macrointegration is made more difficult by microintegration.[12] In fact, those two terms were recently dropped from the lexicon of “creative Marxism-Leninism,” perhaps because they seemed too derivative of bourgeois political economy; actually, they had been proposed in the beginning by a Hungarian scholar.[13] At any rate, three senior Soviet analysts have indicated their strong preference for the distinction between “integration on the state-monopolist plane” and “integration on the private-capitalist plane.” But these two phrases mean the same thing as macrointegration and microintegration, so what does the difference matter? According to the same three authors, the contradiction between the two forms of capitalist integration—that is, the fact that economic microintegration inhibits economic macrointegration—may be resolved and eliminated by the realization of the goals of Soviet foreign policy. Therefore, this evolution of terminology is an example of creative Marxism-Leninism in action, an instructive study of how empirical categories can acquire normative content.[14] Here I retain the original pair of terms for parsimony’s sake and apply them as well to the political and military spheres.

How is this contradiction between microintegration and macrointegration supposed to operate? One Soviet writer explains their dynamic this way:

Under the prevailing scientific and technological revolution, organs of state power have been more and more actively involved in the competitive struggle of the monopolies. In fact, the outcome of this struggle largely depends on the degree of support offered to monopolies by the state. Thus the scientific and technological revolution is raising the contradictions between monopolies to the level of interstate ones.[15]

In this perspective, the earliest result of the STR affecting economic macrointegration in West Europe was opposition to the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which is assumed by Soviet analysts to represent the antagonism between France and West Germany on the one hand and Great Britain on the other.[16] By the same token, “the competition of the US super-giants” has impelled the firms of both small and large countries in West Europe to merge their capital with that of corporations in neighboring countries. But since, in Zakhmatov’s words, “American monopolies used the foundation of the ‘Common Market’ to expand

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further their export of capital and to strengthen their economic position” in West Europe,[17] the two economic blocs there could not last. Competition from American companies, by forcing mergers among European firms, merely prepared the ground for the enlargement of the Common Market.[18] The leading Soviet analyst of capitalist economic integration in West Europe believes that the competition between American and European governmental economic policies is the most acute contradiction in the contemporary capitalist world.[19]

The very transformation of the Six into the Nine, however, provided American capital new access to European markets via its bases in Britain.[20] The Eurodollar market, centered in London, gained correspondingly greater influence on West European monetary integration.[21] One might conclude, therefore, that West European economic integration proceeds, in Soviet eyes, along Atlanticist lines on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. This inference is only partially correct, however, for the Soviet analyses do not ignore the opposition to economic Atlanticism generated in West Europe by those very developments. The countries of West Europe see. Gromeka writes,

… that their economic, scientific, and technical dependence upon the USA can be, and in fact is being accompanied by serious losses. … Consequently, the struggle waged by West European capital for a larger measure of independence in general—and in the advanced technological sectors of industry in particular—enjoys the support of the respective governments.[22]

This would seem potentially to be an example of how economic microintegration works in favor of economic macrointegration, rather than against it.

The prospects for microintegration, according to this analysis, are little short of inevitable. Shakhnazarov puts it this way in this Soviet argot: “whatever obstacles, objective and subjective, arise on the path of West European [economic micro]integration …, influential circles of monopoly capital are as determined as ever to give this process a new impulse.”[23] But those circles—primarily the monopolistic national bourgeoisies of Britain, France, and Germany—are no less mutually rivalrous, for transnational monopolies within the European Communities (EC) are nationally based. Truly multinational monopolies (i.e., controlled by more than one country) are, the Soviets think, unlikely to arise because the EC member states follow their own national economic interests; and even if multinational European monopolies did arise, they would still evolve in opposition to the USA–based transnational monopolies.[24]

The significance of these developments extends beyond the continent. One Soviet writer claims, for instance, that German monopolies are trying to acquire some of the influence which British and French monopolies exercise in the Third World, but find themselves checked by Anglo-French preponderance in the political and military spheres.[25] It is, thus, appropriate to turn here to Soviet evaluations of political and military integration.

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Political Integration

Soviet analysts agree among themselves that cooperation among West European governments in political matters—which they do not call, but which we may, political macrointegration—stems from the need to resolve and regulate the contradictions, or disagreements, arising from economic integration. But, just as Soviet observers disagree among themselves on the significance of economic macrointegration, so they disagree on that of political macrointegration. Thus, for instance, within six months of each other, one of the pioneers of the Soviet study of West European integration affirmed that “the European Economic Community is now not only an economic but also a political reality,”[26] and a colleague of his asserted that “The ambitious programs [behind the foundation of the EEC] for the creation of an economic, monetary, and later political union have now to all intents and purposes come to a total standstill.”[27]

In fact, political macrointegration among capitalist countries is difficult to explain within an intellectual tradition which posits the irreconcilable mutual opposition of ruling national bourgeoisies. Those Soviet writers who believe capitalist political macrointegration to be impossible and to have failed emphasize its nature not only as a response to contradictions issuing from strictly economic microintegration among nationally based European monopolies, but also as a European response to a unilateral US global strategy. On the other hand, the adherents of that school of Soviet analysis which gives greater weight to the reality of political macrointegration tend to be more thorough-going and imply that political macrointegration mutes the conflicts arising not just from economic microintegration but also from economic macrointegration, and therefore, results from the STR having raised contradictions of economic microintegration to the intergovernmental level.

Still, all Soviet attempts to understand the dynamics of political integration in West Europe have a common basis. That basis is the emphasis on the “London–Paris–Bonn ‘triangle’,” to the almost total exclusion of all other national capitals. This emphasis on Britain, France, and Germany in the analysis of political macrointegration derives mainly from the perceived dominance of those countries’ national bourgeoisies in West European economic microintegration (and macrointegration, when this is acknowledged). So French support for British admission to the EC was interpreted as having been motivated in part by a desire to “neutralize the supranational principle” supported by Germany, France having favored since De Gaulle the confederative principle of West European political integration.

Both leading political parties in Britain support the confederative principle, in alliance with French ruling circles and in opposition to West Germany. Britain, according to this mainstream Soviet analysis, used to advocate that the West European Union (WEU) be revitalized as the center of West European cooperation, but since joining the EC has dropped that insistence, treading lightly in matters of institutionalized cooperation in order to maintain its independence in world affairs.

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Ruling circles in the FRG, this line of analysis continues, have always favored a federative political union, based on the supranational principle, in the hope that Germany might play a leading role in a unified West Europe. After the Grand Coalition of the late 19605, however, this principle ceased to animate West German diplomacy which, nevertheless, rejects the WEU as an instrument of political cooperation because it would face there a France and an England which would make common cause to limit German influence. British–German relations have nevertheless ameliorated, particularly as their industrial and financial interests have grown closer; even though London and Bonn are mutual competitors, they are both interested in furthering the integration of West Europe. Despite their economic competition with one another, they are both still “tied politically to US imperialism.”[28]

As may be inferred from the foregoing, Soviet writers primarily have foreign policy coordination in mind when their discussions turn to political integration in West Europe. Mel′nikov has opined that it was impossible to say West Europe had a “truly efficacious common diplomatic activity” before Britain joined the Community in 1973. But, he continues, there are so many “factors complicating the elaboration of a single foreign policy course … that such countries as England, France, and the FRG, as well as other members of the Community, cannot agree to the total subordination of their own interests to any supranational organ.”[29] This position is consistent with past Soviet analyses.[30]

The formation of a directly-elected European Parliament is believed to have resulted not from the wishes of the states concerned but rather from those of the transnational corporations, which “need a special parliament with a supranational basis to pass legislation that could be to their advantage.” The EC Court of Justice is viewed simi1arly.[31] Soviet writers have noted the formation of European political parties within the European Parliament, but the attention accorded it is more polemical than analytical.[32] In this respect, it is treated like the renaissance of neofascism in the mid-1970s, though by no means as vehemently. It is convenient to call this sort of West European integration “political microintegration”—occurring across state borders rather than among national governments; the Soviets, however, do not use this term.

The most significant aspects of political microintegration in West Europe are Eurocommunism and Social-Democracy. The Soviets’ concern with these issues falls under the rubric of the ideological struggle. Their interest in the matter is directed as much toward East Europe as toward West Europe; the Soviets have demonstrated in 1956 and again in 1968 their concern to prevent a breakdown of Marxist-Leninist political forms in East Europe. They wish to prevent the Finlandization of East Europe, at least as strongly as some in the West wish to prevent the Finlandization of West Europe. For, albeit that Finnish foreign policy is hardly at cross-purposes with that of the Soviet Union, Finland is a multiparty parliamentary democracy.[33] As trade and diplomatic

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barriers between East and West have become more penetrable, the Soviets have given increased attention to the ideological struggle both in order to keep their bloc in line and in order to influence West European opinion (particularly the West European left). Thus, Shakhnazarov combines tactical objections to West European political macrointegration with objections to political microintegration which could also be intended for East European elites’ ears:

Is it not obvious that [the big European bourgeoisie] would not act against its own interest …? The situation in Western Europe now differs from country to country, and the preconditions for the further development of the revolutionary process also vary. … In these conditions the creation of a West European confederation could lead to a weakening of the positions of the Left-wing forces in those countries where they have gained much ground.[34]

Rusin expresses the mainstream interpretation of the American response to these events when he writes that “Washington’s strategists are planning to make use of the EC countries’ dependence on their military and political obligations to NATO to prevent the further foreign policy isolation of the West European center and to consolidate US relations with its NATO partners.”[35] It is, therefore, appropriate to pass here to the consideration of military integration in West Europe.

Military Integration

Using NATO to put a rein on the potentially more independent political and economic aspects of European integration means expanding NATO’s scope of competence and giving it additional functions. Such was the motivation Utkin detected behind Kissinger’s call for a New Atlantic Charter.[36] Washington’s concept of “mature partnership” was also seen as an instrument of American control; to the Soviets, this idea meant the conservation of the American right to make unilateral decisions about NATO’s strategic nuclear weapons at the same time that responsibility for preparing and maintaining the bloc’s nonnuclear military forces was devolved upon the West European allies.[37]

Military integration of an intergovernmental nature in West Europe generally means one of two things to the Soviets: either the reinforcement of a USA–dominated NATO or the establishment of a separate West European force; and any form of the latter they usually expect to reflect the desiderata of American policy. The Soviets see each project to be at cross-purposes with the other, and both are anathema to them. Utkin, however, thinks it possible that military macrointegration in West Europe may diminish the collective military dependence of the West European states on the USA.[38] Although Soviet observers do not use the term “military macrointegration,” one writer allows that “the formation of a[n intergovernmental] military coalition may be viewed as a particular form of military and military-industrial integration.”[39]

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The military coalition called the Eurogroup is double-edged to the Soviets, for it can serve either an Atlanticist or a Europeanist function—or even both. In fact, the Soviets, though they are not explicit about this, appear to believe that Eurogroup is Atlanticist on the macrolevel, for in their eyes it was organized “with Washington’s consent” and is “led by Britain”; and Europeanist on the microlevel, as it has the potential to enhance cooperation among the national military industries of the EC states.[40] Eurogroup, thus, appears to one leading Soviet analyst as an instrument which Britain uses to attain a leading position among West European powers in the military sphere. Because the FRG does not have nuclear weapons, it is militarily dependent on its NATO allies, and British ruling circles want to use NATO to limit Germany’s powers.[41] Moreover, Britain (this analyst continues) desires that the Eurogroup “conduct France’s course, on maintaining the military-political independence of Western Europe, over onto anticommunist rails,” even though France’s refusal to participate in the Eurogroup “has placed definite limits upon its development as a major center of military cooperation between the West European powers.”[42]

Although it appears that West Germany and Britain, in contrast to France, share the desire to maintain their ties to the USA through NATO,[43] Madzoevskii and other analysts believe that Bonn views the Eurogroup as the kernel of a West European military unity parallel to economic and political unity. Still, they caution that the “two (Bonn, London) for – one (Paris) against” interpretation of West European attitudes toward the Eurogroup is too simple. For one thing, London originally preferred to reactivate WEU, or to establish a new structure outside both WEU and NATO, as an instrument of West European military macrointegration; for another, some French military and political figures have supported contacts between France and the Eurogroup for the purpose of using the Eurogroup to Europeanize NATO. But since a revitalized WEU would serve both British and French interests by maintaining West Germany’s military inferiority, Bonn rejects WEU as an instrument of military cooperation, preferring the Eurogroup, where she need deal only with London.[44] Despite the cautions by Madzoevskii and others, some Soviet writers persist in the belief that the United States is drawing West European military integration into the bounds defined by NATO, neutralizing both the Eurogroup’s potential autonomy and continued French independence.[45] One author goes so far as to say that the Eurogroup’s main achievement has been

… the elaboration and wide propaganda of programs of increased military expenditure by its members, designed to prove to the US Congress and to American public opinion that Western Europe is assuming a greater share of the cost of the Atlantic alliance.
     In other words, its principal activity has been in the limited field of bribing the United States not to reduce the present level of its armed forces in Europe.[46]

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Military-industrial microintegration is to Soviet analysts but one aspect of economic microintegration generally. They predict that military microintegration, like industrial cooperation in West Europe generally, will not become supranational. The division of labor among national military-industrial complexes is regulated, in their eyes, by the European Program Group (EPG). But the Soviets perceive the EPG to fall under the supervision of NATO and thus of the USA, even though it is not fprmally connected with NATO and includes France as a member. The EPG thus appears to some Soviets as “the nucleus around which [macrolevel] eforts to create a West European military-industrial complex are being concentrated”; such a complex, however, can be built only upon a foundation of “intergovernmental monopolist corporations,” which Ovinnikov has deemed unlikely to evolve.[47] Indeed, the examples adduced to lend credence to this fear—such as the British-German-Italian development of the multirole combat aircraft, the Franco-German development of the Milan missile, and the Anglo-Franco-German development of the Jaguar airplane—tend to substantiate the EPG-as-divisor-of-labor hypothesis. There is no joint West European military force for which these projects have been developed. More accurate is the view that the EPG has the potential to unify its members’ strength “in the struggle with [their] transoceanic partner.”[48]

Soviet Policies toward West European Integration

From the End of World War Two to the Beginning of the Seventies

Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov at first responded favorably to the prospect of Soviet participation in the Marshall Plan, but Stalin vetoed the idea. Instead, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, better known as COMECON) was established in 1949, including the USSR and other communist countries in East Europe, except Yugoslavia. Until Stalin’s death, COMECON was largely a device by which the industrial capacity in East Europe which the war had not destroyed was transferred, often factory by factory, to the Soviet Union.[49] Although COMECON remained relatively dormant until 1955, it was used to coordinate the blockade against Yugoslavia and to organize production for the Korean War. Rapid industrialization in East Europe during the 1950s depended heavily, with the exceptions of Poland and Romania, on Soviet supplies of raw materials. Both Soviet preferences, and Western embargoes during the period encouraged that development. As a result, the economies of the countries in East Europe developed relatively autarchically; because parallel production capacities were constructed in the different countries, specialization and division of labor in the region were inhibited.[50]

The major economic groupings in Europe seem to have consolidated and drawn inward in the years following Khrushchev’s “secret” anti-Stalin speech in 1956, but that “regional polarization” seems largely to

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have been caused by the increasing preoccupation of European Community members with themselves.[51] It is quite possible that the Soviet Union would have been receptive to Western overtures for economic and even political cooperation during the mid-1950s, after Khrushchev established his primacy and before the Treaty of Rome was signed. One Western student notes that “the USSR made proposals” at the April 1956 session of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) “for developing East–West trade, in particular the preparation of an Agreement on All-European Economic Cooperation and the creation of an ECE organization for developing the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” Not only did the Soviets believe that the West European integration efforts would be an obstacle to these proposals, but they also feared that they would hinder German reunification, enhance West German economic capabilities, and enable West Germany to obtain nuclear weapons.[52] Probably there were at least two tendencies among Soviet policymakers and policy advisers at the time: the disadvantaged (light industry and consumer goods) economic managers, including those who supported Malenkov’s New Course after 1953, plus some international relations analysts and East European elites, on the one hand; and the CPSU ideologists and heavy-industrial managers, who had no cause for complaint about the economic status quo, on the other. The former would have encouraged contacts with West Europe, and the latter would have discouraged them. A disagreement along these lines would have coincided with and exacerbated the division between Malenkov (whose criticisms of Stalin’s arrangements in East Europe were primarily economic) and Khrushchev (whose criticisms of them were primarily political). Khrushchev’s openness to contacts with West Europe after his defeat of Malenkov would be understandable as a maneuver designed to reinforce his own domestic political base; as such, the tactic would duplicate the pattern of Stalin’s behavior during the succession crisis after Lenin’s death.

The continued expansion of NATO dampened Soviet pleasure over the foundering of the European Defense Community in the French National Assembly. NATO’s counterpart, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), “represented the single most important formal commitment binding the states [of East Europe] to the USSR, officially limiting their scope of independent action, and legalizing the presence (and hence the political influence) of the Soviet troops stationed in some of them.”[53]

COMECON was revived in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the successful operation of NATO but also partly in response to the dissipation of Stalinist international relations in East Europe.[54] After the 1956 revolt in Hungary and its Polish echo, the Soviets began extending credit to those two countries. COMECON’s purposes were later redefined to include (1) the facilitation of mutual exchanges of experiences and techniques, (2) the promotion of an international division of labor and of specialization of industrial production, and (3) coordination of investment in subsequent five-year plans. Even if these intentions were not entirely realized, they represented a new emphasis on the mutuality reflected in COMECON.

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During the late 1950s and early 1960s, integration in Europe proceeded within the two political-economic blocs but not between them. It is worthwhile to review some salient features of East European integration. The USSR, in its attempt to stimulate COMECON integration, found trade bilateralism (i.e., the desire of centralized nonmarket economies to balance debits and credits individually with every given foreign trade partner) a hindrance. After some experimentation with multilateral financial techniques in the late 1950s, the COMECON countries agreed in Moscow in October 1963 to establish the International Bank for Economic Cooperation (IBEC). The unit of account within IBEC is the “transferable ruble” (perevodnyi rubl′), sometimes erroneously called the “convertible ruble.” The latter term is imprecise because IBEC does not sell hard (i.e., convertible or Western) currencies or gold for transferable rubles. But transferable rubles remain, for the most part, transferable not among all COMECON countries but only between the USSR on one side and other COMECON countries on the other.[55] McMillan concludes from an analysis of trade figures that, between 1963 and 1970, “indices of multilateral balancing … show no evidence of an increase in the multilateral content of COMECON bloc trade.”[56] Clark’s index, which in the absence of political changes depends over time only on its previous value, remains unchanged after IBEC’s creation. Because Clark wishes to use his foreign-trade index as a measure of political integration, he suggests that this finding reflects COMECON’s rejection of Khrushchev’s 1962 proposals for supranational planning. But it is equally interpretable, in light of McMillan’s conclusion, as a confirmation of IBEC’s failure to influence significantly the trading patterns within COMECON.[57]

During the 1960s, political and military integration within the Eastern bloc—as measured by the frequency of contacts between top leaders of the various ruling parties, by military collaboration and contacts, by the conclusion of cultural and scientific agreements, and by intra-COMECON tourism—increased.[58] Although the USSR was able, by emphasizing the specter of West German access to nuclear weapons, to persuade the “northern tier” of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to assist in strengthening the WTO, it was less successful in convincing the Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Romanians of a threat from the West.[59] And after the failure, against Romanian objections of Khrushchev’s initiative to transform COMECON into a mechanism for supranational planning, the USSR relied increasingly on East Germany and Czechoslovakia for long-term bilateral trade deals. The possibility of West European economic support to Romania made the threat of a COMECON trade embargo against that country less powerful.

Beginning with increased West European interest in East European markets, contacts between the two halves of Europe increased in the late 1960s. The USSR and her East European allies soon discovered that capitalist commercial and economic organizations were prepared to take steps to accommodate socialist idiosyncrasies. “So the USSR seems to have decided to allow her allies a policy of sauve qui peut in dealings

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with Western capitalist states and trading organizations, provided that they did not prejudice the solidarity of the Soviet bloc or contradict the main line of Soviet foreign policy (for example by official recognition of the EEC).”[60] This resumption of East–West trade was very much a part of the contemporaneous attempt in East Europe to modernize and reform the various national economic systems. In fact, the renovation of interbloc trade was so successful that by 1968 the USSR was seriously concerned over the divergence of the COMECON economies. Trade between East and West European countries had so encouraged national economic roads to socialism in East Europe that plan coordination within COMECON was significantly complicated. Also, collaboration among COMECON countries excluding the Soviet Union had increased. The national political elites in East Europe—particularly those of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—were being pressured by their economic planners, some of whom saw COMECON as an obstacle to their national economic reforms. Moscow was increasingly concerned about the growing technological gap between East and West, but continued to balk at large-scale involvement in Western markets. East Europe, thus, became (as it still remains to some degree) a conduit for technology transfer between West Europe and the USSR.[61]

The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was, thus, a response as much to the increasing threat of COMECON disintegration as to that of political and ideological apostasy. As occurred after the invasion of Hungary twelve years earlier, COMECON cohesion increased and was pursued more assiduously, the limits of Soviet indulgence toward East European economic and commercial liberalization having been underlined.

The 1970s in Perspective

In order better to understand relations between West Europe as a unit and the Soviet Union, it is useful first to survey relations within the East bloc and then to examine relations between the East and West blocs in their light. In the years after 1968, the USSR retrenched in East Europe, reinforcing its position and its influence. The Comprehensive Program of Socialist Economic Integration, a broad 15–20 years framework which COMECON adopted in 1971, represented a compromise on Soviet terms between the “market integration” formula advocated by reform economies in East Europe (notably Poland and Hungary) and the Soviet concept of “planned integration.” That program, however, was not a “plan,” for it was essentially a set of proposals and contained few specific suggestions for their implementation. This is probably because a relatively high level of abstraction was required to surmount Soviet–East European disagreements. Marsh judges that program to have contained major Soviet concessions to market principles and to have boosted the USSR’s foreign policy goals. “Taken as a whole,” he concludes, it “represented the sum total of agreement possible between states with conflicting economic and political interests.”[62]

[ page 94 ]

The early 1970s were not easy years for relations between the USSR and its East European allies. The contradictions between market integration and planned integration were, one might say, raised to a higher level. The issue was transformed into a question of how, institutionally, to regulate international economic cooperation: by multinational sectoral planning or by transnational coordination on the enterprise level. The model statutes which COMECON published in 1975 provide for both kinds of collaboration. The relative importance attached to the two forms varies in the Western literature, some of which betrayys confusion over the distinction between them. Although the former (mezhdunarodnye ekonomicheskie organizatsii) provide a potential source of control over the latter (mezhdunarodnye khoziaistvennye organizatsii), it is not clear that the creation of the two forms makes such control inevitable.[63] The proposition is tenable, for instance, that the purpose of the decentralization incorporated into the 1973 Soviet economic reforms was to reestablish some symmetry between Soviet economic structure and that of the East European states.[64] In this perspective, the Soviet reform in 1973, which created “trusts” or “industrial associations” at a level between the ministries and the enterprises, is a delayed effect of the extension of economic ties, beginning in the mid-1960s, between the member states of the EC and the East European members of COMECON; for the latter “the decision[s] to liberalize the economic systems and to expand trade with the West … were closely interrelated.”[65] This interpretation in turn suggests that Pindak’s contention (adopted by Abonyi and Sylvain) that the post-1971 COMECON “set-up closely resembles the Soviet ministerial system of planning and management as it has been reestablished by the Brezhnev–Kosygin leadership since 1964,” requires closer scrutiny.[66]

If the replication of that planning and managerial structure on a regional scale is a Soviet goal, its realization or failure is influenced by forces and events outside COMECON, including those in West Europe. Marsh states a consensus view when he writes that “the Soviet Union [was able] to resolve some of the major points at issue between the COMECON member states very much in its own interest” between 1973 and 1975 “only with the aid of three external developments—the emergence of a common EEC policy towards the COMECON states, the onset of the Energy Crisis and the Western recession.”[67] Likewise, Marer, listing seven elements which hinder COMECON integration, mentions only intra-COMECON factors; but of the thirteen factors which he says promote COMECON integration, most involve economic and political events in West Europe and the West generally.[68] One specific example that we can point to is the activity of the International Investment Bank (lIB), established by COMECON in 1971, which has come to playa significant role in COMECON integration by borrowing convertible currencies needed to realize joint integration projects on capital markets in West Europe and North America.[69]

Military and political integration in East Europe was also reinforced after the Prague Spring was expunged. This fact helps to explain the

[ page 95 ]

renaissance in the 1970s of a strong Soviet foreign policy despite the ignominious invasion, an otherwise enigmatic phenomenon. Thus, the events of 1968 not only did not weaken WTO but strengthened it as an instrument of political integration in East Europe.[70] Although coercion for membership in WTO continues, however, recent events confirm Starr’s conclusion that WTO members have some freedom to determine the size of their defense contributions to it.[71]

Capitalist stagflation, beginning in the mid-1970s, made less likely the hot pursuit of trade agreements by the EC with the USSR or other COMECON members. However, increasing competition from the United States and Japan for East European markets, coupled with the Treaty of Rome’s deadline for adoption of a common commercial policy, motivated the EC to turn unofficial contacts with COMECON into actual negotiations. The USSR was also ready to pursue the matter, for its East European allies had been adversely affected by rapidly rising world market prices for energy and raw materials during the first half of the 1970s. Increased East European trade with the West generally and with West Europe in particular could diminish the Soviet burden of subsidizing the East European national economies and free up raw materials for Soviet export to the West in return for hard currencies.[72]

The main sticking-point resisting clarification in the matter of East bloc trade with the Community is the important political issue of the respective competencies of COMECON on the one hand and of its member states on the other; for the USSR’s solicitude of interbloc agreement is also motivated by a desire to supervise East European relations with West Europe.[73] The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) did not provide for a European Trading Organization, as the Soviets had desired, but the USSR has pursued other arrangements to establish (in Brezhnev’s words) “some forms of business relations between the inter-state trade-economic organizations which exist in Europe, COMECON and the ‘Common Market’,” under the condition that members of the latter “refrain from any attempts at discrimination in connection with the other side and facilitate the development of natural bilateral links and all-European cooperation.”[74] Some Soviet officials might even favor interbloc cooperation on large-scale projects in order to encourage EC competition with the United States, but the EC Council of Ministers has declined to establish a Community export bank to issue and provide export credits. On this, Pinder comments, judiciously, that

… Community industries without Community financial support will be unable to match the scale on which the Americans can operate; and the Soviet Union will draw political conclusions from the Community’s inability to act in common in matters which are much more important, in this context, than the common commercial policy.
… The Community’s political weakness, the Soviet Union’s political strength, and the lack of economic interest of either in

[ page 96 ]

trade negotiations present the most unfortunate combination that could have been devised to present difficulties for East Europeans who have real economic problems over on which to negotiate with the Community.[75]

One reason the Soviets have little interest in negotiation with the EC is the nature of their exports to the Community: mainly raw materials, which are not subject to large import duties. Although the Soviets’ exports of manufactured goods are continually increasing, their concern with transition among their political leadership is conducive to the maintenance of the status quo in the matter. For the same reasons, the USSR is not likely to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the near future. It has not, however, prevented Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary from acceding to GATT. Romania has even become a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and has taken out loans from both it and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

It is outside the scope of this chapter to analyze West European trade with the East European COMECON countries.[76] But Tables 5.1 and 5.2 suggest the changing importance to the Soviet Union of trade with the West. Table 5.3 provides a different perspective on the more recent figures. These figures are only suggestive, however, for to assess their real significance would involve analyzing their breakdown by economic sector. That analysis has been well performed elsewhere, and there is little to add to it here.[77]

Conclusion

Evaluation of Soviet Analyses

The point of departure of evaluation is my earlier criticism that the dropping of the term “macrointegration” favor of “integration on the state-monopolist plane,” and that of “microintegration” in favor of “integration on the private-capitalist plane,” has not enriched the analysis of West European integration. Let me discuss the Soviet analyses in terms of macrointegration and microintegration, each having separate economic, political, and military manifestations.

In general, the Soviets take microintegration in West Europe more seriously than macrointegration, perhaps because trepidation over. the latter inhibits reasoned consideration of it. But economic integration in West Europe is taken seriously on both the macrolevel and the microlevel. Economic microintegration is seen as a result of the STR, economic macrointegration as the result of attempts to resolve the contradictions of economic microintegration exacerbated by the STR. Political microintegration is then seen as the result of attempts to resolve the contradictions (1) of economic macrointegration itself, and (2) between economic macrointegration and economic microintegration.

[ page 97 ]

[ page 98 ]

At this point, the logic founders. The problem is that Soviet analysts appear to asume that macrointegration of any kind requires the existence of international governmental organizations (IGOs). Although that assumption is basically correct with respect to relations among Marxist-Leninist political systems, it can be incorrect where transnational microlevel interactions are not regulated by macrolevel structures. In fact, transnational microintegration in the West can by itself assume macrolevel significance.

A case very much to the point involves the political integration of the European peripheries into the European center. The Soviets acknowledge only one form of political macrointegration in West Europe, and that is the EC foreign policy (which, let it be pointed out, is more economic than strictly politicaI). Nowhere have they seriously discussed in print the EC’s stabilizing effect on the parliamentary democratic forms introduced in Portugal, Spain, and Greece in the mid-1970s. This is a pitfall of ignoring the possibility of noninstitutionalized political macrointegration. It would be possible to compensate for this shortcoming by appropriate consideration of political microintegration, but this the Soviets do not do. Their study of what has been called here political microintegration is subsumed by the “ideological struggle” and takes three forms: (1) studies of the “climate of opinion,” including serious contributions to the history of modern political ideas; (2) studies of international organizations, such as the Socialist International; and (3) studies of national politics in individual West European states, often accompanied by tactical prescriptions and informed by policy norms. Micropolitical integrative structures which have macropolitical significance but which remain noninstitutionalized thus fall through the cracks in the Soviet analytical approach. Such transnational infrastructures arise, of course, only under conditions of unrestricted travel and communication by individuals across national boundaries. They were extremely important for the transition from fascism to parliamentary democracy, and for the stabilization of the latter in Portugal and Spain.[78]

The military form of microintegration is, in the Soviet paradigm, a concomitant of economic microintegration generally. Paradoxically, however, the Soviets seem to think that it is not an essential aspect of economic microintegration. The empirical-theoretical reasoning for this assumption is not explicit and may arise more from normative considerations and policy preferences; the same goes for military macrointegration, which is simultaneously portrayed in the Soviet literature as a bourgeois-monopolist conspiracy and as impossible of realization.

One final criticism of the Soviet study of West European integration concerns the scope of its definition. With good reason, Soviet analysts emphasize Britain, France, and Germany (and their mutual relations and their respective relations with the United States) in their study of that integration. Certainly, these three countries are the most significant; Soviet analyses, however, discount not only the role of other Community members but also that of the European peripheries (i.e., Scandinavia, Iberia, and the Balkans) in West European integration. Not that

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they fail altogether to address the matter; the expansion of the EC has been analyzed with some sophistication, and Soviet commentaries on NATO often directly concern the peripheries’ relationship to that organization. But there is nowhere any systematic and sustained consideration of the prospects for West European integration involving the peripheries, or of the relationship of the European Community to them. This shortcoming is most evident in the Soviet study of political and military integration, on both the macroJeveJ and the microlevel.

Evaluation of Soviet Policies

The USSR has been slow to formulate a coherent policy response to West European integration, in part because of an early predisposition not to take it seriously. Now that the Soviets have recognized its significance at least in the economic sphere, they may be hard put to discover specific policy options which affect it. Meanwhile, a tendency to discount political integration in West Europe may leave the USSR in a similar position in that regard in the future. Economic integration in West Europe, both microlevel and macrolevel, appears irreversible to the Soviets. Indeed, they welcome it to the extent that it provides them (1) a channel for Western technology, (2) a market for their own raw materials and energy supplies, and (3) the opportunity to use EC–COMECON negotiations to consolidate East European integration.

An integral part of the Soviet reply to political integration in West Europe has been to intensify the ideological struggle. This intensification, during the early and mid-1970s, is suggested by Table 5.4, the numbers in which are twelve-month moving totals of articles on the ideological struggle appearing in International Affairs, a Soviet journal which combines mainstream political analysis with more hortative purposes. This journal is published not by a research institute but by an agitation-propaganda society, in English and French as well as in Russian, and so the articles in it are designed to be read by both Western and Eastern publics as well as by Soviet policy makers.

The first phase represents rising concern about the effects of the then-projected CSCE for East Europe as well as trepidation over the then-alarming phenomenon of Eurocommunism. The second phase is a continuation of this trend but also represents the legitimation of the ideological struggle as an element in the Soviet world view. It also coincides with the period of conflict within the Politburo during which Shelepin was removed for advocating too “aggressive” and confrontational a foreign policy line, as against the more benign Peace Program announced by Brezhnev in 1971. The continuing importance of the ideological struggle is indicated by the third phase in Table 5.4, in the heightened emphasis it receives even after the peak of the second phase. It was, nevertheless, a rude awakening when the Soviets realized in 1977 that President Carter’s human rights campaign was considered by the West European publics to be a legitimate weapon in the ideological struggle.

[ page 100 ]

There is relatively little the USSR can do with respect to military integration in West Europe. If the negotiations on Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR, from which the Soviets insist on omitting the B) get unstuck, the WTO might attempt to contact the EPG in the context of those talks, as a tactic to split the USA’s European allies from their transoceanic partner.

For the Soviets, EC trade policies with the Third World, and the Lome Convention in particular, represent an attempt to impose imperialist solutions on trade and economic problems. Their own prescriptions is that developing countries expand cooperation with the socialist countries and that discriminatory agreements such as Lome be abrogated in favor of global free trade.[79] As is often the case with such wide-ranging proposals, the Soviets do not suggest means for their realization. The Soviets will continue to have difficulty addressing other forms of political integration in West Europe because of deficiencies in their analysis of it. They will continue to attempt to play on “interimperialist contradictions” to their own advantage, favoring some West European countries as against others in trade, and attempting to reach bilateral political understandings where possible.[80] The USSR will probably continue also to oppose the European Parliament but will have only negligible effect on its deliberations.

The centerpiece of Soviet European policy in the 1970s was CSCE; it is, therefore, appropriate to ask what security in Europe means to the USSR, and specifically what its relationship to European integration is. Robert Legvold has persuasively argued that, in Soviet eyes,

… idealized European security appears to revolve around liberation of Europe’s two systems from their embodiment as polit-

[ page 101 ]

ical-military blocs. Rather than the challenge of structuring security in the absence of blocs, it is the advantages of reducing the present competing political-military blocs to integral systems that seem to occupy Soviet leaders.[81]

The USSR desires integration in Europe to follow three general paths: first, the integration of East Europe should be consolidated if not accelerated; second, the integration of West Europe should increase its independence of the United States; and third, the integration of West Europe should, nevertheless, be hampered by its internal conflicts, particularly among Britain, France, and Germany. These conditions translate into a weakening of Atlanticism in West Europe and the growth there of a semicontinental and stunted Europeanism. The relation of Soviet security in Europe to European integration, as perceived by the Soviets, is twofold: first, the USSR wants West European integration to take place to the exclusion of United States influence, while East European integration continues to be supervised by the USSR; and second, it is desired that West European integration, though it may continue in the economic sphere, not find military or political expression.

Final Remarks

Two projects for further research emerge from this study:

1. The commercial and political relations of the individual West European countries with the USSR should be analyzed to determine the relationship of their collective patterns to the patterns of their collective relationship studied here. A synthesis of these two sets of patterns would yield a more complete understanding of West European relations with the USSR. This project is complicated by the necessity of addressing the relations of individual West European countries with individual East European countries, but a judicious methodology should make that task less imposing.
    
2. The six-fold typology adopted in this chapter—economic/political/military by macrointegration/microintegration—could be refined and applied to the comparative study of West and East European integration. This, too, is not a small project, but it is also more promising than the first from the standpoint of the theory of regional integration.
    

I wish to thank Zachary Irwin, for comments on an earlier version of this chapter; Morris Bornstein, for direction to and discussion of the economic literature; and Lawrence Brainard and William Zimmerman, for access to forthcoming works.

[ page 102 ]

Notes

[Note 1]. A good review of international relations research in the USSR through 1967 is William Zimmerman, Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). See also John Goormaghtigh, “International Relations as a Field of Study in the Soviet Union,” Yearbook of World Affairs 28 (1974): 250–61.

[Note 2]. A.N. Yakovlev [Iakovlev], Fundamentals of Political Science: Textbook for Primary Political Education (Moscow: Progress, 1975). The Russian-language isomorphism of the English “political science” (politicheskaia nauka) is sometimes used in Soviet commentaries on the Western discipline. The word politologiia has, however, been coined for more general use; a practitioner of this art (or science) is thus a “politologist.”

[Note 3]. “Pravo v ideologicheskoi bor′be sovremennost′” [Law in the Ideological Struggle of Modern Times], Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 10 (October 1971), p. 18.

[Note 4]. See, for instance, Richard Neff, “Soviet Meddling Jolts Dutchmen,” Christian Science Monitor, 10 July 1979, p. 11. More generally, see Lothar Ruehl, “Soviet Policy and the Domestic Politics of Western Europe,” in Soviet Strategy in Europe, edited by Richard Pipes (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976), pp. 65–104.

[Note 5]. R.I. Kosolapov, “International Relations and Social Progress,” translated in Soviet Studies in Philosophy 14 (Fall 1975): 29 and 31. Emphasis in the original.

[Note 6]. Nauchno-tekhnicheskaia revoliutsiia i mirovoi revoliutsionnyi protsess [The Scientific-Technological Revolution and the World Revolutionary Process], edited by S.V. Aleksandrov et al. (Kiev: Politizdat Ukrainy, 1977), pp. 67–69. With specific reference to the Common Market, see V. Liubimova, “Sotsial′naia politika EES: deklaratsiia i rezul′taty” [EEC Social Policy: Declarations and Results], Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia [hereafter MEMO], no. 4 (April 1976), pp. 62–79.

[Note 7]. S. Madzoevskii, “Mezhimperialisticheskie protivorechiia v usloviiakh mirnogo sosushchestvovaniia dvukh sistem” [Interimperialist Contradictions under Conditions of Peaceful Coexistence of the Two Systems], MEMO, no. 5 (May 1974), p. 37.

[Note 8]. For a Soviet critique of trilateralism, see A.I. Utkin, Doktriny atlantizma i evropeiskaia integratsiia [Doctrines of Atlanticism and European Integration] (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 187–202.

[ page 103 ]

[Note 9]. Madzoevskii, “Mezhimperialisticheskie protivorechiia v usloviiakh mirnogo sosushchestvovaniia dvukh sistem,” p. 39.

[Note 10]. V.I. Kuznetsov, Economic Integration: Two Approaches (Moscow: Progress, 1976), p. 11.

[Note 11]. L. Afanasiev [Afanas′ev] and V. Kolovnyakov [Kolovniakov], Contradictions of Agrarian Integration in the Common Market (Moscow: Progress, 1976), pp. 7–8.

[Note 12]. L. Maier, D. Mel′nikov, and V. Shenaev, “Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr imperialisticheskogo sopernichestva” [The West European Center of Imperialist Rivalry], MEMO, no. 12 (December 1978), p. 31.

[Note 13]. On the origin of the terms “macrointegration” and “microintegration,” see Christopher A.P. Binns, “From USE to EEC: The Soviet Analysis of European Integration under Capitalism,” Soviet Studies 30 (April 1978): 257–258.

[Note 14]. Maier, Mel′nikov, and Shenaev, “Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr imperialisticheskogo sopernichestva,” p. 28.

[Note 15]. V. Gromeka, “The United States–Western Europe: Scientific and Technological Competition,” International Affairs (Moscow) [hereafter IA], no. 6 (June 1973), p. 33.

[Note 16]. S. Madzoevskii, “V ‘treugol′nike’ London–Parizh–Bonn” [In the London–Paris–Bonn “Triangle”], MEMO, no. 10 (October 1972), p. 39.

[Note 17]. M.I. Zakhmatov, “Dva tsentra ekonomicheskogo sopernichestva” [Two Centers of Economic Rivalry], in SShA–Zapadnaia Evropa: partnerstvo i sopernichestvo [USA–West Europe: Partnership and Rivalry], edited by Iu.P. Davydov (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), p. 256.

[Note 18]. Abram Mileikovsky [Mileikovskii], “The Scientific-Technological Revolution and Capitalism,” New Times, no. 14 (April 1973), p. 18.

[Note 19]. M. Maksimova, “Kapitalisticheskaia integratsiia i mirovoe razvitie” [Capitalist Integration and World Development], MEMO, no. 4 (April 1978), pp. 14–24.

[Note 20]. An. Khachaturov, “US Capital and the Enlarged Common Market,” IA, no. 8 (August 1973), p. 92.

[Note 21]. L. Glukharev, “The Euro-Dollar Market and Interimperialist Contradictions,” IA, no. 9 (September 1972), pp. 52–53.

[Note 22]. Gromeka, “The United States–Western Europe,” p. 39.

[ page 104 ]

[Note 23]. G. Shakhnazarov, “The Labyrinths of Capitalist Integration,” IA, no. 9 (September 1977), p. 36.

[Note 24]. R.S. Ovinnikov, Sverkhmonopolii – novoe orudie imperializma [Supermonopolies – Imperialism’s New Weapon] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1978), pp. 98–104.

[Note 25]. A. Rusin, “The Rough Edges of the West European Triangle,” IA, no. 11 (November 1977), p. 112.

[Note 26]. D. Mel′nikov, “Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr – aspekt politicheskii” [The West European Center – The Political Aspect], MEMO, no. 5 (May 1978), p. 19.

[Note 27]. Rusin, “The Rough Edges of the West European Triangle,” p. 107.

[Note 28]. Madzoevskii, “V ‘treugol′nike’ London–Parizh–Bonn,” pp. 40–45.

[Note 29]. Mel′nikov, “Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr,” pp. 20–21, 23–24, and 27–28.

[Note 30]. Cf. S. Madzoevskii, D. Mel′nikov, and Iu. Rubinskii, “O politicheskikh aspektakh zapadnoevropeiskoi integratsii” [On the Political Aspects of West European Integration], MEMO, no. 4 (April 1974), pp. 57–58.

[Note 31]. Kuznetsov, Economic Integration, pp. 93 and 101.

[Note 32]. S. Sokol′skii, “Mezhnatsional′nye partiinye ob″edineniia v EES” [International Partisan Amalgamations in the EEC] MEMO, no. 5 (May 1977), pp. 121–124, is one of the rare pieces seriously to address this development.

[Note 33]. See Pertti Joenniemi, “Political Parties and Foreign Policy in Finland,” Cooperation and Conflict (Oslo) 13 , no. 1 (1978): 43–60, for a good account of domestic-foreign linkages in the Finnish political system.

[Note 34]. Shakhnazarov, “The Labyrinths of Capitalist Integration,” pp. 38–39.

[Note 35]. Rusin, “The Rough Edges of the West European Triangle,” p. 113.

[Note 36]. Cf. G.A. Vorontsov, Atlanticheskie otnosheniia i sovremennost′ [Atlantic Relations and the Present Day] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1977), pp. 28–29, 69, and 78; and A.I. Utkin, “SShA i zapadrioevropeiskaia integratsiia” [The USA and West European Integration], in SShA–Zapadnaia Evropa, pp. 48–52.

[ page 105 ]

[Note 37]. V. Shein, “NATO: The Price of ‘Mature Partnership’,” IA, no. 2 (February 1972), p. 52.

[Note 38]. Utkin, “SShA I zapadnoevropeiskaia integratsiia,” pp. 42–43.

[Note 39]. W. Stankiewicz, “The Contradictions of Military-Industrial Integration in Western Europe,” IA, no. 7 (July 1972), p. 28.

[Note 40]. G. Kosolov and S. Madzojewski [Madzoevskii], “The Plans for Military Integration of Europe: The British Variant,” IA, no. 9 (September 1973), p. 54. Cf. V.S. Shein, “Integratsiia i dezintegratsiia v NATO” [Integration and Disintegration in NATO], in SShA–Zapadnaia Evrope, pp. 163–164. For an interesting commentary on Eurogroup and its “subgroups,” see V. Leushkanov, “Atlanticheskii generator vooruzhenii” [The Atlantic Generator of Armaments], MEMO, no. 9 (September 1978), pp. 110–115.

[Note 41]. Madzoevskii, “V ‘treugol′nike’ London–Parizh–Bonn,” p. 44.

[Note 42]. S. Madzoevskii, “Evoliutsiia global′noi strategii Londona” [The Evolution of London’s Global Strategy], MEMO, no. 6 (June 1973), p. 27; Kosolov and Madzojewski, “The Plans for Military Integration of Europe,” p. 54.

[Note 43]. Madzoevskii, Mel′nikov, and Rubinskii, “0 politicheskikh aspektakh zapadnoevropeiskoi integratsii,” pp. 58–59.

[Note 44]. Ibid., pp. 59–60.

[Note 45]. Shein, “Integratsiia i dezintegratsiia v NATO,” pp. 163–164 and 166–67.

[Note 46]. Kosolov and Madzojewski, “The Plans for Military Integration of Europe,” p. 56.

[Note 47]. Ovinnikov, Sverkhmonopolii, pp. 98–104.

[Note 48]. Leushkanov, “Atlanticheskii generator vooruzhenii,” p. 115. Cf. Rusin, “The Rough Edges of the West European Triangle,” pp. 111–112; Kosolov and Madzojewski, “The Plans for Military Integration of Europe,” p. 54; S. Madzoevskii and S. Sladkevich, “Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr: tendentsii v razvitii voennykh vzaimosviazei” [The West European Center: Tendencies toward the Development of Military Mutual Relations, MEMO, no. 1 (Januarv 1979), pp. 95–96.

[Note 49]. Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 432–440. For details, see Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), chap. 5.

[ page 106 ]

[Note 50]. Andrzej Korbonski, “Detente, East–West Trade, and the Future of Economic Integration in Eastern Europe,” World Politics 28 (July 1976): 568–589.

[Note 51]. James A. Caporaso, “The External Consequences of Regional Integration for Pan–European Relations: Inequality, Dependence, Polarization, and Symmetry,” International Studies Quarterly 20 (September 1976): 370 and 379.

[Note 52]. Christopher A.P. Binns, “The Development of the Soviet Policy Response to the EEC,” Co-existence 14 , no. 2 (October 1977): 243–245. Cf. Eberhard Schulz, Moskau und die europaische Integration (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1975), pp. 72–84.

[Note 53]. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, p. 174.

[Note 54]. Ibid., chap. 6, is a detailed treatment of this issue. Also, see George Modelski, The Communist International System (Princeton, N.J.: Center of International Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 1961).

[Note 55]. The difficulties created by transferable rubles for COMECON integration are discussed by Lawrence J. Brainard, “The CMEA Financial System and Integration,” in Eastern European Integration and East–West Trade, edited by Paul Marer and J.M. Montias (New York: Praeger, forthcoming).

[Note 56]. C.H. McMillan, “The Bilateral Character of Soviet and Eastern European Foreign Trade,” Journal of Common Market Studies 13 , no. 1–2 (1975): 17. McMillan provides the best concise discussion of IBEC’s functions that I have come across, pp. 14–16 ff.

[Note 57]. Cal Clark, “Foreign Trade as an Indicator of Political Integration in the Soviet Bloc,” International Studies Quarterly 15 (September 1971): 259–95.

[Note 58]. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, chap. 18, esp. pp. 471–481; Richard W. Mansbach, “Bilateralism and Multilateralism in the Soviet Bloc,” International Organization 24 (Spring 1970): 371–380. For an attempt to measure foreign policy cohesion and to interpret that as political integration, see Barry Hughes and Thomas Volgy, “Distance in Foreign Policy Behavior: A Comparative Study of Eastern Europe,” Midwest Journal of Political Science 14 (August 1970): 459–492; the validity of this approach is debated by Kenneth S. Hempel, “Comparative Research on Eastern Europe: A Critique of Hughes and Volgy’s ‘Distance in Foreign Policy Behavior’,” and by Hughes and Volgy, “On the Difficult Business of Conducting Empirical Research in a Data-Poor Area,” American Journal of Political Science 17 (May 1973): 367–393 and 394–406 respectively.

[ page 107 ]

[Note 59]. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, pp. 453–454.

[Note 60]. Binns, “The Development of the Soviet Policy Response to the EEC,” pp. 253–54.

[Note 61]. Korbonski, “Detente, East–West Trade, and the Future of Economic Integration in Eastern Europe,” pp. 575–582, provides an admirably clear and concise examination of the reforms undertaken. His analysis emphasizes the motivations of the East European national political elites in liberalizing their economic planning systems, stresses the contrasts among the policies they adopted, and discusses the Soviet response to those policies.

[Note 62]. Peter Marsh, “The Integration Process in Eastern Europe, 1968 to 1975,” Journal of Common Market Studies 14 (June 1976): 322–327; quotation at 326–27. But Frantisek Pindak, “Comecon’s Programme of ‘S.E.I.’,” Jahrbuch der Wirtschaft Osteuropas 5 (1974): 435–453, maintains that the USSR made few real compromises. For a comprehensive review of institutional developments in COMECON in the early 1970s, see Zbigniew M. Fallenbuchl, “East European Integration: COMECON,” in United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Reorientation and Commercial Relations of the Economies of Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974).

[Note 63]. Cf. Arpad Abonyi and Ivan J. Sylvain, “CMEA Integration and Policy Options for Eastern Europe: A Development Strategy of Dependent States,” Journal of Common Market Studies 16 (December 1977): 148, who make this argument, and Pindak, “Comecon’s Programme of ‘S.E.I.’,” pp. 442–444, upon whom they draw.

[Note 64]. In support of this interpretation, see Marsh, “The Integration Process in Eastern Europe, 1968 to 1975,” pp. 327–29, esp. p. 328. There were also, undoubtedly, domestic Soviet pressures for reform as a result of the original structure’s inefficiency for production.

[Note 65]. Korbonski, “Detente, East–West Trade, and the Future of Economic Integration in Eastern Europe,” p. 575. The best discussion of the 1973 organizational reforms is Alice C. Gorlin, “Industrial Reorganization: The Associations,” in United States Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a New Perspective (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 162–188.

[Note 66]. Pindak, “Comecon’s Programme of ‘S.E.I.’,” p. 443; cf. Abonyi and Sylvain, “CMEA Integration and Policy Options for Eastern Europe,” p. 148.

[Note 67]. Marsh, “The Integration Process in Eastern Europe, 1968 to 1975,” p. 329.

[ page 108 ]

[Note 68]. Paul Marer, “Prospects for Integration in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA),” International Organization 30 (Autumn 1976): 631–648.

[Note 69]. Brainard, “The CMEA Financial System and Integration.”

[Note 70]. See Christopher D. Jones, “Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: The Dynamics of Political Autonomy and Military Intervention,” World Politics 29 (January 1977): 216–241; Nish Jamgotch, Jr., “Alliance Management in Eastern Europe (The New Type of International Relations),” World Politics 27 (April 1975): 405–429.

[Note 71]. Harvey Starr, “A Collective Goods Analysis of the Warsaw Pact,” International Organization 28 (Winter 1974): 521–532.

[Note 72]. The relation of these issues to Soviet–East European integration is discussed in William Zimmerman, “The Energy Western ‘Stagflation’ and the Evolution of Soviet–East European Relations: An Initial Assessment,” Discussion Paper No. 130 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Institute of Public Policy Studies, University of Michigan, 1979).

[Note 73]. For details on interbloc institutional contacts, see “Economic Integration and East–West Trade: Conflict of Comedy of Errors?” Journal of Common Market Studies 16 (September 1977): 1–3.

[Note 74]. Pravda, 21 December 1972, p. 1.

[Note 75]. John Pinder, “The Community and Comecon: What Could Negotiations Achieve?”, World Today 33 (May 1977): 180–181.

[Note 76]. See, however, Philip Hanson, “The European Community’s Commercial Relations with the CMEA Countries: Problems and Prospects,” in Carl H. McMillan (ed.), Changing Perspectives on East–West Commerce (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Co., 1974), pp. 31–58.

[Note 77]. See Philip Hanson and Michael Kaser, “Soviet Economic Relations with Western Europe,” and John Pinder and Pauline Pinder, “West European Economic Relations with the Soviet Union,” both in Pipes (ed.), Soviet Strategy in Europe, pp. 213–267 and 269–303 respectively.

[Note 78]. See, for instance: Pierre Letamendia, “L’intervention des organisations partisanes transnationales dans Ie processus de démocratisation espagnol,” mémoire ronéotypé (Bordeaux: Centre d’étude et de recherche sur l’Espagne et Ie monde hispanique, Universite de Bordeaux–I, 1979), cited in Charles Zorgbibe, “Puissance d’opinion,” Le monde diplomatique 26 (December 1979), p. 23.

[ page 109 ]

[Note 79]. Z. Kuzina, “Politika EES v ‘tret′em mire’” (The EEC’s Policy toward the “Third World”), MEMO, no. 4 (April 1977), pp. 63–71. See also Vasily Vakhrushchev, Neocolonialism: Methods and Manoeuvres (Moscow: Progress, 1973), chap. 5.

[Note 80]. See, e.g., Trond Gilberg, “Soviet Policies in West Europe,” Current History 61 (October 1971): 198–205, on the issue of bilateral ties.

[Note 81]. Robert Legvold, “The Problem of European Security,” Problems of Communism 23 (January–February 1974): 17.

 
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