Word: comecon
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Like the West, the East has sprouted its own supranational institutions--all under Soviet control. The Warsaw Pact, signed in 1955, formalized Soviet direction of Eastern Europe's armed forces. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Comecon, was set up to coordinate and integrate East bloc economies; the system has been as ungainly as its foundation stone, Soviet-style central planning...
...control and regulation. WHY DO YOU FEAR AN E.U. SUPERSTATE? We spent a half-century under communist eyes. We are more sensitive than some other West Europeans. We feel things, we see things, we touch things that we don't like. For us, the European Union reminds us of COMECON [Moscow's organization for economic control of the Soviet bloc...
...GUESS YOU WON'T BE GOING TO FRANCE ANYTIME SOON ... Not ideologically, but structurally, [the E.U.] is very similar [to COMECON]. The decisions are made not in your own country. For us who lived through the communist era, this is an issue...
...good news. Like Poland, Czechoslovakia has been hit hard by the collapse of Comecon, the economic organization of the former Soviet bloc. Exports to Russia and other once communist countries have shriveled faster than new markets can be developed in the West, and imports of Russian oil now have to be paid for in scarce hard currency. Czechoslovak production fell 16% last year; unemployment, officially zero under communism, has risen to 8% and is certain to go higher, bringing some of the same calls heard in Poland for pumping more money into sick state enterprises...
...lowest inflation (34% for all 1991, about a third of that at year's end). Hungary has been especially successful in attracting foreign investment; it has formed no fewer than 10,000 joint ventures with Western firms. The country has also developed new markets to replace those lost when Comecon collapsed; more than three-quarters of its exports go to the West...