. . . the idea of common European home came to my mind, and at the right moment this expression sprang form my tongue by itself.
--Mikhail Gorbachev in Perestroika
In four years' time, the European Community will be transformed into a major geoeconomic area, with one voice in trade, tariffs, and technology. The 12 member nations that began as the Common Market or the European Economic Community (EEC) (collectively known for the past 20 years as the EC because the Community now encompasses many entities and programs, including cooperation in coal and steel production, nuclear energy, and technological research) have edged slowly toward the creation of a European Internal Market (EIM) in which all fiscal, physical, and technical frontiers would be eliminated by the end of 1992.
Little noticed in the current euphoria over the coming of 1992 was a linkage that occurred in Luxembourg on June 25, when the EC and the socialist economic bloc, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or COMECON), signed a joint declaration to develop "cooperation in areas which fall within their respective spheres of competence and where there is a common interest." A few weeks later, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the Polish parliament, he redefined the aim of CMEA as the "establishment of a socialist common market." Europeans realized, once and for all, that perestroika had reached them.
Presumably, the non-Soviet members of the CMEA can now hope to take the EC as a role model, thanks to Gorbachev's revelations concerning a "common European home". The CMEA, with headquarters in Moscow, never really was free to emulate the EC, because it originated purely as a political response to Gen. George C. Marshall's plan outlined at Harvard in June 1947, to help rebuild war-devastated Europe.
The following September, Andrei Vishinsky presented the Soviet view of the Marshall Plan as "an attempt to split Europe into two camps." In fact, Vishinsky accomplished precisely that: a few days later, the USSR ensured the existence of the two camps by the establishment of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) to control Eastern Europe, politically and economically, through its communist parties. The CMEA, still under the shadow of its initial purpose as a mechanism for control rather than for growth, may just be beginning to emerge from the shadow of the Cominform, which was dissolved by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956.
The economic mechanism for achieving the goals of the Marshall Plan was created in April 1948 as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which had as its membership the Western European nations, Canada, and the United States. Today, with Australia, Japan, and New Zealand added as members, and reaching out with assistance to developing nations, the OEEC has become the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).
Formed in January 1949 as the Soviet response to the creation of the OEEC, the CMEA really should be the economic parallel of the EC, but it has not been in any measure as effective. The CMEA, a coalition of symbolic albatross states, including Cuba, Mongolia, and Vietnam, bears a heavy burden of economic diversity and differing perceptions of socialist
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