ABSTRACT
Political and military ties formed, as we have seen, a highly institutionalized framework for the Soviet control of Central Europe and provided a dense network of processes through which the supremacy of Soviet interests could be assured. They were the main means through which Soviet regional dom inance and the specific forms of communist party rule were secured. Alongside the multiple structures of political linkage and military co-ordination, however, were those of the Committee for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON, also known as CMEA). Established in 1949, several years before the Warsaw Treaty Organization, COMECON was the counterpart of the regional military institution in more ways than one. As we have already seen, in the case of the military organi zation the issue of regional integration was somewhat ambiguous, priority being assigned to the assurance of Soviet control rather than to the development of relations of complex interdependence. Like the WTO in the military sphere, COMECON served primarily to demarcate the Central European economies from those of the capitalist West, and its record in furthering the integration of the individual communist-governed economies was not a strong one. Considerable doubts have, in any case, been expressed about whether the idea of integration has much applicability to economies organized on the basis of bureacratic administration and central planning.
