Introduction

The legal and institutional aspects of international economic cooperation among socialist countries1 — even though, in various forms and on various levels, such cooperation has now been in progress for more than three decades — have not been closely studied in the Western world. Indeed, the main legal features of the cooperation which is developing in a substantial section of the socialist camp form a subject which, on the whole, is comparatively little known in the West. In particular, the major works about Comecon, hereafter CMEA (from the initial letters of its full name, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), with the exception of a few studies in German and French, have taken a strictly economic, historical or political perspective. The main areas of interpretation and assessment have often tended so far to be concerned with a handful of principal themes in economic integration and interdependence in order to evaluate, inter alfa, the performance of CMEA in terms of the implications for Soviet political and economic control of Eastern Europe. In the last few years, on the other hand, the body of Eastern legal literature concerning socialist economic integration has been growing in size and improving in quality.