Presentation at the “Un/Making (National, Imperial, EU-European) Borders: Spaces & Practices in and beyond Europe in the long 20th Century” conference (of the “Production of Migration” Collaborative Research Centre, SFB 1604) at the Europa-Universität Flensburg on 31 August 2026.
Excerpt: “Economic integration” itself meant something different for Soviet-style socialist states than it did in liberal capitalist Western Europe, where the aim was to establish a customs union or common market by progressively abolishing tariff barriers, thereby increasing competition and consolidation among economic actors. Instead, socialist states were more concerned with ensuring domestic supply than with increasing foreign trade for its own sake, and international cooperation was primarily useful for improving the division of labour among producers or achieving effects of scale within the bloc. In essence, these were countries that were long conceived as autarkic, and one view is that “socialist integration” was a way of translating that national program into one of self-sufficiency for the system of socialist states as a whole. The customs controls that capitalist “integration” needed to eliminate remained vital for countries where central planning was “the most important economic policy instrument,” and one that could be fundamentally undermined by uncontrolled foreign trade.