CMEA’s monetary institutions between the West and the Global South

Abstract

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), founded in 1949, provided an institutional space for the economic exchange between socialist member countries as well as between them and the West and the Global South. Its goal was to establish a socialist alternative to the economic globalization project offered by the capitalist West. Analysing the monetary institutions established by CMEA – the Transferable Rubel, the International Bank for Economic Cooperation and the International Investment Bank – the paper argues that these ultimately failed to create an independent socialist economic system and were conducive to de-facto dependencies on the West as well as on the Global South.