Europe is a continent whose history has, in one form or another, long been dominated by integration. And yet the European integration process is often treated as synonymous with the evolution of just one particular, and until recently geographically quite limited, Western-centred organisation: the European Union (EU). This trend obscures the multitude of ways European states have acted collectively on both sides of the Iron Curtain - and continue to do so throughout the continent today. With contributors drawn from history and political science, this book explores some of these diverse integration efforts 'beyond Brussels'. We shine a light on international organisations, trade frameworks, and various political, social, scientific and cultural forms of unity in both Eastern and Western Europe. In so doing, the book seeks to redefine the history of the European integration process not only as a less purely EU-centric phenomenon but as a less strictly Western European one too.

In the early 1970s, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) began to revise its trade policy towards the outside world. It needed to counter the European Community's bid to implement its Common Commercial Policy and thereby change East-West trade practices. Foreign trade priorities became at once a crucial issue on the socialist countries' political agenda. The key question was whether they would have to open their system to the global economy - and bear the consequent pressures and competition that this decision entailed. Based on newly declassified archival sources, this study shows how the East European states were able to lobby their positions towards the USSR within the CMEA. The pressure from its allies forced the Soviet leadership to accept the CMEA's opening towards the EC.

Europe is a continent whose history has, in one form or another, long been dominated by integration. And yet the European integration process is often treated as synonymous with the evolution of just one particular, and until recently geographically quite limited, Western-centred organisation: the European Union (EU). This trend obscures the multitude of ways European states have acted collectively on both sides of the Iron Curtain - and continue to do so throughout the continent today. With contributors drawn from history and political science, this book explores some of these diverse integration efforts 'beyond Brussels'. We shine a light on international organisations, trade frameworks, and various political, social, scientific and cultural forms of unity in both Eastern and Western Europe. In so doing, the book seeks to redefine the history of the European integration process not only as a less purely EU-centric phenomenon but as a less strictly Western European one too.