The globalisation process and the Eastern bloc countries in the 1970s and 1980s

This article examines the position of the Eastern Bloc countries in the economic globalisation which spread in the last third of the twentieth century. The main emphasis is on the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Therefore two significant dimensions of economic globalisation have been selected: trade and capital-market transactions. The first part of this paper provides an outline of globalisation processes and their causes during the 1970s and 1980s. The second part deals with the role of Eastern bloc countries in globalisation trends, including an examination of the motivations and intentions behind their foreign-trade operations. This becomes the basis to explore the attitude of Eastern bloc countries to the institutions of globalisation (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT], the International Monetary Fund IMF] and the World Bank). As it turns out, it seems questionable whether the Eastern bloc countries had ever been able actively to determine the conditions of globalisation. They probably only had an influence as their very existence presented a line of demarcation to the global world: because of their own policies and because of the defence reactions of the West.