Dissolved from Within: The Visegrád Group Bury the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance to Exit the Soviet Bloc

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the socialist bloc's economic organisation, was dissolved in June 1991. After the revolutions of 1989, which brought down the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the CMEA member states negotiated for the establishment of a successor organisation, the Organisation for International Economic Cooperation (OIEC). Its function would have been to act as a temporary coordination forum to ease the members’ transition to a market economy. The OIEC was never established because the three Central European members, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, decided in early 1991 to withdraw from all regional integration plans led by the USSR. They wanted to protect their newly gained sovereignty and thus sought to dissolve all socialist-era tools of Soviet control, including the CMEA and its potential successor. Membership of the European Communities – the Central Europeans’ main foreign policy goal – remained out of their reach in the immediate post-1989 era. Therefore, the Visegrád Three, as they became to be called, tightened their sub-regional collaboration and created the Central European Free Trade Agreement at the end of 1992.