Balancing between the COMECON and the EEC : Hungarian elite debates on European integration during the long 1970s

Abstract

This article intends to uncover the internal disputes about foreign and trade policy between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, and to highlight the Hungarian motives in both Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) internal discussions and Hungary’s talks with the European Economic Community (EEC). The issue of concluding an agreement with the EEC became a home-front battlefield between the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ of the political leadership at the turn of the 1970s. The article argues that from the early 1980s, the genuine initiator of a foreign trade policy shift was the reform wing of the party, while the foreign trade apparatus remained firm on its standpoint of non-recognition.