The impact of Eastern Europe's convertible currency external debt situation on the financing of East-West trade in the late 1908s and early 1990s.

This book offers an international reading of the Polish socialist regime’s history in the 1970s, and its opening up to the West. It bridges Poland’s socialist domestic history with critical developments of the global and European 1970s, including détente in the Cold War, western European integration, and globalisation. In this period of international transformations, socialist Poland under Edward Gierek's leadership multiplied its economic and political contacts with capitalist countries, especially western Europe, and became a leader of East-West cooperation among Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and Warsaw Pact members. Relying on sources from public and corporate archives in five different European states, the book demonstrates both that the global political and economic transformations of that period were critical for the decision-making process in Poland and, moreover, that the national socialist elites participated in shaping these transformations. By looking at the goals and expectations of the Polish socialist elites and their practices of political and economic exchanges with western Europe, the book explains the logic which drove the socialist regime into entanglement with the West. As is shown here, this entanglement proved inextricable and critical for the socialist regime's failure and Poland’s political and economic future. This book will be of much interest to students of European history, cold war studies, socialism studies and International Relations.

This title was first published in 1975:

WHEN in the future historians examine the second half of the twentieth century, they will no doubt identify the accelerated inter-nationalization of production as a landmark comparable with the Industrial Revolution. In this process multinational enterprises have been leading actors in the past twenty-five years and are certain to continue to be so in the next quarter-century. In 1975 the sales of the Western multinational corporations represented one-fifth of the Gross National Product of all capitalist countries. If their growth is maintained at the same rate as over the period 195o-75, by the end of the century this share will be nearly one-half and the whole capitalist economy may very well be dominated by some 200 giant corporations of which three-quarters may be American-based.