Authors

Szinan Radi¹;  ¹ University of Exeter, UK

Discussion

Our contemporary history of economic globalisation is framed primarily as a Western capitalist story, starting after World War II, advancing through economic liberalisations from the late 1960s, the collapse of socialist planning in the 1980s, and the global rise of neoliberalism. This paper nuances this perspective, arguing that creating and maintaining global economic interdependencies to foster national growth was a key concern not only for Western policymakers but also for their socialist colleagues. However, socialist strategies were not merely driven by ideology or inter-bloc competition. Rather, they were shaped by the interplay of shifting global dynamics, national economic strategies, and domestic social forces driven by the inequalities they generated or sought to address. Focusing on the economic relations between liberalising Hungary and oil-rich Iraq 1960s¬–1980s, the paper draws on the materials of MEDICOR, a Hungarian socialist enterprise specialising in the manufacturing and export of medical devices and equipment, to examine how perceptions of inequalities and money influenced Hungarian policymakers’ views on global economic interdependence. In doing so, the paper explores how these factors contributed to Hungary’s viewing of Western institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, as complementary solutions for addressing their global structural imbalances, strikingly manifesting in the country’s balance of payments deficit.