Socialist Internationalism

Not a monograph but a treaty in book form.

It carries no single author. An editorial board of eleven represents seven countries - Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR - under the general editorship of S. Anghelov of Bulgaria, who also wrote the introduction, with some thirty contributors listed section by section: Butenko and Novopashin for the Soviet side, Prikryl and Kulhanek for Czechoslovakia, Kruger for the GDR, Ladosz and Iskra for Poland, Szechy for Hungary.

Its subject is the theory and practice of relations between socialist states: sovereignty, mutual obligation, economic integration through Comecon, military coordination, and the duty owed by each state to the others. As a multilateral, negotiated statement of what the bloc said its own internal law was, agreed across seven parties, there is nothing else comparable in English.

It is also, read closely, the Brezhnev Doctrine set out twice on the same page as its own denial - repudiating the concept of limited sovereignty and affirming each state's freedom to choose its path, then adding that no fraternal state's decisions should be detrimental to socialism within its own borders, a proviso that hands the entire content of sovereignty to whoever does the judging. The judge is then named, in the formula adopted at the Moscow meeting of 1969: that the defence of socialism is an internationalist duty.

Romania, notably, supplied no author and sat on no board.

Translated by Barry Jones.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.