The Disputes over the Economic Transformation in Czechoslovakia in 1990's. An Introduction to a Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
The paper presents the current state of my doctoral research, focusing on three particular issues which are linked to the subject of political history of the post-1989 privatization in Czechoslovakia. In the first part, the paper explaines how the privatization became the main point of the economic reform, and how it addressed the growing anti-communist sentiments of the era.
I argue that the concept of the privatization as a core of the whole economic reform was not in any way natural consequence of the previous political development, but had to fight for its own acknowledgement against other concepts, which saw the focal point of the economic reform somewhere else. In the second part, I argue that the different concepts of privatization were discussed not so much through their assumed economic performance, but through their perceived justice (who has the right to get the state property).
Here, the paper concentrates on the way how the supporters of two major concepts, employees' privatization and voucher privatization, understood their projects as a way to create a democratic social order, and try to explain the political failure of the first as a result of a deeper change in the political discourse. This change in discourse resembled the similar processes which had been taking place in the non-communist world since the 1970s and included some features that could be called neoliberal.
In the third part, the paper concentrates on the different ideas of how the people should behave in the new economic order (capitalism). This argument is based on an analysis of a particular part of the voucher privatization's history, when a clash of different views on this subject occurred between the architects of the privatization and several groups of its participants.
I also try to explain how the differing ideas about the people's behaviour in capitalism contributed to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993.