Modernization of an Underdeveloped Central European Region through the Technocratic Project: Bohemian-Moravian Highlands in the 20th Century

Abstract

During the 20th century, besides many regions of fragmented Central Europe, Bohemian-Moravian Highlands has risen from underdeveloped, poor and remote hilly area on the periphery of both Bohemia and Moravia to the centralised region of high relevance as an (supra)national traffic axis as well as a region of many natural resources vital for the whole Czech state. Originally, this divided periphery was omitted by the central-established supportive initiatives.

In addition, its completely negative natural and socio-economical characteristics were seen as the major obstacle to modernization. Total turnover in this approach occurred just before WWII, when influential regionalist and hydrology expert František Radouš came up with completely contrasting view of the Highlands.

In his technocratic project published in 1939, he saw the conditions of region as an unmissable opportunity to modernization. Radouš urged to build up the region's strategic relevance upon its water resources and traffic infrastructure.

He planned detailed projects (dams, hydroelectric stations; roads, highways and railways) and proposed to establish the centralized regional headquarters in order to coordinate these projects. Despite of his impressively complex concept of regional modernization, Radouš has never worked on this topic again and his proposals haven't been broadly reflected after the war.

Nevertheless, these visionary plans came in fact almost completely true lately, in the changed political and economic context of the socialist state and nearly in the same way Radouš suggested. In the 2nd half of the century the region was actually centralized, main infrastructural projects were really built and finally, the rising Highlands became one of the strategic regions of Czechoslovakia.

Proposed paper will outline the situation of the region in the first few decades of the 20th century and most of all will examine Radouš's specific technocratic vision of the Highlands, with the stress on the changing aspects in the perception of regional development options which meant that the region acquired strategic importance in the post-war Czechoslovak modernization. Nowadays, Radouš's technocratic approach seems to be very visionary.

Were his plans so logical and inevitable, or were they just "rediscovered" by the following planners of the regional development?