Abstract
In 1989, the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe brought enormous challenges for all of the postsocialist societies in their so-called transition to market economy. This involved a task to build most of the market institutions anew, while setting up regulatory framework of the emerging capitalist property and production relations.
In other words, the enormous challenge consisted precisely in a task to enable the formation of new economic elite which would underpin the emergent market economies. There were many aspirants for that role ranging from socialist directors (nomenclature managers) to domestic managers allied with the interests of foreign investors (comprador managers).
The task to steer the transition into functioning market economy was nonetheless up to the state administrations and their respective state projects. Evaluating the policy content and socioeconomic outcomes of such state projects reveals much about the ups and downs of transitions to market economy.
Czechia offers two state (transition) projects for evaluation. The first nationalist project can be associated with the expansion of domestic private ownership of Czech economy up until its own implosion in national economic and political crisis at the end of 1990s.
Having developed from the collapse of the first, the second internationalist project accounts for a growing share of foreign private ownership and has so far proved resilient to the global economic crisis. The experience with both projects is pertinent to a critical analysis.
This experience is ambiguous when compared with the socioeconomic outcomes of other late developers such the East Asian developmental states. In contrast to them, Czechia has got stuck in the middle of developmental ladder between low- and high hanging fruit of socioeconomic success, which provides for a bittersweet experience.
Much of this owes to the capitalist property and production relations which have emerged under the auspices of two varieties of Czech transition state.