Does the Third Way Lead to the Third World? A Shadow of the 1968's Economic Reform in the Czechoslovak Post-communist Transformation
Abstract
The paper deals with the economic concepts of the 1968 Czechoslovak reform economists. It analyses the development of their opinions after the suppression of the prague Spring in 1970's and 1980's, concentrating on the lives of Ota Šik, the most prominent Czechoslovak economist of the era, and his close collaborator Zdislav Šulc, who, unlike Šik, spent the two decades after the Soviet invasion outside the academic world.
Both of them made a substantial revision of their previous ideas, moving from the "reform socialism" to the "third way", which is defined as an overcoming of both the capitalist and the socialist social system. The paper also shows that both Šik and Šulc quickly abandoned their Third way concepts after 1989 in favour of the implementation of the system of western capitalism.