The changes that did (not) occur. The post-communist Europe as an avant-garde of the social development?
Abstract
The paper focuses on the expectations of the political and expert agents in the era after the Velvet revolution and asks the question whether they had the ambition of formulating political projects different from a return to the system of so-called democratic capitalism. Analysing the works of Jaroslav Vanek and other economists, the paper shows that there was no lack of ambitious projects of social transformation in the contemporary Czechoslovak political debate, and that some of them even aimed to make Czechoslovakia a pioneer of a new social order based on the ideas of so-called economic democracy.
The authors of such concepts were rather politically isolated, but the idea that Czechoslovakia (and the whole post-communist Europe) could play a key role in the new European order was popular even among the ruling liberal conservatives, even though they had a different idea of what it should look like. In a conclusion, the text compares the formerly analysed expectations of the agents with the contemporary research on the actual role of the post-communist states in shaping the post-1989 Europe.