Abstrakt
In my contribution, I will focus on the re-emergence of market reform in the case of Czechoslovakia which is often disregarded as belonging to the more hard-line socialist countries with only superficial reforms. I will follow how such reform was allowed as a possibility by the socialist regime and how it was slowly gaining form and ground since 1979 - especially on the example of the Forecasting Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences which formulated the most radical, official market reform plan.
The main source of this analysis are the documents and plans of the Forecasting Institute including the text of its employees which later carried out the post-socialist transformation and held high positions in post-socialist governments, thus shaping and carrying out the transformation directly. This will show how the principles of the post-1989 reform were already set during late-socialism and post-1989 Western influence was quite limited.
I will analyse how the previously united community of the Forecasting Institute later broke apart with the possibility to actually implement such market reform due to the differences between the conceptualization of the way towards the end-goal - a real functioning market. And also, what should such market form entail.