Abstract
The crisis in the late-socialist regime in Czechoslovakia brought about plans for restructuring the economy and attempts to find a new place for it in the global economy. The worsening economic position forced the communist elite to consider transition to a market economy and trade liberalization.
But these would bring new challenges in regards how to achieve this. The trade relationships among Comecon were heading towards marketization and the trade, especially arms trade, with developing countries did not increasingly correspond with the idea how such a trade should be conducted.
In 1989, the communist leadership was overthrown by the Velvet revolution. Now, the previously favoured Gorbachev's idea of a common European home connected to the restructuring of Comecon was openly competing with the return to the West.
The increasing insolvency of the (former) Comecon countries and the developed world was pushing Czechoslovakia to the West where most economists saw its rightful place. But nevertheless, not everyone was ready to fully reorient themselves to the West and not even try to reform Comecon at first.
The EC and the future single European market was nevertheless a variable that exercised a substantial influence on the considerations regarding trade orientation. At first, not believing that they could join in the near future, Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic embarked on this long journey.
One key tool being the Visegrád Group which was founded with the intention to support the position of its members with regards to the membership in the EC. Its lowest point being during the government of Václav Klaus who tried to abandon the idea of Central Europe and fully head West.
In my presentation I will focus on the ideas regarding the Czechoslovak and later Czech restructuring of trade relations in the late-socialist and post-socialist era in the documents of the Forecasting Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences stressing not only the relationship to the EC but also the imagined place of Czechoslovakia in Europe.