This project excavates how cultural production was influenced by and interacted with the introduction of free market mechanisms in Central Europe after 1989. Concentrating specifically on the 1990s, it argues that this decade now deserves to be studied historically, rather than being understood as part of a present “post-communist” condition. The collapse of state socialism and (re)instatement of democracy has been theorised from an economic, political, and social perspective, but its significance for cultural production has been neglected. This project analyses how this economic change was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations. Specifically, it investigates how the fields of cinema and television responded to the introduction of a free market economy in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Its main object of investigation is the reciprocal relationship between the effects of economic change on cultural production and this production as an agent in economic change. The proposed research will attend to the cultural dimension of the economic transformation in order to understand the symbolic meanings and narratives that gave the economic and political changes coherence and social validity at the time. The project’s original intervention lies in applying historical questions to an area that has been primarily dealt with in the disciplines of political science, economics, and sociology. It will thus be at the forefront of the agenda of the host institution which is concerned with investigating the introduction and development of capitalism and liberal democracy in the region in a historical context, making it ideally positioned to provide all the necessary infrastructure and leading expertise on the topic in question. This project will offer a novel cultural history angle on the study of the systemic transformations of the 1990s by producing an array of scholarly and popularizing outputs.

The project National Communism (NATCOM) addresses the ambivalent and dynamic relations between communist ideology and nationalism. The project goal is to investigate how national communism, in its various stages, shaped the political, intellectual, and cultural development in Czechoslovakia during the “short 20th century”, from 1918 until the second half of the 1990s. National communism, as understood in this project, is a specific variety of communist thinking deeply rooted in the Eastern Central European (ECE) intellectual tradition. It is a crucial phenomenon that both predates and outlives the existence of the socialist dictatorships in the region. The investigation addresses the central question of how the complicated, ever-changing relations between communism and nationalism formed the development of the Czechoslovak socialist dictatorship and how the remodeled national communist agenda after 1989 influenced the post-communist transition. The main objects of the analysis are the nature of communist appeals to national legitimacy and the continuities between national communism and the “national populism” in the 1990s Eastern Central Europe. The research of national communism will look for continuities that survived the implementation of the new rules, the cases of adaptation, and evolution according to specific traditions. The main question is how the intellectual substance of national communism adapted to and also formed the changing reality. National communism will be analyzed with a specific focus on the Slovak part of the Czechoslovak Republic, in its interactions with the Czech and Hungarian environment. However, Slovak development is not understood as unique. NATCOM uses it as a case study identifying and providing distinct developmental traits typical for other former socialist dictatorships in ECE.