Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)

Introduction

Introduction

Croatia’s relationship with Austria which Damir Jelic discusses in the context of capitalist Austria and socialist Croatia “living in the neighbourhood” within the Danube economic region. He concentrates on the analysis of human capital, trades, skills, labour, migrant workers, travel and tourism where he perceives historic continuity in good neighbourhood relationships between Croatia and Austria throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (SHS), as well as during the existence of Socialist Yugoslavia. Optimistically he concludes that seen from the human point of view good neighbourhood will continue.

The way authors dealt with the Central-east and Southeast European planned economies’ relationships with Austria provides ample proof of differences in development. It shows the fallacy of the widespread approach to the history of East European socialist states as a monolithic block. Indeed, the diversity of Austria’s neighbours is convincingly mirrored in the contributions on sources in the archives of the countries which form the last section of this volume. The availability and the content of Austrian sources are described by Alexandra Neubauer-Czettl, who concentrates on trade agreements covering the period 1945 to 1990, followed by Dieter Lautner who assesses the quality of extant documentary evidence. Such informative evaluations are of great assistance to historical research. Equally revealing are the contributions on archival sources covering Slovak- and Czechoslovak-Austrian negotiations. Eudovit Hallon and Miroslav Londâk offer a history of the vagaries of Czech-Slovak relationships in the mirror of the quality and the whereabouts of archival sources, while Bohumir Brom is able to present an impressive overview of the parallelism of government documents as well as sources of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party on Czech-Slovak- Austrian post-war economic relations.

This volume is about Austria’s “delicate relationships” with its socialist Eastern neighbours, but there were other neutral countries in Cold War Europe such as Finland. And this is the subject of Pekka Sutela’s contribution on Finnish trade with the USSR: Why Was It Different? The essay on Finland provides us with an impetus for further research into the history of relations between neutral states and socialist states in Cold War Europe. Thus neutral Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland engendered trade and financial relations between their market economies and the planned economic systems of the socialist countries in spite of restrictions imposed by the Cold War. These were the subject of a further conference on “Cold War and Neutrality: East-West Economic Relations in Europe” in Bratislava (22.-23. September 2005). Both conferences were held in preparation for Session 101 at the International Economic History Congress in Helsinki (August 2006), where this volume will be presented.

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