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)
Eduard Kubů: Restoration and Régularisation of Economie Cooperation under the Circumstances of Accelerating Cold War
Eduard Kubû Czechoslovak export but there was only a very slight decrease in comparison with the other developed capitalist countries. Import was increasing even during the times of the hardest confrontational fight between East and West; it did not start to decline at a moderate rate until 1952. The reduction of the trade exchange volume was caused by two main factors and both of them came from Prague: in its trade with Austria, the Czechoslovak Republic limited its deliveries of gas coal and was purchasing ever less refined steel, which it was now newly producing itself (the export of coal decreased by 40 percent over the period 1948-1954!), and these two commodities were the largest items in the mutual trade. Other factors, including for example observance of the embargo regulations based on the list of goods issued by COCOM, influenced the exchange of goods “only slightly”, according to a source material prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Trade for a meeting of the Trade Committee of the European Economic Commission.'’3 The data on the trade with Austria used here are based on the aggregate internal secret records of the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the Czechoslovak Republic; in addition to that, the data for the years 1946-1953 were converted to the new currency (the currency reform took place in June 1953). However, their origin is not quite clear; the official published Czechoslovak statistics for the first half of the 1950’ies only state aggregate data on foreign trade (the detailed data were classified data); in several annual volumes, there were not even figures on the levels of foreign trade by individual countries. It is probable that the volume of trade exchange was higher than the stated figures. This opinion of mine is based on the irregularly reported data on complicated deals with USIA, i.e. the Austrian enterprises under Soviet administration. The volume of deals concluded with USIA reached as much as 50 million Czechoslovak Crowns.63 64 The structure of the goods traded between Czechoslovakia and Austria included a dominant share of raw materials and fuels. In 1948, these commodities accounted for 66 percent of exports and for as much as 74 percent of imports. The slight prevalence of Czechoslovak imports of raw materials can be seen throughout the examined period. The trend concerning the second most important item of mutual trade, i.e. machines, tools and apparatuses for production, is symptomatic. In this respect, the approximately even balance in the years 1948 and 1949 was followed by a period of clear Austrian dominance in the export of the goods of this type; the Czechoslovak economy assumed the role of a considerably technically and technologically less developed partner, who seeks to obtain highly technically intensive goods from Austria. In the times of the escalating cold war, Austria became one of the intermediaries for import of the highly sought-for economic63 NAP, MFT, Tajné spisy [Secret records] 1955, box no. 1, Rakousko - nezpracované [Austria - uninventoriseded records], Material pro informaCni dossier na zasedani obchodniho vÿboru EHK. [Materials for information dossier on the session of the trade committee of the European Economic Commission], dated 15. 8. 1955, without number. 64 See footnote no. 60. 216
