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)
L'udovit Hallon - Miroslav Londák: Sources and Possibilities of Research on Slovak-Austrian Economic Relations after the Second World War
Cudovit Hallon - Miroslav Londâk possible even lucidly to evaluate the institution’s agenda because its archive materials are not at disposal in any of the Slovak archives. In the 1950s it had a few branches of the State Czechoslovak Bank in Slovakia. These were established through the re-organization of former Slovak commercial banks and public financial institutions. The main function for Slovakia was carried out by the Regional Institute SCB in Bratislava. A part of its organizational structure was an independent so-called foreign group with five divisions and 15 sections. A preliminary review of Regional Institute SCB files in archives of the National Bank of Slovakia shows that information about foreign trade in materials of the foreign group is just sporadic. Scanty information can be obtained in materials of Slovak departments for different economic sectors in the Slovak National Archive and in company archives. Research in this respect would be very time-consuming, arduous and the results very indefinite. We can state that for the period of the 1950s we shall have to rely on archive material of economic institutions in Czech regions. The fact that in the materials of Slovak archives from the beginning of the 1950s documents about Austrian-Slovak trade relationships are lost is a great pity because radical changes occurred in the structure of foreign trade of Czechoslovakia. One of the results of the radicalization of the totalitarian regime of Czechoslovakia in the years 1950-1953 was a basic change in trade to the Soviet Union and its satellites. The relationships with Western countries started to improve after the mid 50s, when a peace treaty was signed with Austria. Since the end of the 1950s a new structure of product exchange and economic cooperation of Czechoslovakia with Eastern Europe was being built. In the 1960s, on the background of attempts at economic reforms, a positive economic-political environment for trade contacts with Western countries developed in Czechoslovakia which culminated in 1968. The interference of the Soviet Union against the reform trend in Czechoslovakia and the commencement of neo-Stalinist politics at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s again stymied positive tendencies in foreign trade. However, economic cooperation with the Western world, although limited, continued because the country needed new technologies for modernization and to satisfy the growing needs of the inhabitants. In the 1960s the centralization of foreign trade management was partly loosened. In Slovakia branches of statewide foreign trade companies for the needs of Slovak production started to be established. In the reform years of 1968-1969 even the state monopoly of foreign trade was partially loosened. For a short period of time the companies had possibilities to establish direct trade relationships with partners in capitalist states. Though, in 1970 the channels of direct trade relationships were closed again. In the 1960s the monopoly of Zivnostenskâ banka in foreign currency trade operations with foreign clients was loosened. In 1965 the Czechoslovak Trade Bank (CSOB) was established which focused on specific bank services in the foreign trade area. In 1967 the CSOB opened its subsidiary in Bratislava. In talks about the reform of the financial system in the second half of the 1960s there was a proposal from the Slovak side to revitalize the Slovak Tatra Banka which was to 300
