Reconsidering Cross-Border Interactions: Balancing the Scales

This chapter considers four major aspects of globalization in state socialist East Central Europe, which also serve as a basis for assessing the soundness of new and older mainstream interpretations: trade, capital movements, information flows, and the movement of people. The East Central European state socialist countries achieved a relatively low level of globalization between World War II and the period of regime changes, which is evident in all the aspects surveyed. At the same time, there is no empirical evidence to support the claim that globalization in the region decreased in the two decades leading up to the regime changes. On the contrary, during the latter period, globalization advanced slowly but steadily in the East Central European countries. The gradual increase in openness was facilitated by the growing complexity of their economies, growing consumer demands, and the ongoing globalization of the world at large, as well as by rapid technological change, such as the spread of new information and communication technologies. From the 1970s onwards, the region also experienced internal divergence: the international openness of Poland and Hungary increased more significantly than that of Czechoslovakia.