Industrial Enterprise in Two Globalizations: The Czechoslovak Footwear Industry between Socialist Economic Exchange and Global Capitalism,1980s–1990s

Abstract

This article analyzes the impact of economic globalization on the decline of the footwear industry in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Rather than presenting the story of increasing integration into global economic structures, it focuses on one industry (footware) and one large firm (Svit Gottwaldov/Zlín) to highlight the contradictions, discontinuities and frictions between different globalization projects and to examine the clash between socialist and capitalist regimes of economic globalization in the 1980s and 1990s. The globalization that affected the former socialist countries and their economies accelerated in the 1990s could have led to opposite consequences – the rupture of the long-standing and intense transnational economic relations in either those countries’ industrial sector or at the level of a particular industrial enterprise. This case study shows that capitalist globalization could also cause discontinuity, producing effects contrary to those suggested by the narrative of an increasingly interconnected world.