Pioneers of the Free Market Economy? Unofficial Commercial Exchange between People from the Socialist Bloc Countries (1970s and 1980s)

Abstract

Pioneers of the Free Market Economy? Unofficial Commercial Exchange between People from the Socialist Bloc Countries (1970s and 1980s)

The article presents Eastern Central European societies’ transnational strategies of dealing with the domestic «Economics of Shortage» which developed during the 1970s and 1980s. In this context, special emphasis is given to the People's Republic of Poland. East Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians have crossed the borders into neighboring states since the mid 1950s, but only the 1970s brought a radical quantitative as well as qualitative change. The unofficial «Tourism Trade» evolved into arguably the most used platform for multilateral, transnational communication. The number of participants in this «informal exchange» multiplied due to the liberalization of passport and visa regulations. At least for some participants, geographical horizons and goals likewise changed; they often shifted to the professionally organized increase of profits. During the 1970s, the groundwork was laid for the even less controlled development of the next decade: As the long obvious economic crisis in Poland gradually spread to the ČSSR, the GDR, and Hungary, the unofficial, usually illegal, trade reached its peak. Drawn from this perspective, the year 1989 marks the nearly natural end of a development which undermined and thwarted the norms of state socialism from the very start.