Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Article Commentary: Slovakia: From Stagnation to Prosperity

2008; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s12290-008-0036-8

1865-5831

Mikuláš Dzurinda,

Russia and Soviet political economy

In 2005 Tony Blair, then, Prime Minister, was trying to justify the need for a so-called globalisation fund in the European Parliament. Rover, the car manufacturer, had gone bankrupt and Blair said that the people who lost their jobs needed to be helped. And that is why—in Blair’s opinion—we needed to establish a new fund in the EU: the Globalisation Fund. Reading these words, I felt sadness. A film flashed before my eyes, the Slovak story of the years from the Velvet Revolution in 1989 to our independence. My childhood and two-thirds of my adult life were lived under a system called socialism. Nevertheless, faith and responsibility dominated the education that was given to me by my family, as well as something called common sense. Later, all this helped me understand and fully accept what Friedrich Hayek described with facts and scientific terms. My upbringing has also helped me to believe in the power of democracy, personality, action and diligence as the basis of hope and prosperity for nations and people at large. The road Slovakia took after the 1989 Velvet Revolution was very difficult but also very meaningful. Until only 15 years ago, we manufactured tanks and weapons for the whole Warsaw Pact: we did not manufacture any passenger cars. Today we no longer manufacture tanks, but we manufacture almost one million passenger cars a year. German, French and Korean cars have replaced Russian weapons. And thousands of Slovak smalland medium-sized enterprises have emerged. So essential changes have taken place in Slovakia. And there was no European globalisation fund. We had to help ourselves even though the unemployment rate in certain regions reached 30%. This shows how much Slovakia has changed. The road Slovakia took during the period of transformation was neither smooth nor direct. There were times of hesitation as well as times of failure.