ABSTRACT
Do these disturbances represent a serious threat to the competition state? In the light of the arguments presented in this book, we can be confident that this is rather unlikely. I have shown that the externally oriented project has solid social and political bases in CEE states and beyond. Indeed, in contrast to the early nineties, nationalism has not provided a major blow to the project of the competition state. Thus, Prime Minister Kaczynski’s rhetoric was not translated into economic policy, and he was voted out of office at the end of 2007. The purge at CzechInvest did not lead to an abandonment or significant change in the externally oriented strategy;
the clean-up was essentially about gaining political control over an important component of the state apparatus.5 The investors seem to know this. The business press wonders about the new opportunities of profit extraction based on ‘brainpower in the service industries, rather than cheap, nimble fingers in manufacturing’.6
