ABSTRACT
The main objective of this book has been to provide a new analysis of ‘competition’ as it manifested itself under state socialism. We have analysed a variety of case studies with a relatively wide scope in relation to the spatial and temporal context. The countries under review displayed, to some extent, a remarkable divergence in their societal development under the semi-conformist state socialist structure. Hence, using a simplified category, we could argue that there were ideologically more orthodox and also more liberal states represented in our investigations. Naturally, we also acknowledge that the phases and amount of political rigidity in relation to governance and Eastern bloc loyalties fluctuated over time in each country. In addition, these reformist/ orthodox phases varied horizontally from country to country at any moment in time, and this has provided an interesting challenge in our comparisons. Furthermore, all these countries had different attitudes towards the West and, thus, the quality and quantity of their Western connections changed over time as well. The unquestionable advantage of this project, however, has been that it has covered several decades in its time span, and this has helped us to pinpoint similarities in somewhat divergent long-term processes. This was particularly important in the elaboration of our key concept: competition.
