Pinochet in Prague: Authoritarian visions of economic reforms and the State in Eastern Europe,1980-2000

The ‘1989’-inspired liberal enthusiasm about Eastern Europe’s democratisation has led to an overestimation of the efficacy of liberal ideas, and to a blotting-out of decidedly illiberal strands of political thought, in the region both during and after the end of Communist rule. One such strand was a remarkable interest in different aspects of the Chilean transformation from socialism to liberal democracy via authoritarianism across (post-)socialist Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on reform debates from Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, this article argues that this fascination with the military dictator Augusto Pinochet is an indicator for widespread authoritarian visions among various political and intellectual elites during the transition period. For them, Pinochet served as a code and source of inspiration for a non-democratic path to an efficient economy. Before 1989, this path was laid out under the tutelage of a de-ideologised authoritarian Communist Party. After the end of planned economies and through the 1990s, the ‘Chilean model’ was used by anti-communists and liberal economists across the region as a source of legitimacy in their internal struggle against opponents of their reform ideas.