‘NATIONAL ECONOMY-BUILDING’ IN ALB, CS and GEO in the 1920s

This unique comparative, conceptual historical research seeks to capture the early attempts at making viable national economies in the small nation-states of Albania, Czechoslovakia and Georgia during the first years/decade of their statehoods in the early 20th century. Respective historiographies have contextualized, as individual cases, the main concerns and efforts apropos the difficult processes of making the respective states and nations, i.e., state-building and nation-building, since the end of War World One. But minimal efforts have been put onto underscoring what does it mean having a viable economic life in the early 1920s, thus embarking upon a national economy-building process, by studying both its internal and external contexts and past imperial legacies, including visions for its future and connecting these three processes. This perspective, which has not received attention in the cases of Albania and Georgia yet that focuses on tensions between national state power and private (local/international) economic interests through ideas, projects/policies on money, capital, labour and land is crucial for understanding the nature of small nation-states economies and for offering a historically-informed theoretical contribution to contemporary scholarly and political discourses on economic nationalism and especially to the scholarship of historical political economy of small states. What renders this three-paired comparison of contrasts valid are the similarities and differences inhistoricalcircumstance: as smallnation-states emergingfrom imploded/dismembered empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian) with nonetheless different economic positions and stages of development within and without their respective empires and in conceptual similarity: seeking a viable national/state economy for national welfare and political autonomy articulated as ekonomia nasionale (Albanian), nrodn/sttn hospodrstv (Czechoslovak) and natsionaluri ekonomia (Georgian) informed by overlapping and differing political-economic traditions of thought. Innovatively, this project aims to conceptualisethe makingof respective nationaleconomies as contested ideas/programmes/projects and deeds some already forged in their late imperial period by focusing on efforts to establish a national bank, to industrialise while dealing with organized/ing labour (sociln otzka in the nineteenth-century Bohemian context), to reform agriculture and to set out positions/deals on free trade/protectionism in a post-imperial/international political and economic order. Underpinning this with archival research in several countries while drawing on the interpretative insights of the approaches of Begriffsgeschichte and Speech-Act theory, this one-researcher project makes the hypothesis that viable small national economies require closer interaction between national capital and labour and controlled openness to international economic order.

One of the main scholarly goals of this project was to investigate, comparatively, what it took for the newly emerging and relatively small nation-states of Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Georgia - after the end of the Great War - to build viable national economies within the new international political and economic order of the 1920s. The three cases were compared on the criteria of being established as states at around similar timeframe and similarly being small in relation to the former imperial centres and some their neighbouring countries, while carrying on and building on differing legacies of economic discourses and experiencing differing stages of economic (under)development. The project, applying not only a comparative but also a conceptual history approaches - reconstructing ideas, plans and policies regarding money, trade, industry, labour and agriculture - hypothesized that for smaller national economies (smaller meaning vulnerable), their viability (meaning surviving and potentially thriving) as such entailed pursuing ideas and policies that lead to closer cooperation between national capital and labour. The project found - in the main manuscript retitled, Open But Not Dependent: National Economy-Building in Georgia, Albania and Czechoslovakia after the Great War (to be published with Routledge) - that while discursively this hypothesis was evidenced for the three cases, in policy terms, with Czechoslovakia being more advanced, such hypothesis translated into implementation of 'social policies' that reduced the tensions between national capital and labour especially for most of the decade of the 1920s. Furthermore, being smaller national economies in relations larger neighbouring economies and in entering and becoming part of a post-war international economic order of the early 1920s, the economic ideas, discourses and policies on money/capital, industry, labour, trade and land put forward key thinkers and political figures - hence the concept of national economy-building - while containing both national liberal/social and national protectionist impulses, were more attuned to open and liberal inclinations.