‘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.

No additional funding sources recorded.