Structural Policies in the Slovakian Carpathians. State Development Policies and their Social and Ecological Consequences (Post-doc Project)

After 1945 the socialist state intervened in the peripheral Slovakian Carpathian region with its stagnating mining industry and traditional farming and brought about fundamental change through industrial development, structural policies, and the transformation of the agricultural sector, altering the life of the local population and the cultural space they inhabited beyond recognition. This project seeks to examine the concepts and plans on which the development of the mountainous region were based and the consequences of this development for the local population and the environment. It analyses how interventions into cultural space, usage conflicts, and new environmental hazards were negotiated under state socialist conditions. This approach makes it possible to investigate the relationship of the centre to the periphery in the specific Czechoslovakian context and to establish the extent to which there was an awareness of landscape and an ecological consciousness under socialism. On a more general level the project is concerned with the question of whether similar development paths were taken in other European countries in the second half of the twentieth century, or whether differences predominate in the development of natural and cultural spaces in East and West.

Dr. Martin Zückert