The Fifth Column of Technocratic Socialism?: How Environmental Expertise Got Out of Hand in State Socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s

• In Event: Experts as Agents of Liberation?: Expert Cultures and Transnational Knowledge Networks in the Cold War Era I

Abstract

Environmental criticism was part of state propaganda in the 1950s. But it gradually came into conflict with official state policy. Although they remained faithful to modernist technocratic concepts, the ambitions of representatives of the institutionalized national environmental bureaucracy increasingly ran up against the limits of state socialist governance. Gradually, they became the voice of the political opposition without aspiring to this role. This paper examines specific professionals operating across national boundaries (active in international organizations) and explores how and why they found themselves in opposition and to what extent they embraced such a status.

Author

• Jiří Janáč, Institute of Contemporary History CAS (Czech Republic)