This thesis analyzes the state support of the cultural and creative industries in selected post-communist countries, now the Visegrad Group. The first part is devoted to the impact of the totalitarian regime on culture and cultural policy, economic transformation and current economic situation of individual countries with emphasis on chracteristics of the cultural and creative industries concept. The main part of the thesis deals with the issues of culture policy perspective of each state including the opportunities available under EU funds. The final section presents the summary of a comparative analysis along with pros and cons of the models in all countries.

The presented dissertation focuses on the large-scale privatization in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990's, on how it was pushed through and why. It analyses the political conflicts over its eventual form and means of realization, and reconstructs the contemporary expectations concerning the future development. It also pays attention to the roots of the 1990's conflicts in the relevant economic disputes of the previous decades. The dissertation identifies an establishment of a new type of liberal political language as a key moment for the implementation of a large-scale privatization. For the new political language, which can be labelled as "market without adjectives" (or "attributes"), the privatization was a flagship policy and it encompassed its key ideas. The language of market without adjectives was defined in a strong opposition to the principles of the so-called "economic democracy", which had been popular among the members of the Czechoslovak dissent, the numerous supporters of workers' self- governing bodies and some economic experts. The attempts to implement the principles of market without adjectives occurred during several political conflicts the dissertation tries to analyse. The delimitation of space for democratic decision making was one of them, with the liberal economists arguing...