Authors

Tomáš Nigrin¹; Mojmír Stránský²;  ¹ Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Czechia;  ² Research Center for the History of Transformations, UNiversity of Vienna, Austria

Discussion

The beginning of the Cold War transformed Vienna into a center of East-West relations and Berlin, thanks to the diplomatic military missions of the Allied Control Commission in Germany, became the center for military-diplomatic communication and reconnaissance. In this context, Czechoslovakia continued its pre-war tradition of arms production and export, also benefiting from a partially strengthened military-industrial complex from the Second World War. Due to the nature of the business, diplomatic missions played an important role in the arms trade during the Cold War, whether officially or unofficially. This article focuses on two cases of Czechoslovak diplomatic representation – in Vienna and with the Allied control commission in Germany.
The aim is to show what role these places, the Czechoslovak diplomatic missions, played in Czechoslovak arms exports – especially with regard to the intensity and direction of contacts with different parts of the world or by focusing on trade in a particular type of military production. Were they symbolic places due to their location or architectural design, or did they fulfil other political functions? And so this paper will also examine the extent to which Berlin and Vienna can be described as a ‘fiscal-military centers’ of the Cold War.