This chapter looks at public attitudes towards an ‘open economy’ – where producers and consumers are exposed to freely operating world markets externally, and to a freely operating domestic market internally. In principle it might be possible to have one without the other. Communist regimes did engage in external trade with each other and with a wider world market though they attempted (not entirely successfully) to suppress domestic markets. Conversely, it would be possible to conceive a regime with an entirely free market internally, yet sealed off from the world economy – some remote Himalayan kingdom, an idealised Chinese or British Empire founded upon ‘imperial preference’, or a more inward-looking European Union. Some of our Czech focus group participants looked to European Union (EU) accession as a means of insulating themselves from the world market as much as integrating into a pan-European market. But the much debated ‘Washington Consensus’ (Teunissen and Akkerman 2004) was based on the ideal of a seamless market, independent of political boundaries. Thus the Fraser Institute's (2004) Economic Freedom of the World rankings, for example, are based on indicators of both an external and an internal market. Though a country may score higher on one than the other, both are regarded as essential components of a truly ‘free market’.

Like outside observers, most of the public in our countries could distinguish between the internal and external components of an open market economy, however.