The paper focuses on the era after the democratic revolution of 1989, analysing the political agents' expectations about the nature of the future economic system. Describing the case of Czech-American economist Jaroslav Vanek and others, it shows that the contemporary debates included ambitious projects, which aimed at making Czechoslovakia a pioneer of new social orders, usually inspired by the ideas of so-called economic democracy. In conclusion, the paper compares these concepts with the actual development of the East European countries in the following decades, as it has been described in the conteporary researches.