Josef Zieleniec was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in July 1992 by the Czech National Council, i.e. the Czech Parliament, after the June elections. He was given a mandate to create the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, and on January 1, 1993 was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.

Josef Zieleniec was a co-founder of the civic Democratic Party (ODS) and a member of its Executive Committee. He was elected its Deputy Chairman in November 1991 and reelected in November 1992.

Josef Zieleniec was one of the main authors of the ODS party platform, especially of the economic and foreign policy chapters of the programme.

Until 1990, he was not a member of any political party, having spent most of his life as an academic.

Born in 1946, Josef Zieleniec graduated from the School of Nuclear Technology in Prague in 1966, and from the Prague School of Economics specializing in industrial economics in 1974.

In 1973, he began to work at the Research Institute of Machinery Technology and Economics, where he specialized in mathematical methods in economics.

In 1986, he defended his thesis in microeconomics and began to work at the Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. There he initiated a seminar which greatly influenced the opinion of Czechoslovak economists on the process of transformation from a centrally planned to a free market economy. Within the framework of this seminar, he prepared the study "Czechoslovakia at the Crossroads", which influenced the post-November discussions on the economic reform.

In January 1990, Josef Zieleniec founded, and became director of, the Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) at Charles University, the first Western-style PhD-level economics institution in Czechoslovakia, which he headed until he became Minister. In 1991, he was appointed to the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and became an associate professor of economics.

Josef Zieleniec is married.