ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disrupting Socialist Science and Technology Diplomacy: Hungarian Technical Universities and the End of the Global Cold War

• In Event: New Histories of Cold War Scientific Exchange

English Abstract

Since the early 1960s, Technical Universities were at the heart of Hungary’s science and technology diplomacy. The significant development of their transnational networks, driven and controlled by the state, pursued three major objectives: strengthening the scientific and technical integration of the socialist bloc; importing technologies, knowledge and know-how from Western countries; and contributing to the internationalist effort of scientific and technical cooperation with the Global South. This policy, consistently implemented for more than two decades, was disrupted from the early 1980s onwards due to several factors: on the one hand, the rapid increase in the professors’ mobility toward the West (which became the majority at the Budapest Technical University in 1984) ; on the other, the commodification of student mobility (with the introduction of fee-paying English-language programs starting in 1983); and finally, from 1987, the introduction of EC programs which reoriented the geography of transnational exchanges of Hungarian universities toward Western European partners. These processes, in which university leaders played an active role, therefore began before 1989, even if the end of the Cold War undoubtedly accelerated them.
How did Hungarian Technical Universities negotiate this reorientation of Hungarian scientific and technological diplomacy? What opportunities did they find in it? What consequences did it have for engineering research priorities? To what extent did it lead not to an opening toward the global scientific arena, but rather to a shift back toward the European, or even regional, space? This study will focus on university actors, particularly leaders, and consider university diplomacy as part of the broader spectrum of scientific and technological diplomacy. It will draw on, among others, little-known archival sources from the universities themselves, and contribute to the study of a subject that has received little attention, including in recent Hungarian historiography.

Author

• Jules Siran, University of Geneva