Paradiplomacy in Hungary – A new research topic?
Zsuzsanna Zsibók – Balázs Brucker
The significance of city diplomacy started to increase after the end of World War II, and the main features of city cooperation also constantly changed throughout the post-war decades. Despite its growing importance, sub-national diplomacy has attracted less attention from the social sciences (political science, regional studies, international studies, social geography), and the subject has managed to preserve its position, however peripheral, within the framework of research and theories relevant for the analysis of international relations. Studies on sub-national diplomacy emerged in the Anglo-Saxon literature as early as the 1970s and 1980s and from the mid-1980s, the focus has shifted to the investigation of the international weight and relations of Western European regions. Research on paradiplomacy is supported by an extensive body of international literature. However, the question arises: what contributions have Hungarian scholars made regarding the international activities of Hungarian subnational actors and what literature is available on subnational diplomacy in Hungarian language?
In Hungary, the international activity for local and regional governments became of paramount importance only after the fall of the Iron Curtain and its subsequent access to the European Union. Subnational diplomatic relations were initially limited to bilateral (twinning) relations, but as Hungary’s accession to the EU approached, multilateral relations, namely the participation of Hungarian subnational actors in international networks, and then, after EU accession, the interaction between Hungarian municipalities and EU institutions came to the fore. These processes did not attract the attention of Hungarian researchers, or only to a limited extent. On the one hand, research on local and regional governments in Hungary focused primarily on the legal frameworks for the operation of domestic local and regional governments, the issues of centralisation and decentralisation, the legal and financial autonomy of local governments, and – especially after 2010 – the relationship between local governments and central government. Research on international studies, on the other hand, has mainly focused on the state as the main actor of international relations, and ignored the issue of the international activity of local and regional governments.
The vast majority of studies related to the international activities of domestic subnational actors deal only with bilateral twinning relations, while the issue of the relationship of local and regional governments with international (especially EU) institutions and their participation in international/European self-government’s networks did not attract the attention of Hungarian researchers.
A four-year research project launched in January 2024 at the ELTE CERS Institute for Regional Studies, the first comprehensive research in Hungary on subnational diplomacy, aims to fill this gap. In the year since the launch of the project, based on the results of our empirical research (questionnaires, interviews), several manuscripts in Hungarian and English have been elaborated on the mapping of Hungarian twinnings, on the geopolitical aspects of sister city relations, on cross-border cooperation, on the special relationship between the European Union and subnational actors, as well as on international networks of local and regional governments. These articles, after publication, will contribute to the expansion of the Hungarian literature on paradiplomacy and the English-language writings will also enable foreign researchers to get acquainted with the results of paradiplomatic research in Hungary.
Brucker Balázs, Zsibók Zsuzsanna: Paradiplomacy in Hungary: a New Research Topic? In: The paradiplomacy worldwide. TIP – Trabajos de Investigación en Paradiplomacia” (year 1). University of Lodz; Asociación Civil Paradiplomacia, Lódz, Buenos Aires, pp. 126-143
