Leírás

Last year marked eighty years since the Charter of the United Nations (UN) was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, and seventy years since Hungary joined the world organisation on 14 December 1955. However, these milestone anniversaries received little media coverage. This may be due to the fact that both international and Hungarian public opinion has only fragmentary knowledge of the UN’s global institutional system, whose norm-setting, regulatory, and supervisory activities affect almost all areas of human society, from food and healthcare to culture and nuclear safety.

To conduct a detailed and thorough examination of the relations between Hungary and the UN that takes into account the vast amount of collected but yet unexplored source material, as well as the breadth and complexity of the topic, we decided to establish a research group. This was formed on 2 July 2024 within the framework of the Institute of History at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities. In order to achieve this goal, a cooperation agreement was signed on 24 October 2024 between the Research Centre for the Humanities  and the HUN-REN Research Centre for Social Sciences. (Since 1 August 2025, the former institution has been named the ELTE Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, and the latter the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences.)

The planned publications seek to address two main questions. On the one hand, they examine the effects of the UN institutional system and decisions in Hungary in specific research areas (agriculture, health, culture, etc.). On the other hand, the authors examine how Hungary – the Hungarian government and its subsystems – has influenced decisions within the world organisation.