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WHEN HUNGARY’S Prime Minister Jozsef Antal addressed the Annual General
Meeting of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in May, he spoke warmly of
his government’s commitment to science. Yet only a few days previously,
when he announced his new, coalition cabinet, there had been a notable omission:
no minister had been named with specific responsibility for science.

The Hungarian scientific community was not entirely surprised. The election
had been fought entirely on the issue of the economy, and even the pressing
environmental issues which had played such a large role in the protest movements
of the previous five years attracted little electoral support.

Antal’s post-election message to the Hungarian people is the Churchillian
‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, with no indication of when the Hungarians
can expect to ‘win the peace’. And as the incoming Minister of Education
Bertalan Andrasfolvy told New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ the day before his appointment was
confirmed, ‘We had inherited our budgets from the previous regime, and that
regime set the 1990 allocations at the same level as 1989, without allowing
for inflation. As far as education is concerned we have only enough to last
us till October.’

Since 1982, when the country’s economic problems began to develop into
a crisis, the relationship between scientists and the government has been
soured by cut-backs in promised funding, derisory salary increases, and
poor housing and social services, particularly for young graduates.

During the second half of the 1980s, the growing anger of scientists
and academics – particularly those of the younger generation – took a number
of forms. Some turned to institutionalised dissent, for example by participating
in discussion groups, running an underground press, or leading protests
against the projected damming and diversion of the Danube. Others tried
to change the system from within. Thus in 1987, for example, the Communist
Youth League of the University of Szeged called for cuts in defence spending
to release more funds for young researchers.

Significantly, when an independent trade union movement sprang up in
Hungary in 1988, it was the scientists and academics who first organised
themselves as the Democratic Trade Union of Academic Workers (TuDDoSz).
But, as the decade wore on, most ambitious scientists saw their only solution
as working outside Hungary.

Some have been lucky enough to have helpful colleagues abroad, and have
managed to arrange extensive visits to foreign laboratories, where they
often put in long hours of experiments on equipment which they could never
dream of having access to in their own laboratories. Although occupying
full-time positions in Hungarian universities and research institutions,
many of these return to Hungary only to publish their results.

Many others have chosen emigration – if not for life, at least for the
foreseeable future. By the beginning of this year, Hungarian scientists
were leaving the country permanently at a rate of over seven a day – enough,
if the trend continued, and allowing for natural wastage, to reduce the
country’s scientific workforce to zero by the end of the current decade.

The new, multiparty democracy offers little immediate hope to science.
‘Before the election, we invited many people from various parties, and they
were honest enough to tell us that at this stage they had no science policy,’
says Karoly Szego, deputy director of the Physics Institute of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences.

In a country where major decisions on science policy have been settled,
as Szego puts it, ‘somewhere in the party’, it may take some time to adjust
to more open decision-making procedures. The scientists, like all Hungarian
citizens, learnt to survive the rigours of central planning by developing
a network of contacts, and discovering which minister or party officials
were sympathetic to their needs. But now, as Szego says, ‘the old ‘old boy’
network has gone, and the ‘new boy network’ came to politics mostly from
the humanities’.

At this stage, says Szego, it is not so important to decide the long-term
future structure of science funding, as to let current arrangements continue
for the time being. ‘Government funding is now seen as a contract,’ he explained
in May. ‘Cancellation would make a very bad impression on people, and have
only a little effect on the economy.’

Szego’s hopes, however, appear to have been misplaced. Shortly after
he expressed the above opinions, the new government announced a cut of 2000
million forint ($30 million) in one of the main channels of government funding
– the Central Development Fund.

Under these circumstances, Hungarian scientists are putting an increasing
amount of hope in international cooperation projects. They stress that international
collaboration is not meant merely as a stopgap measure, but can be seen
as the re-establishment of a tradition which has a long history.

For two thousand years, the land which is now Hungary has been at the
crossroads of civilisations and cultures. The Roman frontier ran along the
Danube; indeed, excavations for the ill-starred Nagymaros hydroelectric
scheme revealed a unique chain of Roman frontier posts. And the city of
Debrecen grew up at the crossing point of the East-West caravan route and
the Baltic-Adriatic ‘amber road’.

Only the events of the past 45 years, the Hungarians say, have deprived
them, psychologically if not geographically, of their central status – and
even then, Hungary has been the most Western-oriented of the Warsaw Pact
nations. In strengthening their international links, Hungarian scientists
are simply resuming their nation’s historical role.

Certainly, they are not losing any time. In a single week in May the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences filed an application to join CERN, the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics, signed letters of intent with the European
Space Agency, and co-hosted a ‘Trilateral Forum’ (US-USSR-Hungary) on scientific
cooperation and information exchange.

The signing with CERN, in particular, was considered by Ivan T. Berend,
the outgoing president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as, ‘a real
step forward, a real breakthrough’. The application, explains Gyoergy Marx,
head of the Department of Nuclear Physics at Budapest’s Eoetvoes Lorand
University, was essentially a confirmation of existing cooperation agreements,
but the forthcoming change of status (Hungary hopes to be a full member
of CERN by the end of the year) was ‘a fact of considerable significance’,
since ‘ethically, mentally and morally, Hungary is a member of the European
³ó´Ç³Ü²õ±ð’.

Joining CERN, however, will not mean withdrawing from its Comecon analogue,
the Dubna Joint Institute of Nuclear Research – indeed, Dubna now has a
new Hungarian director general, Dezsoe Kis. The kind of cooperation ‘which
politicians speak and dream about, in physics we have already as a reality.
It is working, it is working fine’, says Professor Marx.

Until now CERN has been a Western-bloc institution – this was one of
the conditions imposed by various Western nations, including Britain and
the US, when it was set up in the early 1950s. Furthermore, Eastern-bloc
visitors to the laboratory have suffered constraints imposed by the Paris-based
Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), as a result
of which, certain state-of-the-art technology has been barred to them.

This difficulty seems likely to be overcome soon. Following Hungary’s
complaint that Hungarian scientists cannot participate fully in scientific
exchanges without state-of-the-art technology, negotiations were opened
at the end of June. It is hoped that these will exempt Hungary from the
restrictions, subject to the same kind of end-user agreement that is already
used in arms sales: in particular, Hungarian scientists will undertake not
to sell the technology they acquire through their collaboration with CERN
on to a third party.

But if Hungary is to re-establish its ties with the West, it must have
the language and educational framework to do so. The good old days, when
every educated Hungarian spoke German and at least one other Western language,
are only a distant memory. Forty-five years of compulsory Russian courses
have produced only a handful of Russian-speaking professionals – and last
year, the practice was abandoned as no longer being cost-effective.

Throughout Hungary new language schools are springing up. Some, like
the Panorama school in Debrecen, are enterprisingly combining language tuition
with computer skills. But in the state sector, there remain problems. As
Zsuzsa Kurtan, who teaches English at the Chemical Uni versity at Veszprem,
explains, special techniques are needed for teaching science students, particularly
those who come from technical-grammar schools, where there is no language
teaching (other than Russian) at all.

The Chemical University has placed an emphasis on the teaching of English
since 1983, and now aims, during the first three years of university courses,
to bring its students to a standard where, if they so choose, they can use
English as a medium for study during their final two years of study. Budapest’s
Technical University goes even further; it offers full courses in all faculties
taught throughout in English.

According to Geza Gordos, director of the University International Programme,
these courses were originally intended for foreign students only. They were
introduced in 1983 as a means of earning hard currency (the Semmelwiess
Medical University of Budapest introduced similar ‘off-shore’ courses for
Americans at about the same time).

The Technical University courses originally followed the Hungarian,
five-year syllabus, but this, says Gordos, was soon seen to be a mistake.
The students, who included many aspiring businessmen from the Middle East
and South Korea who see Hungary as a suitable base for penetrating both
East and West European markets, wanted courses on the English/American model.

Instead of the five-year Hungarian ‘diploma’ (MSc) course, the Technical
University remodelled its ‘international’ courses into two stages: a four-year
bachelor degree course, followed by a further two years’ masters degree.

But the new courses seemed so attractive to Hungarian students that
they, too, asked to attend. Now, says Gordos, out of the total of 8000 students
at the university, 1050 are taking the ‘international’ courses, of whom
some 250 are Hungarians. One in seven of the students in the Hungarian-taught
courses is studying English.

Under the strict controls of the previous regime, the ‘four plus two’
structure of the international courses remained simply a concession to the
needs of foreigners. But now that the universities have more autonomy, Gordos
says, they are considering changing to a two-stage degree structure generally.

A Western-style degree structure, it is felt, would play an important
psychological role in the reintegration of Hungarian science into Europe.
At a practical level, such a structure would also facilitate exchanges of
young people who, by current Hungarian reckoning, are still undergraduates,
but whose Western equivalents already have first degrees.

Exchanges, and Western support for them, frequently come to the foreground
of discussions of Hungary’s scientific future. The British Council is concentrating
its efforts on retraining redundant teachers of Russian to teach English,
with an emphasis on ‘ESP’ (English for specific purposes), and is cutting
off its support for short-term student visits to Britain.

For scientific visits, young Hungarians place their hopes in the American-based
Soeroes Foundation or the ‘Tempus’ programme – the new EEC initiative to
sponsor exchanges and know-how training for Poland and Hungary. Or they
turn to the self-help system developed by the Budapest-based International
Association of Physics Students (founded in 1986, at a time when its idea
of privately sponsored exchanges seemed utopian). In the meanwhile, they
try to prepare for the outside world in study courses that are often still
hampered by the constraints of the former regime.

Censorship has disappeared, and one thematic dictionary, which previously
ran into trouble for including a section on ‘law and order’, is at last
available to the public. But Kurtan still teaches her chemistry students
from four-year-old copies of New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, since there have been no funds
since then to renew the university’s subscription.