130 Years of Catching Up with the West

A Comparative Perspective on Hungarian Science and Technology Policy-making Since Industrialization

Peter Biegelbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138634527
• eBook ISBN: 9781351793582
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: Issues such as globalization and the fight against joblessness as well as the growth dynamics of economies in general have been linked with science and technology. Accordingly, the growing public interest in the effects of science and technology on society and politics and vice versa have been the foremost reason for the creation of this study. One of the central questions for politicians as well as for scholars in the field of science and technology is, "How can I influence a given science and technology system in a way so as to achieve optimal outcomes for a given national economy?". The study at hand tries to answer this question by analyzing the Hungarian research sphere from industrialization until the late-20th century. Since the beginning of industrialization, Hungary has made a number of attempts to catch up with the economically more developed Western European countries. The problems encountered in the course of the Hungarian efforts are surprisingly similar to the difficulties that modern, fully industrialized economies are facing today.

1 Introduction

One way to understand and to learn from the past is by viewing history as a series of innovations, which were introduced to all societies with varying levels of success. Indeed, one might measure the pace of a society’s evolution by analyzing the number and nature of successfully introduced innovations. And in fact, such an understanding of history is often implicitly employed by historians of science and technology even if they are not always explicit about their normative basis of assumptions.

One example is 15^th century Ming dynasty China, a society which seriously restrained its technological capabilities in an important area, when it, abandoned deep sea shipbuilding technologies for internal reasons (Pacey 1990). Of course, at the same time China made important contributions in other fields, as for example in that of philosophical thought. However, it seems that these advances did not strengthen the country’s scientific, technological and economic capacities, which indeed stagnated or declined for a long period of time. This economic and technological stand-still made isolationist China more vulnerable to other peoples, specifically the Europeans, who at this time began to systematically explore the world and whose subsequent colonial activities proved to be as disastrous for Asia as for other parts of the world.

Contrary to this, an example for the successful introduction of innovations to a society, is 18^th century England, in which individual entrepreneurship, competition and the development of what could be called a ‘civil society’ of people less dependent on the church and on the state, enhanced the possibility of introducing innovations at an up to then unprecedented speed (Rosenberg/Birdzell 1986). Of course, at the same time a social phenomenon occurred, which was unprecedented in its dexterity, too: the pauperization of a large part of society and the creation of the industrial proletariat (Polanyi 1944). Yet, as severe as these social developments were, they did not prevent England from becoming the first global hegemon for most of the 19th and the first part of the 20^th century.

Following from this, ‘history’ should not be understood as a solid concept, but rather as consisting of a plurality of ‘histories’, which are defined by the specific nature of the unit of analysis. If the history of technology of China or England is analyzed, it will allow for a very different perspective of the past, than the social or economic history of the respective countries. What makes the situation complicated is that these different histories are interlinked with each other to varying degrees, depending on the circumstances of specific time periods. Without the successful introduction of the steam engine in England, the industrial revolution might not have been all that revolutionary, but might have taken a much slower and evolutionary path. In this case of the steam engine a technological innovation had a strong impact on the economy of a country, which entailed a multitude of often quite indirect effects ranging from the rising political power of the country to the declining social situation of the factory workers. Therefore, an incident, which might be of importance for ‘technological history’ might have effects on ‘economic history’, ‘political history’ and ‘social history’.

Such observations have led to the hypothesis that technological change might drive history (Heilbronner 1967). Others have rightly pointed out that technological innovations themselves might be contingent on social factors, or indeed, social innovations. This in turn has led to the hypothesis that society in fact influences, or even shapes, technological change¹ (Williams 1994). Coming back to the example of the steam engine, Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986) identify a number of social factors responsible for the success of Europe in comparison to other regions of the world, amongst which we find the diminishing of the church’s influence on political decisions and the fact that the European states were in competition to each other politically, economically and technologically. Following this logic, the successful introduction of the steam engine might have been possible only because a number of social innovations had occurred before, such as the strengthening of civil society and the individual entrepreneur. The role of the entrepreneur was of central importance here, since he was forced to take risks and invest into new technologies to enlarge his profit margin because of the rising level of competition in late 18^th century England.

From these statements it can be inferred that it is actually quite difficult to establish clear causal relationships between various ‘histories’ and between various innovations. One might even surmise that the question as to whether technological change drives history or whether society shapes technologies is irrelevant, because of the interlinked nature of both processes. This suspicion is nourished by the observation that not only the concept of ‘history’ needs a number of qualifications, but that the notion of ‘innovations’ similarly incorporates a number of facets, which should be differentiated.

If we are interested in learning about history and from history and we accept that history can be viewed as a series of innovations, we have to specify the nature of innovations in more detail. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to specify innovations, as they appear in different forms, sizes and kinds. These innovations might take the forms of new products, such as the wheel, the automobile or the computer, new processes, such as the introduction of bronze, the hot-bed molding of iron or the numerically controlled workbench and new organizational set-ups, such as the creation of the nation state, the manufacture or corporate alliances. The innovations might come in different sizes, as major, radical innovations, such as the radio and the Internet, and minor, incremental innovations, such as the adaptation of a 220 Volt powered German machine tool to the United States’ 120 Volt electrical power sources or the production of tyres with longer life cycles due to a different mixture of largely the same chemical components already used before. The innovations may also come in various kinds, being generated in a number of areas as different as the political sphere, where new voting systems might be recognized as more democratic, or the social sphere, where new forms of formerly societally unrecognized work may reduce unemployment rates, or the economic sphere, where environmentally sound production processes may lead to sustainable forms of development, to name only a few examples.

Having understood the spectrum of existing forms of innovation, it soon becomes clear that the causal relationship is not fixed; neither between the different kinds of innovations, in the sense of technological, social or political, nor between different forms of innovations, in the sense of product or process, radical or incremental. On the one hand, the industrial revolution was not only an effect of a number of product and process innovations such as the steam engine and new weaving and dyeing techniques; it was also preceded by a societal reorganization in the 18th century freeing a part of the labor force from slavery in the agricultural sector (Polanyi 1944). On the other hand, the ongoing computerization of the OECD countries starting in the 1970s, which has been changing the organizational structure of all highly industrialized societies decisively, was preceded by the invention, development and dissemination of a bundle of microelectronics technologies (Bell 1973).

If the current effort is to learn about history and from history, even in perhaps quite a limited way, a serious analysis of the interrelationship between the different forms of innovations cannot be simplistic. In fact, it shall be argued here that the respective contingencies of historical development are as complicated as they are badly understood. Taking into account the level of complexity of the subject, it seems hardly feasible to create an empirically based analysis of the intertwined relationship of the political, social, cultural, economic, scientific and technological innovations in histories of industrialized societies by addressing all these different areas at once. Therefore, this study shall focus on the interaction of political, economic, scientific and technological innovations in the area of Central Europe from the time of this region’s industrialization in the 1860s until the end of the 20^th century. More specifically, this book is about the interdependency between the political sphere and the areas of science and technology (S&T) as well as, on a more general level, the economy in Hungary in comparison to other Central European countries particularly Austria and Germany, from the 1860s to the 1990s.

On another, more reflexive, level of analysis not only will the understanding of the complex relationship between the different kinds and forms of innovations, but also the coming to an insight as to how people in different time periods understood the afore mentioned complex relationship shall be at the focus of interest. Limiting the task to a more concrete assignment, the gradual development of people’s ideas about technological change and their ideas on how to govern the processes of change will be analyzed, taking the Hungarian experiences as the example for a comparative perspective from the 1860s to the 1990s.

The analysis of people’s notions of technological change and their perspectives on questions of governance of this process is highly significant insofar as it should give us deeper insights into the way people perceive history (or single ‘histories’ in the sense of technological or economic history) and into the possibilities of influencing historical processes in order to understand our own inefficiencies in thinking about these questions. A better comprehension of these problems is indeed important for the theoretical understanding of the linkages between societal development and technological change, but also simply for the practical reason of actual policy-development in the areas of economic, science and technology policies.

The systematic study of the impact of ideas and notions about the functioning of the world in general (or about more specific problems such as the processes of technological change) on the development and delivery of policies has been rather neglected up to now. More generally, it can be stated that the interest in the effect which ideas have on the behavior of decision-makers is commonplace in some social science disciplines – the work of Thomas Kuhn and others (Kuhn 1970, Cohen 1985) on the sociology of science comes into mind – while this appears to be less the case for others, as for example political science and economics.

In fact, in these two latter disciplines ideas’ effects on the behavior of actors have so far only been studied rather implicitly. One example from political science is the concept of political culture (Almond/Verba 1963), which analyzes the impact of these norms, values and daily routines, which are generally perceived as being part of a specific ‘culture’, on the set-up of political entities, called polities, and on politics as such. Yet, although norms and values are amongst the basic ingredients for ideas and notions about the functioning of a particular facet of life, the two concepts are not equivalent. In fact, one of the most visible differences between basic norms and values and more complex ideas and notions is that the former tend to resist change and evolve very slowly, whereas the latter have life-cycles of sometimes only two decades.

Another example is the economic approach to human behavior (Becker 1976), which operates on the basis of the assumption that all human beings act rationally, that their preferences do not change substantially over time and that markets, which are defined very broadly here (the economic stock market as well as the social marriage ‘market’), tend to move towards equilibria. With these assumptions in mind, the approach aims at an explanation of human behavior as ‘the allocation of scarce means to satisfy competing ends’ (Becker 1976, p.3). While norms and values can enter the model via the concept of preferences, more complex categories such as ideas and notions are of no explicit interest for social scientists using this approach.

Of course Becker’s work has a number of forerunners. In a long-ongoing effort political philosophers like for example 16th century Niccolò Macchiavelli in his ‘Il Principe’, have interpreted single policies and, more broadly, politics as such as a process with the ultimate goal of obtaining power. Political scientists and economists in the tradition of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, the historical materialism of Karl Marx or the historicist statism of Friedrich List have learned to analyze policies and politics as a process with the goal of maximizing an individual’s, a class’s or a nation’s utility, be it in the form of money or power, but also truth or other categories.

Besides these analyses of the question as to for what reason and to which end individuals or groups want to enter politics or economics, the question as to how they actually engage into politics and the economy is relatively well understood, too. These aspects are covered by research into the processes of policy-development and policy-delivery as well as other forms of governance, such as the development of management strategies and the actual delivery of the same. Examples for successful research along these lines are quite diverse, as may be demonstrated taking the example of the analysis of political interest formation, which has been described by liberal group theory (Truman 1971), by literature on neocorporatism (Schmitter 1979), by the new political economists (Downs 1957) and by others.

A topic which has not been given much thought until now is the way decision-makers’ inherent ideas or concepts influence the policies they devise. A study of this topic includes the analysis of the cognitive background of the decision-finding and -making processes, which was described and analyzed by economists and political scientists from a number of traditions, including the ones cited in the previous paragraph. Existing research, however, tends to exclude the very ideas and notions which form the framework through which the decision-makers interpret the problems they face and subsequently structure their problem-solution strategies.

This said, it is important to mention a small strand of literature in political economy and international relations, which has been growing throughout the 1990s. In both subfields several books have been published, which are part of neo-institutionalism in both its historic (Hall 1993) and rationalist (Goldstein/Keohane 1993) variants (compare with Jacobsen 1995 and Blyth 1997). Moreover, in Germany Hofmann (1993) and Braun (1997) have analyzed the roles of ideas with regards to the steering problems modern states face in societies of growing complexity.

Most of these studies use ideas only as additional or intervening variables for explanations of policy development (Blyth 1997). The work of Peter Hall (1986, 1989, 1993) forms an exception; for Hall, the importance of the ‘ideational’ (sic!) factor seems to grow over the years: in his earlier work, he deems ideas to attain importance primarily through their inclusion in institutions (1986, pp.278), later, ideas are understood as of considerable importance on their own right (1993, p.289).

For the sake of clarifying what is at stake, one might say in somewhat simplifying terms that political science and economics have obtained quite a clear vision of the ‘know-why’ and of the ‘know-how’, but much less of the ‘know-what’ of the political and economic processes. In other words, the reasoning behind the entrance of individuals and groups into politics and the economy as well as the governance of the two areas are wellunderstood, but the cognitive basis upon which individuals and groups in politics and the economy form their decisions, leading to policies, management strategies and the like are barely understood.

It seems to be the case that decision-makers, at least in specific policy-fields and time-periods, have a widely-shared understanding of the general mechanisms behind the problems they face. This general understanding, which is based on the repeatedly mentioned ideas and notions underlying policies, can take the form of paradigmatic notions and shall therefore be called ‘policy paradigms’ here.² These policy paradigms are not equivalent to, and may even be independent of, ideologies or ‘Weltanschauungen’.

Policy paradigms are cognitive frameworks common to a number – indeed, most of the time to the overwhelming majority – of policy-makers in a specific time-period and policy-field. They consist of the general understanding of the key process(es) in the center of interest of a specific policy-field, such as the process of technological change in S&T policy or the main mechanisms behind economic cycles of boom and bust in macroeconomic policy-making. Moreover, they consist of the broadly defined goals of policies in this area and entail an equally broad understanding of the set of policy-instruments decision-makers have at their hands to tackle the problems of a field of public policy. In a sense the policy paradigms even enable policy-makers to develop policies as they create an intersubjective view of specific problem areas between groups of decisionmakers and therefore form a basis for discussions.

The term ‘policy pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Background
• 3 The Foundations: Establishing a National Science and Technology System
• 4 The First Transition: The Implementation of the Soviet S&T System
• 5 The Second Transition: The New Economic Mechanism
• 6 The Third Transition: The Return to Capitalism
• 7 Presence and Future: Hungary and the other CEECs
• 8 Learning From the Past for the Future
• Annex
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index