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The study discusses the changes of governmental intelligence services after the birth of the Austro-Hungarian constitutional dualist monarchy following the Compromise of 1867. When the Empire's Police Ministry ceased to operate, the task of protecting law and order was passed on to two national governments -- that of Hungary and Austria -- but majority of its special competence was reassigned to the new common Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This means that the supervision over activities involving both national policy and international intelligence was integrated in the hand of one institution, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and this unit was named "informationsburo" in 1872. as head of this newly established state security unit at the ministry, Joseph Prottmann von Ostenegg was appointed. The police officer with wide first-hand experience from Hungary took over and reemployed most of the former Hungarian state police informants. This one-sided political interest, however, was less in line with requirements posed by foreign affairs and diplomatic relations of the time, and therefore Prottmann was replaced by a specialized foreign officer in 1871. the president's unit, directly supervised by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, was granted new powers; it supervised all state security activities in the whole of the Monarchy, and controlled the press bureau that managed the disposition funds spent on influencing both national and international written media. The common Minister of Foreign Affairs and Reichskanzler, Friedrich Ferdinand Beust, revealed intelligence information rather haphazardly following the Compromise of 1867; being rather biased towards the Hungarian cabinet. This is plainly illustrated by the fact that he only let the Hungarian cabinet learn about a particular proportion of the disposition funds, a confidential budget estimate allocated to cover intelligence purposes. Despite all this, the Hungarian cabinet's intelligence activities during the premiership of Gyula Andrassy (1867-1871) can be regarded as somewhat rudimentary and impromptu. The new Hungarian parliamentary government had an aversion to obtaining information secretly, mainly because the public opinion still had unpleasant memories of such practice during the former absolutist regime. For this reason, cabinet's methods were restricted to regular information exchange and confidential enquiries when contacting official authorities. This political conviction also played a crucial role when the cabinet set up the Hungarian Government's press bureau whose staff was housed at the Prime Minister's Office. Due to the fact that activities were dived between two press bureaus, the one in Vienna and the other one in Buda, Serbian press matters were "influenced" from the disposition funds of the Hungarian PM's Office up until 1875 under the guidance of Austro-Hungarian consul-general Benjamin von Kailay. The Hungarian press bureau started to review Slovak and Romanian papers in 1869 and the reports were forwarded to cabinet bodies and large papers in the capital issued in form of lithographic print. However, the Vienna-based press bureau did not rely on these press reviews until the beginning of 1872, when Gyula Andrassy was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Furthermore, from 1870 onwards, the police department of Hungary's Ministry of the Interior prepared briefings for the Prime Minister on the country's state of affairs based on the information obtained every three months. In the early 1870s, these two reports served as the basis of Hungary's domestic political intelligence. Having been appointed as common minister of foreign affairs, Gyula Andrassy made considerable changes to the ministry's intelligence services. He curbed the importance of the press bureau; its role was to merely inform the PM, while he also limited the extensive subventions given to the national and international press. From the activities of the state security information department, he banished all bad practices they had inherited from the time of absolutism, and also stopped the shadowing of the Hungarian political elite done by the Viennese state police. These changes could be enforced by reallocating the foreign resources available in the budget of 1873; the secret disposition fund was used for diplomatic and military intelligence purposes in areas significant for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire or Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on several papers discussed at a workshop held March 23-25, 2012 at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, titled "Environmental histories of the Visegrad countries: Cold War and the environmental sciences," is presented. Topics include the history of environmental science during the Cold War, the cooperation between scientists in the Soviet Union and Scandinavia, and the development of industrial towns in socialist Hungary.

Romanians and Hungarians have different memories of same historical events and for instance different "truths". Naturally as in most other conflictual events affecting social constructed collectivities they memorialize certain periods and events in a different manner (Irish and English, French andGermans, Poles and Russians, British and Bure, Koreans and Japanese, Serbs and Croatians, Turks and Greeks etc).General Harry Hill Bandholtz'Undiplomatic Diary remained in Hungary one of the most quoted source on the Romanian occupation of Hungary. Unlike General Mãrdãrescu's Memoires, his Diary was not written to be published, since it is very undiplomatic in its considerations about both allied the Romanians and other members of the Entente (in particular, the French and the Italian Representatives). Although idolized and passionate quoted by the Hungarian historiography, Bandholtz-Undiplomatic Diary can be considered however an interesting source for an interpretation of the events from a Romanian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of the Slovak-Hungarian "Little War" are closely connected to the circumstances of Hungary's re-annexation of Sub-Carpathia in March 1939, which took place under the motto of re-establishing a common Hungarian-Polish border. Corps belonging to the Carpathian section of the Hungarian army advanced into Sub-Carpathia and then proceeded to attack Slovak territories. Hungary's official explanation for its occupation of Sub-Carpathia ran as follows: since Slovakia has become an independent state and thus Czechoslovakia no longer exists as a state, the Viennese arbitration is no longer valid. Hungary has won the right to exercise its claim to Sub-Carpathia. The military conflict between Slovakia and Hungary came to an end when Germany intervened and ordered the two parties to conduct bilateral negotiations with a view to reaching an agreement. At the negotiations on March 28, 1939, the parties agreed to end hostilities and to establish a neutral zone between the two armies. They also agreed that Hungarian troops might remain at their occupied positions. On March 28 the Slovak delegation announced claims on Hungarian territory by way of compensation, but the Hungarian government rejected these claims. Germany offered no support to the Slovaks on the border issue; indeed, on April 7 Slovak troops were even required to withdraw from various settlements on the Slovak side of the demarcation line. On April 3, 1939, the German Ambassador to Budapest, Otto von Erdmannsdorff, paid a visit to the Hungarian foreign minister, István Csáky; in the course of their discussions, the two men touched upon the issue of the border established with Slovakia. The Ambassador informed Csáky that the Slovak government had turned to Germany for support, but that it had been told that under the circumstances any attempt at the full restoration of the old border, which was Slovakia's wish, would be futile. The German Ambassador then asked Csáky whether the Hungarian government would be willing to make certain territorial concessions. Csáky responded that this would be inconceivable — "where Hungarian soldiers have trodden, they will stay". Hungary could keep the 60-kilometre long and 20-kilometre wide strip of land that it had taken from Slovakia. The Hungarian authorities attached the area of land Sub-Carpathia, of which it remained a part until 1944. In 1945 the newly re-established Czechoslovakia was obliged to surrender the railway line between Csap and Ungvár as well as the Ung line: the Czechoslovak-Soviet border — today's frontier between Slovakia and Ukraine — was drawn ten to fifteen kilometres further west. During its engagements with the Slovak armed forces from March 23-28, 1939, the Hungarian army suffered 25 fatal and 56 non-fatal casualties; it captured 360 Slovak and 211 Czech/Moravian soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]