Zsombor Body

@tatk.elte.hu

Department for Comprative Historical Sociology, Faculty for Social Sciences
Eötvös Lorand University Budapest

Zsombor Body


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RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

History, Sociology and Political Science
5

Scopus Publications

Scopus Publications

  • Hungary and Austria in the “Third World”: A Comparison of Two Countries on Opposite Sides of the Iron Curtain
    Zsombor Bódy
    East European Politics and Societies, 2026
    This article examines globalization in Hungary and Austria, two equal-sized, landlocked Central European countries without an overseas colonial past, and their relationship with the Global South from the 1960s until the 1990s. Recent literature assumes that belonging to the Eastern Bloc gave the socialist countries an advantage in terms of their presence in the Global South. However, a comparison of their relations with the Global South shows that Austria, a non-communist country, had a wider diplomatic room and broader, better structured, and more durable economic, cultural, and political relations with the Global South than the socialist Hungary. Therefore, the article shows that the present day tendency of Central and Eastern European countries—Hungary in particular—to diverge from Western institutions cannot be considered as continuation of their communist-era weak global positioning, which also opposed the West.
  • The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Its Consequences for the Ikarus Bus Factory: Technology, Workforce and Power Relations
    Zsombor Bódy
    Studies in Global Social History, 2021
    In scholarly work dealing with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, emphasis with regard to factories has been placed largely on the political activities and influence of the workers’ councils, which were revolutionary in spirit.1 Attention has also been paid to the suppression and disbanding of these councils after the defeat of the uprising. This is understandable, since for a short time the workers’ councils did indeed represent a threat or challenge to the Kádár regime, which was trying to consolidate its hold on power after having been installed by the Soviet troops. As Hannah Arendt has observed, in the case of the Hungarian revolution – which in her view was the only real workers’ revolution in the twentieth century – it is worthwhile to make a distinction between the workers’ councils and the other councils, which were hastily formed and had political goals. “At any event, the Revolutionary and the Workers’ Councils, though they emerged together, are better kept apart, because the former were primarily the answer to political tyranny, whereas the latter in the case of the Hungarian revolution were the reaction against trade unions that did not represent the workers but the party’s control over them”.2 However, the emphasis in later scholarship was on the political and armed clashes. Accordingly, questions about the conditions in the factories at the outbreak of the revolution and the state of the factories themselves were relegated to the background; as was
  • Social structure, mobility and education
    Zsombor Bódy, Stanislav Holubec
    Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century Volume 1 Challenges of Modernity, 2019
    Changes in social structure in Central and Eastern Europe involve processes such as the transformation from rural to urban society; from a society with extreme levels of inequality to one with ‘functional inequalities’; from agricultural occupations to those in the industrial and service sectors; from a low social mobility rate to socially more open societies; and from a clear division of labour between men and women, to mixing gender roles in the workplace, etc. Particular attention will be paid to four key social groups in modern society: elites, the middle class, the working class and peasants. The chapter will also focus on education, which is traditionally considered an important element of social mobility in modern society. The history of mass education in the twentieth century was marked by waves of both expansion and stagnation. Here, too, a historical gap between Western and Eastern Europe can be observed. The chapter will explore not only these parallels and diversities within a larger European context, but also address the role of education in shaping social values and expectations. To what extent did the societies of Eastern Europe after 1989 return to historically established patterns and how can we view their experience in light of general European trends?
  • A delay in the emancipation of labour: Bourgeois paternalism, workers' insurance and labour law in Hungary from the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War
    Zsombor Bódy
    Social History, 2009
    In most countries in early twentieth-century Europe, labour, which had merged into privacy in the liberal configuration of the nineteenth century, distinguished itself as an independent area structured by laws. Along with this took place the social emancipation of the working class and some kind of integration of the labour movement into the political system. One manifestation of this was the development of labour law, as well as the recognition of trade unions and the appearance of workers’ insurance or other, non-insurance-based welfare policies. During this process, while a triangle of the interested parties of employers, employees and the government was formed, there took place a transformation by which the handling of problems arising from industrialization was lifted out of the local logic of the former poor relief and entrusted to organizations which handled the issue on an all-society level. These organizations endeavoured to make the people available and manageable by new bureaucratic techniques, thus ensuring the integration of society. However, compared with the earlier bourgeois paternalism this still meant the emancipation of the lower classes of society. In this article I attempt to sketch out the nature of the bourgeoisie’s personal, not institutionalized paternalism, which fitted in with the classical liberal view and was characteristic of labour relations in late nineteenth-century Hungary, and to present how the birth of workers’ insurance and social security laws and the failure of the development of labour law had preserved this paternalism and transformed it by the inter-war period into some sort of corporate paternalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after 1848, the dismantling of the legal structure of feudal society in Hungary was followed by fairly rapid commercial and later industrial development. This took place, after 1867, within liberal political frameworks and,
  • La formation du groupe social des « magantisztviselo » en hongrie 1890-1930
    Zsombor Body
    Geneses, 2001
    Cet article etudie comment, en Hongrie, les employes du secteur prive ont reussi a se regrouper pour former une « categorie socioprofessionnelle » reconnue par l’Etat. A la fin du xixe siecle, la revolution industrielle et les progres de la culture ecrite entrainent un important developpement du nombre des employes. Ceux-ci se mobilisent pour que la specificite de leur fonction soit reconnue. Neanmoins, les associations regroupant les employes s’opposent sur les criteres qui definissent leur categorie sociale. Alors que les liberaux militent pour obtenir un statut comparable a celui des fonctionnaires, les socio-democrates considerent les employes comme l’une des composantes de la « classe ouvriere » en lutte contre la « bourgeoisie ». La revolution de 1918 et l’instauration de la republique permet aux socio-democrates d’acceder au pouvoir. Mais leurs efforts visant a fondre l’ensemble des salaries au sein d’une meme classe sociale echouent. Finalement, le nouvel Etat accepte que les employes du secteur prive se constituent en « corps », disposant d’un statut proche de celui des fonctionnaires. Le role joue par la social-democratie dans ce processus explique qu’a la difference de ce qui s’est passe en Allemagne, dans l’entre-deux-guerres, les employes ne soutiendront pas massivement l’extreme droite, mais resteront fideles aux forces de gauche.