Civil-military relations in Eastern Europe, 1945-1990: The case of Hungary

The purposes of this dissertation are (1) to offer a comprehensive analysis of civil-military relations in Hungary in the post-World War II period; (2) to offer a thorough account of the Hungarian armed forces in the same era; (3) to evaluate the available corpus of Western theories of civil-military relations pertaining to Communist systems in the face of the Hungarian experience; and (4) to contrast Hungarian civil-military relations with those of other non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) states. The fundamental hypothesis of this study is that civil-military relations after the Second World War had undergone two comprehensive transitions in Hungary.;First, with the emergence of Communist rule after the war the armed forces became a tool of the ruling regime. The defense of the Communist Party from its internal foes evolved as one of its basic functions. The regime needed a reliable army and it exerted its domination over the military in several ways. Similarly to the Soviet model, it organized a Main Political Administration and introduced political officers, controlled matters of personnel, military education system, etc. Nevertheless, the Communist Party's efforts to control the armed forces met only with limited success as the example of the 1956 Revolution demonstrated.;Second, with the transition from the single-party system to multi-party democracy in 1989-1990, civil-military relations in Hungary had undergone a drastic change. The dissertation analyzes military attitudes toward the political democratization process and examines the army's role in the new Hungary. The armed forces are now under the control of a freely elected President of the Republic and the government of the day.;The study also explores the utility of Western models of civil-military relations in Communist systems. After a comprehensive examination of the Hungarian case and a less detailed comparative chapter (which analyzes the subject in the six NSWP states) the conclusion reached is that although most of the models can contribute to our understanding of party-army relations in the region, none can explain the profound differences between the individual cases.