Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

1. Session / Séance. Experiences gained, current Situation, future Prospects / Expériences acquises, Situation actuelle, Perspectives futures - Körmendy, Lajos: International Cooperation in Europe. A Survey / Programmes de Coopération internationale des archives en Europe. Un bilan (english 13 - français 27)

1. Session/Séance: Körmendy, International archival Cooperation

of personal freedom and the political and administrative structure in a given country. In non-democratic countries, archives have little autonomy; the more dictatorial regime is, the more professional relations are subordinate to political considerations. In their replies to the questionnaire, Romania and Albania pointed out that because of the political conditions which prevailed until recently, they were unable to maintain regular international contacts. The extent to which the archival system is centralized or decentralized produces remarkable divergences even between democratic countries. The influence of the central authority on international archive relations is quite clearly greater in centralized countries.

Nonethless, with the exception of extreme cases, the profession has always enjoyed a certain freedom of manoeuvre and has been able to take action to promote openness to the outside world. In the 60s and 70s (i. e. during the dictatorship), Hungarian archives played an important role in the international sphere because they persuaded the political leadership that the country needs these contacts. This could also explain why Soviet archivists have been so extremely active in the last ten years: nine countries out of twenty-eight gave the USSR as a country with which they maintained very close links.

The foregoing also applies in reverse: politics can force archives to be part of some international organization, which, if it has no real professional content, reduces cooperation to a matter of form and can, if the political pressure is removed, lead to the disappearance of the organization itself. The socialist countries’ cooperation organization (which in certain fields tried to compete with the ICA) provides a good example: it ceased to exist in 1990. The archives of the participating countries were not deriving sufficient professional benefit from it to keep it alive once political pressure had been removed.

Finally, we sould mention financial conditions. We all know that travel, hotels, meetings and conferences, etc., cost a lot of money, and this poses problems for poor countries. Archivists from these countries travel less and are less well represented on international committees, a fact which is partly due to financial problems which bursaries and subsidies from rich countries and international organizations cannot offset.

3. Institutional and Organizational Format 3 .1. Internal Institutional and Organizational Formats

All archive institutions which maintain large-scale external relations set up an internal organization to coordinate and manage these relations. This may consist of a single member of staff working part-time or comprise a full dozen individuals. Staff numbers depend on the extent of the work and the administration model employed. In Europe, central archive’s staff in charge of international relations normally comprises two full-time posts concerned with coordination, which other individuals being brought in a deal with international activities as required. This structure has

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