Századok – 2008

TANULMÁNYOK - Somogyi Éva: Modern bürokrácia a közös külügyminisztériumban I/3

foreign affairs (to what extent it became a modern administrative institution), and how it transformed the personnel of the ministry. The study in fact focusses on the careers of Hungarian officials in the ministry of foreign affairs. It examines the life of some hundred people who served for at least ten years in the ministry and reached at least the rank of secretary. The analysis is based on the personal papers of the officials preserved in the ministry, on their correspondence kept in Austrian and Hungarian archives, and on the official publications of the ministiy itself. One of the major conclusions is that the characteristic figure of the Ballhausplatz-bureaucracy in the age of dualism became the professional official, which was one of the important elements of modernisation, but this transformation hardly affected the social background of the officials. Most of the diplomats, as elsewhere in Europe, were of aristocratic origins, and in this respect no real change happened in the course of the period. Some modernisation began however, for a limited number of non-aristocratic professionals did appear in the ministry. Some of the requirements demanded from the officials, such as conscientiousness, sense of obligation and devotion can indeed be regarded as middle class values, yet the official was nevertheless not a typical member of the middle class. The main reason was not that his independence and responsibility were seriously limited by the official system, but that officials in general, and those of the ministry of foreign affairs especially, constituted a separate social caste, subjected to special sanctions, expected to conduct a special way of life, with their behaviour and non-official relationships being under continuous scrutiny. And, before all, the official recognition of his services but strengthened his social separation, for the greatest reward was acceptance by the ruler into the ranks of the nobility or the aristocracy. Any official in the ministry of foreign affairs became in the course of his service a professional in a bureaucratic machinery working according to exact rules, where hierarchy was respected and the conditions of promotion defined. The official received salary and pension in keeping with his rank, and the ministry took care of widows and orphans. Yet the officials of the Ballhausplatz, despite all tendencies in this direction, and independently of their social extraction, did not become modern bureaucrats. Thanks to the act of 1873 on the salary of the officials the bureaucracy was attached to the parliament, for its financial security depended henceforth on the vote of the representatives. In a sense it became independent from the court, but this process in the case of the officials in the „ministry of the imperial house and of foreign affairs" was never completed. Although the transformation of the ministiy of foreign affairs into a modern bureaucratic machinery was launched by the dualistic constitutional transformation in 1867, the process was hindered by a number of obstacles inherent in the structure of the empire and in the place of the emperor within it.