Antal Tamás: A tanácsrendszer és jogintézményei Szegeden 1950-1990 - Dél-Alföldi évszázadok 26. (Szeged, 2009)

IDEGEN NYELVŰ ÖSSZEFOGLALÁSOK

after 1945 right until the change of regime in 1989/90. In Hungary Act I of 1950 set up the system of councils, which replaced the previous traditional system of counties while retaining several of its elements. This was followed by Act X of 1954 and Act I of 1971. Although the third council act made an attempt to introduce some aspects of local government into public administration at least among its basic principles, the hierarchic nature of the structure, its central control and its being opposed to the separation of branches of power did not change. The starting point of the system was complete centralization, the direct influence of higher state control on all the elements of the state apparatus, although the existence of local and regional matters was acknowledged at the same time. For instance, the executive committee was elected and set up by the council as a body of representatives which, as an executive organ, had to conform to the legal norms of the council which had established it as well as to the normative and other decrees of the superior executive committee. Thus the ministries were in chain-like and direct nexus with the county executive committees and with the district or town/village executive committees. In addition to all these, the influence of the party's analogous organization was not negligible, either, in terms of the operation of the system. With regard to the institutional history of the council system, at the beginning of the monograph it was necessary to present — albeit briefly — the establishment, institutional essence and development of the already-mentioned Soviets, which ultimately served as the model for the organization of the councils in Hungary in 1949 and in 1950. The itemized and comparative study of the Soviet constitutions and the constitutions of the "socialist" countries was also extremely useful to this end. The author started the examination of the period and its boundaries by exploring the origin, preparatory work and Parliamentary debates of the Hungarian council acts. Thereafter, the provisions of the acts were briefly presented based on their reasoning rather than on the legislative norm text so that the legal institutions and their background can be understood by means of an authentic interpretation. The presentation would not have been complete without the targeted reference to the state philosophy and legal theory of the era, which was mostly founded on the "official socialist legal theory". This was complemented by the respective chapters of textbooks of constitutional law published mainly in the 1960s. The Szeged chronicles of local transformations and restructuring after each council act, reconstructed from council minutes, were also included for the sake of entirety. The major part of the monograph is constituted by the presentation of the Council of Szeged, City of County Rank in the South of Hungary, or to be more precise its organs, their operation and legal rules. As a starting point for this, the rules of organization and operation, modified and reworded several times after 1971, were analysed, compared and described in their development. The author chose one feature of the great number of such rules of the "mature" council system (1971-1990) and used it for the detailed description of the development and work of each council institution. As their number is very high, a detailed analysis in terms of institutional history was performed. As part of this, the legal characteristics of the council body,