Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
FINAL THOUGHTS – TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS
FABULOUS SPY GAMES Ferguson has also looked at the major turning points of human history from the point of view of network theory.507 He concluded that we can observe the changes in the balance of power between hierarchies and networks, and that the most revolutionary changes occurred in the history of mankind when corroded hierarchical institutions were shaken and destroyed by networks. Ferguson argues that our era is the Second Networked Age when networks dominate the world, adding that they have never been as important as they are today. In the preface to his book, Ferguson says: “Even today, the majority of academic historians tend to study the kinds of institution that create and preserve archives, as if those that do not leave an orderly paper trail simply do not count. Again, my research and my experience have taught me to beware the tyranny of the archives. Often the biggest changes in history are the achievements of barely documented, informally organised groups of people.”508 The lessons from this book support Fergusons conclusions also with regard to Hungary: the barely documented and therefore barely researchable informal networks and financial-economic interest groups affected the economic processes in Socialist Hungary, thus directly influencing how politics was shaped. It is not enough to explore the documents left behind by party committees and state institutions to understand exactly what happened in Hungary after 1945. It is at least as important to trace back the nexuses within and the motivation behind the network this book is about. From the point of view of network research, secret service documents and also state security documents, which are all too often disparaged and the value of which as a source is frequently questioned, are of immense significance, because secret service men and the detectives of state security, on top of operating as networks themselves, were trying to unveil exactly the system of nexuses that stayed hidden, so the logic of their working methods resembles that of the historian looking into network research.509 507 Ferguson 2019 508 Ibid. p. 21-22. 509 The monograph Secret Society by Nóra Szekér is an outstanding work of network research in Hungarian historiography. It describes the mysterious network that infiltrated interwar political public life in Hungary by presenting the operation of the Hungarian Fraternal Community. Szekér 2017a. 184
