Featured Lendület Member: Miklós Sebők

“Since the 1990s, the conventional wisdom has been that the processes of transatlantic and EU integration have made the major powers in this circle (i.e. either NATO members or EU member states) the main partners of the Central and Eastern European region,” begins Sebők, head of the research group, outlining the context of the Momentum project. This was the case not only in Hungary but also in other countries in the region. However, since the early 2010s, the situation has started to change and the picture has become more unclear: there is a significant global transformation in partnership relations, which justifies political science research on the issue.

Miklős Sebők

Great powers and the V4

“Our research has two parts. The first part, which is substantive, deals with how the perception of the great powers has changed in the Central and Eastern European countries over the last 30 years,” says Sebők. “Obviously, everyone has some impression of who public actors negotiate with most often and what interests they represent, but this has been little researched using quantitative methods.”

When a country concludes a new investment or tax treaty with another country, it is obviously preceded by negotiations and, presumably, there is a good relationship between the two countries. Countries with territorial or other more serious conflicts will not enter into this type of agreement. Such agreements indicate that there is a good relationship between two countries, possibly a small country like Hungary, and a great power. In terms of content, the research group will examine how relations with which great powers have developed in the past decades in which countries of the Visegrád Four, and how these have changed in response to what events. These developments relate to the transformation of political science, international relations and the global economy in general.

Telltale patterns

The second key element of the research – and what makes it truly novel – is that it will be carried out using an advanced technological methodology. The researchers work as part of the National Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, the only such AI laboratory in the social sciences. This means that

they analyse large databases, which are then analysed using artificial intelligence

to process data in ways that would have been unimaginable before. “We are downloading millions of newspaper articles published since 1990 in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia and using AI to look for patterns. These patterns can indicate what people have said about the great powers, when and on what topics, and we try to draw conclusions from these statements.”

The research leader is confident that the results of the study will provide many surprises and will not fully confirm the impressions and memories of people who have lived through the previous 34 years. According to Sebők, there is often a disconnect between the public communication of business and political actors and their background activities. The behaviour of elites in relation to proposed legislation or local investments may differ from the surface perceived by the population. The majority of people do not read the questions, bills and budget amendments submitted on the Parliament’s website. But researchers, and more specifically the algorithms they develop, will.

They will systematically process not only news reports and newspaper articles in the media, but all the bills that have been tabled, the laws that have been passed, the amendments, and the questions and interviews. In other words, practically any source that can tell us about the political process. They seek to find out whether there is a discrepancy between the less publicised work of politicians and their grand-sounding statements. They expect to find discrepancies between the public and the behind-the-scenes work of many parties or economic actors.

A changing world system

With this research topic, one might almost automatically wonder whether researchers fear that their findings will be exposed to political scrutiny. After all, those who have been active in foreign policy in recent decades are often still active today.

“Science is not primarily concerned with specific individuals. We are interested in trends,” argues Sebők. “What is important for us is how the international relations of the Hungarian state have developed, and to be able to examine this objectively, using scientific methods. We have no ambition to enter the media space beyond science communication. At the international level, similar studies are fully established – but we also have an advantage over these studies in that we use state-of-the-art methods for data analysis. W

e can provide the community with reproducible and retrievable results, which we hope are methodologically sound,

and whose further interpretation beyond scientific conclusions is no longer our task.”

With the help of AI, the researchers will produce time series of the emergence of different topics and keywords. Data collection is currently underway. They have already collected all the parliamentary speeches since 1990 in all four Visegrád countries and are running programs on them to find the so-called relevant keywords. This work is greatly complicated by the fact that the same term can be referred to in many grammatical forms. As a result of the study, a website will be made public in a few months’ time, allowing anyone to see when any public figure mentioned which countries in which context.

“From this database, we can then use artificial intelligence to analyse, for example, whether a given country is mentioned positively or negatively in a given speech,” continues Sebők. “Aggregating this data can reveal, for example, if one party previously thought differently about, say, Russia or Britain, but then had a sharp shift in its communication that the public might not have noticed. We can then look at what might have caused this, what might have been behind it. But our research is not just about Hungary, we are doing the same analysis for the other three Visegrád countries.”

There are already preliminary hypotheses about what caused the shift from a Euro-Atlantic orientation to a kind of mixed Russian-American orientation in East-Central Europe, but it is not the data collected in the Momentum study that will shed light on this.

“The transformation of the world system is the cause. After the revolutionary period of the early 1990s, it was clear until the mid-2000s that there was a unilateral world order: the United States dominated, and there were many smaller powers alongside it, but there were no more real great powers,” says Sebők. “Of course, a shadow was cast over this picture by the fact that there were many other nuclear powers, and the rise of China or India was already under way. On the other hand, the transformation of the global economy was also pointing towards a multipolar world order. We also produce visualisations of how countries have risen in terms of GDP and foreign direct investment in Hungary. So it is only natural that the Hungarian, Polish or Slovakian public sphere started to orient themselves in other directions. There were political and economic actors who saw more potential in the so-called opening to the East than in the cultivation of relations with the West.”

According to the research team leader, the “formula is clear” in Hungary, where the opening to the East was announced around 2012-13. The research team already has a peer-reviewed study on this, using available data to examine how much this opening to the East is visible in foreign trade or investment data. However, we do not know whether similar economic reintegration has taken place in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. “So the question is whether the Hungarians are breaking away from the V4 in this respect, or whether we are travelling eastward together with the V4. The data will tell us this, and we are curious to find out,” says Sebők.