The paper summarises the legal scholar Ferenc Mádl's thoughts on European integration. In the meantime, the family background and the results of the professor's own research on European law are discussed. In the last phase of his career, Mádl held several positions in public life. As a cabinet member in the Antall government and later as President of the Republic, he did much in practice to promote the accession of Hungary and the Central European region to the European Union. In the 2000s, he repeatedly spoke about his vision of the European Union, which, because of its objectivity, can serve as a reference and benchmark for future generations.
A tanulmány arra vállalkozik, hogy összefoglalja Mádl Ferenc jogtudós gondolatait az európai integrációról. Mindeközben szó esik a professzor családi hátteréről és saját európai jogi kutatásainak eredményeiről. Mádl pályafutásának utolsó szakaszában több közjogi tisztséget is betöltött. Az Antall-kormány kabinetjének tagjaként, majd köztársasági elnökként a gyakorlatban is sokat tett Magyarország és a közép-európai régió európai uniós csatlakozásáért. A 2000-es években többször beszélt az Európai Unióról alkotott elképzeléséről, amely objektivitása miatt referenciaként és viszonyítási pontként szolgálhat a jövő nemzedékek számára.
Ferenc Mádl (1931-2011) is generally remembered as the first Conservative President of the Republic in Hungary. However, Mádl also was a jurist, scholar and professor whose main field of research was the law of European integration. This subject, which also drew on his personal experiences, was his preoccupation from the 1960s until his death, i.e. for more than four decades. Initially concentrating on the legal mechanisms of integration, he later broadened his perspective to include the cultural project of the Union, as well as the development of the acquis. He was also interested as a politician, as a scholar and as a private citizen, in the study of the structural reform of the Union and its Eastern enlargement, in which - as Cabinet Minister and later Hungarian President - he was involved. Even in his last years, he wondered where the Union was going and what its future scope could be. In this paper, we examine the research and conclusions of the academic Ferenc Mádl on European integration.
Professor Mádl was born in the western part of Hungary, in a small village called Bánd, inhabited almost exclusively by Germans. His family was also of German origin, they spoke German at home, but considered themselves Hungarian. Both of Mádl's grandfathers had lived in the United States for a while, so the young boy was introduced to English at an early age. Mádl's family farmed and lived relatively well from the second half of the 1930s. It was only towards the end of World War II that the effects of the war were felt directly in this area, but the insecurity of life, the arrival of soldiers and the approaching Soviet army left a lifelong mark on the child. Mádl saw European integration first and foremost as a peace project to prevent further wars on the continent by securing mutual benefits to the European nations.[1]
The other important question was one that he faced early on, as a schoolboy. The question that occupied his mind was whether Hungary belonged to Europe, whether it was inherently part of this continent or whether it should be annexed to it separately, together with the whole region. Even then, he saw - mainly thanks to a work by the medieval humanist Thomas More, which is set in Hungary - that Hungary was in Europe, a necessary part of it. The scholar's later oft-repeated assertion that we are not joining Europe - as we have always been part of it -[2] but reintegrating or returning to the European political community, can be traced back to this.
The common European culture and the extent of the national contribution to it remained a preoccupation of his later work. In his 1952 biography of Count Széchenyi as an undergraduate, this question was revisited with emphasis. Here the national goal is the preservation and development of a nation for the benefit of mankind.[3] Already as President of the Republic, in a 2004 essay, the idea reappears: "culturally speaking, there are no 'big' or 'small' nations; every national heritage is also a world heritage."[4] The university student Mádl may not have known it yet, but he was already exploring the framework of national identity, even if for him it was then only on a cultural level. We also know that he already recognised the importance of the life's work of the first Hungarian king, Saint Stephen, and that this became a regular reference in his later works. In Mádl's
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works, István's decision to join Europe was a decision that determined the whole of Hungarian history.[5]
Ferenc Mádl was regarded as one of the most talented lawyers of his generation - even as an undergraduate. Although initially unsympathetic to the socialist system, his talents enabled him to work as a researcher and later as a university lecturer. During his university years, he began to focus on civil law, and as a researcher - in the late 1950s - he was assigned first to Hungarian private international law and then - in the early 1960s - to the comparative study of the law of Western economic integration (EEC) and Eastern economic integration (Comecon). In the course of his research, he regularly attended conferences and training courses abroad, the most significant of which was certainly the Strasbourg course on comparative law. This was, in today's terminology, a three-year correspondence course, with a few weeks per semester in different Western European cities. On the one hand, it gave Mádl the opportunity to build up academic contacts internationally, but on the other hand, the training days in Strasbourg gave him the opportunity to see the European institutions being formed at the time live and to listen to the politicians who are now considered to be among the founding fathers of the European Union.[6] For several years after his return home, he continued to concentrate on private international law, but in 1967, on his return from a trip to the United States, he became specifically concerned with the characteristics of EEC law.
Mádl started teaching in 1962. First in Strasbourg - still being a student (!) -,[7] and from 1968 at the Faculty of Law in Budapest (ELTE), of which he himself was once a student.[8] In addition to civil law, he lectured on comparative commercial law, and this is probably how the legal issues of integration came back to the forefront of his interests.[9] In his university lectures, it was impossible to avoid the fact that, thanks to integration, the commercial law of the Western European states was undergoing a process of unification, with attempts being made to approximate the detailed rules of the various legal systems in certain areas. On the other hand, in the field of company law and competition law, a new body of Community law began to emerge, which then developed according to its own rules (Community law or European law).
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