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Viktor Pál

International Environmental History Group, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere,

Institut für Wirtschafts-, und Sozialgeschichte, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien,

Pollution in Capitalism and Communism.

Water pollution and control in the Ruhr and in Borsod, Hungary between 1850 and 1980.

We know very little of industrial water pollution and water protection in East-Central Europe prior to the rise new social movements in the mid-1980s. This presentation will analyze water pollution and water protection in capitalist Western Europe, and in state-socialist East-Central Europe prior to the rise new environmental movements.

Iron-and steel industries boomed during the 1950s, and chemical plants mushroomed in the 1960s in Hungary and in other state-socialist countries. Such change was rapid, aggressive and enormous, and aimed to build up production capacities comparable to what was to be found in Western European countries. As a result, East-Central Europe's new heavies induced similar environmental problems by the late 1950s than those heavily presented in the West. After the revolution of 1956, pollution debates opened up in Hungary and the regime acknowledged problems of water supply, water pollution, and environmental degradation in general. In 1961, the Kádár regime created a pollution tax system and a class of paid environmental public servants. This pollution control system resembled to the West German, French and Swedish institutions of pollution taxes on various levels. Simultaneously, industry wide modernization schemes were introduced. Such programs increased the amount of water recycled, and reduced the amount of pollutants discharged per production ton. These modernization programs in Hungary followed Western European examples. Energy regime modernization programs were fortified by cheap crude oil-, and natural gas deliveries by the Soviet Union. Such imports reduced Hungary's dependency on coal, reduced phenol discharges to water bodies decades earlier than in Belgium, West Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Viktor Pál is a final year PhD student at the Finnish Graduate School of History at the University of Tampere. He is a member of the International Environmental History Group at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere and a “Lektor” at the Institut für Wirtschafts-, und Sozialgeschichte at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. Pál has studied four semesters at the University of California Los Angeles under the supervision of Professor Ivan T. Berend, and taught environmental history courses at the University of Helsinki and the Comenius University of Bratislava.