Máté Rigó

The first project I will be working on at IAS CEU is a follow-up research on my first book, Capitalism in Chaos (to be published by Cornell University Press in 2022). The book follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe and explores the clashes between nationalism and material interest between 1870 and 1929; it also argues for long-standing continuities among ethnic minority business elites in the successor states of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Related to this book project, I will be working on an article that places the post-1918 predicament of ethnic minorities in broader discussions on statelessness and explores to what extent not belonging officially to any state was also an opportunity to avoid ethnic discrimination. 

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My second project, From Aid to Trade, explores the multifaceted commercial and cultural connections between the Global South and the Eastern Bloc, focusing on Vietnam and Hungary between 1945 and 1990. It starts with East European fugitive teenagers who ended in the French foreign legion after 1945 and perpetrated genocide in Algeria and Indochina in the 1950s; subsequently, the manuscript shifts gears to document how East European states cast themselves as supporters of socialist Vietnam, and how this generated actual social and economic connections as diplomats, filmmakers, foreign traders, students, and goods travelled across Eurasia in the 1960-80s.