Navigating Technoscientific Internationalism: Hungarian Engineers, International Associations and the Global Cold War (1950s–80s)

Abstract From the mid‐1950s onward, Hungarian engineers became deeply involved in the rapidly expanding technoscientific internationalism of the period, notably through their participation in several international scholarly associations devoted to both scientific and technical disciplines. This article examines how leading Hungarian engineers – generally professors at the Technical University of Budapest and members of the Academy of Sciences – navigated two such associations: the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID). Until the 1960s, their involvement reflected two distinct Cold War logics. Within the IFAC, Hungarian engineers primarily sought to acquire technical knowledge from the West in order to avoid technological backwardness within a bloc‐based framework. Within the ICID, they aimed to promote Hungarian hydraulic expertise among partners in recently decolonized countries. Finally, this article will show how, from the 1970s onward, these engineers increasingly moved beyond those priorities and forged new paths for technoscientific internationalism, centred on integration into a European – and more broadly Global North – technoscientific space. Drawing on little‐known archival materials from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Technical University of Budapest, this article offers a new perspective on Hungarian scientific and technical cooperation during the socialist period by showing how it operated at the intersection of the three worlds of the global Cold War.