During this visit they enjoyed the generous hospitality of the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) and the Central European University (CEU). The Central European University is an institution that will shortly leave its campus in Budapest, forced out by hostile legislative measures by the current Hungarian government. These are part of a broader set of policies that pose a fundamental threat to freedom of expression and in the country, not just among academics.

The meeting of the network-members started at the OSA, which is affiliated to the CEU, and is both an important archival repository (with a focus on the history of the Cold War and international human rights violations) and a “laboratory of archival experiments.”[1] The archive’s director, Prof. István Rév, provided us with an in-depth introduction to the archival collections and the archive’s broader mission. Afterwards Senior Reference Archivist Robert Parnica gave a tour through the impressive storage spaces. He also gave a very interesting presentation of the digitalization-projects of the OSA. The curated online collections of documents related to Radio Free Europe (RFE) are of particular importance to the network.[2] At the end of the morning meeting the network members had the opportunity to delve into the archives for themselves.

In the afternoon, the members gathered at CEU for an international workshop that dealt with ‘National and International Broadcasting in Turbulent Times: Mediating between States and Publics’. The first session, chaired by István Hegedüs (Hungarian European Society) reflected on challenges to broadcasting in Europe. Nelson Ribeiro talked about the establishment of radio censorship in Portugal under Salazar in the 1930s. Friederike Kind-Kovács reflected on the changing role of RFE after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jessie Labov presented the first datasets coming out of her digital history project on RFE. In this first panel, important contributions were made by two Hungarian scholars reflecting on the recent history and current situation in their country. Peter Bajomi-Lazar critically assessed the state of public media organisations in his country and argued that the structures of civil society in Eastern Europe do not allow for a simple transfer of Western media models. Gergely Gosztonyi discussed the development of Hungarian media laws after 1989 and painted a worrying picture of how the current regime encroaches upon various media outlets.

In the second panel, chaired by Friederike Kind-Kovács, the network members provided contributions on their work on the relation between state-control and radio broadcasting, particularly in context of colonialism in the 1930s. Rebecca Scales provided an interesting reflection on the way radio created a colonial public sphere in Algeria. Vincent Kuitenbrouwer explained why the owners of a station that broadcast from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies were subject to preventive state censorship measures on the airwaves. Andrea Stanton talked about the transmedia ties between broadcasting and newspapers in Mandate Palestine. Simon Potter presented a reassessment of the start of the BBC Arabic Service in which he showed that the role of the British Foreign Office was far greater than previous historians have argued. Finally, David Clayton took us back to the 1990s, with a thought-provoking reflection on the question of why British and American broadcasting from Hong Kong into China grew significantly in the run up to the handover in 1997.

The meeting at OSA and the workshop at CEU presented an important opportunity for the network members to connect their historical fields of expertise to current burning questions about the freedom of media and academia. What came up in the discussions was the way that historical methodological approaches can help us to better link our research topics to current societal and political questions. The network members would like to thank all their Hungarian partners for their important contributions. They went home enriched by this experience and will continue to express their solidarity with CEU, OSA and every scholar and activist in Hungary who shows the courage to stand up for the protection of the freedom of thought and expression.

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Friederike Kind-Kovács, Simon Potter