Masterclass: international law and constitutional development in 19th century Europe (Part II)

1. Today, Hungary is a small Central-Eastern-European country making headlines with its domestic political and constitutional controversies. Yet, throughout its 1000-year history, this country had many struggles and developments, which, when put into a European comparative context, are relatively unknown and nevertheless very interesting. Hungary was similar to its Western-European counterparts in many ways: it was a monarchy, which joined the Roman Catholic Church upon its founding. It established a domestic administrative system, regulated land ownership and eventually established feudal representation. The pace of its development may have been a little slower sometimes than that of the West, but Hungarian scholars studied at the Western Universities, its rulers fought and consulted their foreign counterparts and the country had a normal-size territory to be considered a country, like any other, in Europe. 2. At the same time, Hungary was also different in many ways than its Western counterparts. The country only had a so-called historical constitution and no written constitution until the 20th century. Due to certain elements of this historical constitution, the structure of land ownership, local public administration and social structures remained the same throughout the middle ages. As a result of the Turkish occupation in the 16th-18th centuries, the country dipped into the second wave of serfdom. It did not embark on the road to a civil society as the West has after renaissance and reformation. Roman law was never officially received in Hungary and multiple codification attempts for domestic laws failed throughout the 18th-19th centuries. A closer examination of the 19th century constitutional development in Hungary and especially the rather unique dualist state of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy may provide additional meaning to legitimacy, sovereignty and multi-level governance in international law. A multitude of questions arise in this regard, such as the true significance of the 1867 Ausgleich between the Austrian Empire and Hungary from the perspective of international law, the relevance of domestic constitutional order within related states, etc. Taught together with dr. F. Dhondt (Legal History Institute)

Scalar-Tensor theories from Λ(ϕ)\Lambda(\phi) Plebanski gravity

We study a modification of the Plebanski action, which generically corresponds to a bi-metric theory of gravity, and identify a subclass which is equivalent to the Bergmann-Wagoner-Nordtvedt class of scalar-tensor theories. In this manner, scalar-tensor theories are displayed as constrained BF theories. We find that in this subclass, there is no need to impose reality of the Urbantke metrics, as also the theory with real bivectors is a scalar-tensor theory with a real Lorentzian metric. Furthermore, while under the former reality conditions instabilities can arise from a wrong sign of the scalar mode kinetic term, we show that such problems do not appear if the bivectors are required to be real. Finally, we discuss how matter can be coupled to these theories. The phenomenology of scalar field dark matter arises naturally within this framework.Comment: 21 page

Abstract elementary classes and accessible categories

We compare abstract elementary classes of Shelah with accessible categories having directed colimits

L’art religieux en Hongrie et en Roumanie Relations et interactions des années 90 à nos jours | Religious art in Hungary and Romania. Relationships and interaction from the 1990s to today

Ayant été lui-même témoin des évènements qu’il décrit, László Beke donne une idée de l’esprit qui souffla sur les relations magyaro-roumaines au début des années quatre-vingt-dix. Cache-cache entre l’art contemporain et la nation, à la recherche du bon voisinage au point d’équilibre entre le cosmopolitisme et le provincialisme. | Having been himself a witness of these events, László Beke describes the spirit that inspired the Hungarian-Romanian relationship in the beginning of the 1990s. He identifies a kind of hide-and-seek game played by contemporary art and the nation, as well as an effort undertaken in search of good neighbourly relations, somewhere at the intersection of cosmopolitism and provincialism