Central Europe Foundation: Biography of Dr. Elemér Hantos (1880-1942)
Dr. Elemér Hantos was a Hungarian economist and one of the principal promoters of Central European and Pan-European integration during the interwar period. Hantos was born in Budapest on November 12, 1880. He studied Law and Political Sciences at the University of Budapest, where he obtained two doctorates. During his studies, he travelled to London, Oxford and Cambridge, where he wrote a scientific study on the comparison between the English Magna Carta and the Hungarian Bulla Aurea. In 1904, Hantos started his professional career as Secretary General of the Hungarian Association of Financial Institutions.
In 1910, Dr. Elemér Hantos embarked on a political career and became a member of the Hungarian Parliament for the liberal National Party of Work. During the First World War, Hantos published several books on the Austro-Hungarian wartime economy and finances. His expertise led him to be named Secretary of State at the Hungarian Ministry of Trade in 1917. The same year, he also started to teach at the University of Budapest, where he was named Professor in 1929.
In 1918, Dr. Elemér Hantos was appointed president of the Hungarian Postal Savings Bank and played an important role in the monetary policy of the short-lived Hungarian republic of Mihály Károlyi. After the signature of the Treaty of Trianon, which ratified the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the disintegration of its unified economic area, Hantos abandoned his political career and dedicated himself to the promotion of Central European economic integration.
In 1924, Dr. Elemér Hantos was asked by the Economic Committee of the League of Nations to address various monetary and economic problems in Central Europe. During the interwar period, Hantos advocated an economic rapprochement between the successor states of Austria-Hungary, not only Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also Romania and Yugoslavia.
To promote his idea of Central European economic integration, Elemér Hantos published several books and numerous articles, and gave many conferences throughout Europe, but primarily in Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. Hantos was the main protagonist of the first Central European Economic Conference organized by the Austrian businessmen Julius Meinl in Vienna in September 1925. At the end of the 1920s, Hantos created the Central European Institutes in Vienna, Brno and Budapest, as well as the Central European Study Centre in Geneva.
Dr. Elemér Hantos was also a founding member of the International Committee of the European Customs Union and of the Hungarian section of the Pan-European Union, created by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. Hantos participated in numerous Pan-European conferences, facilitating the elaboration of the economic program of the Paneuropean Union and promoting Central European integration as the first step towards an economic Pan-European Union.
Dr. Elemér Hantos died in Budapest in 1942.
Article written by Gabriel Godeffroy for the Central Europe Foundation.