The Foreign Parliamentary Collection holds parliamentary documents dating from 1878 onwards that the Library of the Hungarian Parliament procured through exchanges with foreign parliaments.

The collection includes documents from Germany and some German state parliaments, as well as from the legislative bodies of Great Britain, France, Austria and the United States. Historical source material from some neighbouring countries can also be found here, such as the papers, journals and indices of Croatia-Slavonia and the Diet (Sabor) of Dalmatia (fragmentary from 1861 to 1915), as well as some parliamentary documents from Serbia (fragmentary from 1899 to 1938) as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 1900 to 1918. From the 1980s, printed volumes were replaced with microfilm sheets, CDs, and more recently by online documents in several countries. This meant that the exchange of hard copies was gradually discontinued.

The collection includes publications from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organisation fostering parliamentary cooperation. An integral part of the Foreign Parliamentary Collection is a reference section containing works on the parliaments of foreign countries.

Worthy of note is a series of books from France and the United Kingdom on the history of parliamentarism in these countries. The series in English is titled Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, which summarises the history of English and British parliamentarism from 1066 to 1803, while the French series is titled Archives parlementaires, which presents the political history of the period from 1787 to 1881 (1788-1799 and 1799-1881).

Please note that all of the printed foreign parliamentary resources are stored in an external warehouse, so documents must be ordered in advance by e-mail at library(at)parlament.hu.

Contact:

Reference Librarian: Gergely Zágoni-Bogsch
Phone: +36 1 4414087
E-mail: gergely.zagoni-bogsch(at)parlament.hu

The history of the collection

A system of exchange between countries proliferated after international conventions – the “Convention for [the] International Exchange of Official Documents, Scientific and Literary Publications” and the “Convention for the Immediate Exchange of Official Journals, Parliamentary Annals, and Documents” – were signed in Brussels in 1886. The publications for exchange included official administrative and parliamentary publications, parliamentary almanacs, publications written by government decree and at government expense, and official journals. Hungary joined the convention in 1923, but prior to this had established relations of exchange with some countries – for example, with the Belgian, German, Austrian, Prussian, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, French and Croatian parliaments in 1878, with the British House of Commons in 1881 and with the United States of America in 1884 – in order to obtain foreign parliamentary documents. Thus, starting from the last third of the 19th century, the Library of the Hungarian Parliament collected significant historical source material from the parliamentary documents of the countries mentioned above (journals and papers, as well as committee documents, minutes, budgets and final accounts from some countries).