War & Virtual War - 2004 Conference Programme Session 2

Session 2: Business, Economics and War
Chair: Asa Kasher

Budapest and the Great War: A Brief Overview
Monika L Riez
Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary, Canada

My paper will briefly examine the Blockade of the Central Powers by Britain. The focus of the paper is what impact the Blockade had on Hungary and its capital Budapest. One of the key questions which I will examine is the impact the Blockade had on Hungary. To what degree was the problem of lack of supplies such as food and metal created by the Blockade versus internal problems managinig the war effort. Thus this paper will look at how the politicians at both a local and federal level dealt with the crisis of lack of supplies and how they tried to redistribute supplies. Then I will go on and compare the politicians response to how the people in Hungary and especially its capital Budapest experienced the war and the impact that the lack of supplies had on their everday lives.
Hungary is often overlooked when examining World War I being swallowed into works regarding Austria-Hungary with the emphasis being on Austria and people assuming that the situation was similar in Hungary. Hungary is an important part of the Austro-Hungarian equation. By 1914 Hungary was completely independent in all its domestic affairs because of the 1866 Ausgleich. Hungary was also a critical part of the equation because it ws the part of the Dual Monarchy which produced the majority of the food for the Empire and with the Blockade in place its role within the Empire became critical to Austria-Hungary's ability to successfully continue its war effort. Finally it should be remembered that World War I for Hungary ended not on the war front but on the home front in October of 1918 when the people of Budapest rose up against the government because they were tired of being hungry and cold and the ordinary citizens of Budapest just wanted the war to just end! Thus a lack of supplies on the home front played a critical and decisive role in the Hungarian war effort.
This paper is based predominantly on primary sources such as the sources found in the Hungarian National Library, the Hungarian Military Archives, the Hungarian National Archives, the Budapest Municipal Archives, and the Hungarian Literary Archives.

The Similarities of Business and War and the Idea of Being the Best
Albrecht Fritzsche
DaimlerChrysler Information Technology Management, Mercedes Car Group, Sindelfingen, Germany

This paper explores the possibilities to subsume business and war in the same behavioural framework. The argument is based on the idea that professional interactions are more or less performed as games. Fighting an enemy or serving a customer takes place on a rather abstract level. The counterparts of interaction are often reduced to impersonal cues, which make people act or react, but do not influence their role. As a consequence, the scenarios of action in warfare and business activities can be identified with the way people play games. Observations from practice show that people even play the same games in both fields of action. Many parallels between business and war can be found in the way people speak and think, in organisation and leadership, and in the technology used to support plannings and decisions. In addition to that, warfare and business activities both show a tendency to focus on their own behaviour, because the predictions of the counterparts of interaction are mostly vague and unreliable. Independently from the counterpart, the own power is increased to a maximum. Again it is possible to identify similar paradigms of optimization in both warfare and business activities, but also similar traps and misunderstandings. Examples illustrate problems in technology, communication and organisation. Based on the experiences in industry and engineering, this paper highlights the main issues in optimization and suggests ways how people in warfare and business could learn from each other.