Curriculum vitae
Péter Balázs was born on December 5, 1941, in the Central Hungarian town of Kecskemét.
He was graduated at the Budapest Karl Marx University of Economics in 1963. Started working as economist with the Elektroimpex Foreign Trade Company, became department head at the Foreign Trade Ministry in 1969. From 1982, he directed the Hungarian foreign trade branch-office in Brussels; from 1987 worked as deputy head of the Ministry's International Economic Relations Secretariat and from 1988, head of the Trade Ministry’s foreign policy department.
He was appointed administrative state secretary of the Trade and Industry Ministry in 1992. Between 1994 and 1996, he was ambassador to Denmark and between 1997 and 2000 ambassador to Germany. From 2000 he became professor at the Budapest University of Economics and Public Administration.
As of summer 2002, he returned to the Foreign Ministry as the state secretary for integration and foreign economic policy. From 2003 he was the head of the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the European Union.
With the accession of our country on May 1, 2004 he was appointed a member of the European Commission thereby being the first Hungarian EU Commissioner. He held this post until 22 November, 2004.
Péter Balázs received a PhD in economics in 1994, and became a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Science’s economics department in 2003.
From 2000 he was a professor of Budapest’s Corvinus University and from 2005 professor at the faculty of International and European Studies at the Central European University (CEU) as well as director of the EU Enlargement Centre.
Mr Balázs is the deputy chairman of the Hungarian Economic Society, a founding member of the Hungarian Foreign Policy Association and the Hungarian Council of the European Movement.
Mr Balázs is the author of numerous studies and articles. In parallel with his governmental and diplomatic career, he has spent more than three decades carrying out research and teaching at universities in Hungary and abroad. He regularly gives lectures at international conferences in Hungarian, English, French and German.