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Social Science in Eastern Europe

N E W S L E T T E R

July 2000 SPECIAL ISSUE

Publisher Social Science Information Centre, Member of the German Social Science Infrastructure Ser-vices, Bonn

Editors Department Information Transfer Eastern Europe at the German Social Science Infrastructure Services (GESIS) Branch Office Becker, U.; Schleinstein, N.; Sucker, D.; Schwefel, E.; Hausstein, B.

Layout Mallock, W. Frequency Print

Minimum 4 issues per year; presently free of charge Printed in Germany

Distribution Social Science Information Centre, Department Information Transfer Eastern Europe at the GESIS Branch Office Schiffbauerdamm 19, 10117 Berlin, Germany Tel.: +49-30-308 74-246, Fax: +49-30-28 23 692 e-mail: [email protected]

This publication is financed by the German Social Science Infrastructure Services (GESIS) which is jointly funded by the Federal and State governments. ISSN 1615-5459 2000 Social Science Information Centre, Bonn. All rights reserved. The reproduction of excerpts is permitted but subject to the condition that the source be mentioned and against specimen copy. Social Science Information Centre (IZ) of the Association of Social Science Institutes (ASI) Lennéstr. 30 • 53113 Bonn Telephone: +49-228-2281-0 Hotline: +49-228-2281-100 Fax: +49-228-2281-120 e-mail: [email protected] Department Information Transfer Eastern Europe at the GESIS Branch Office Schiffbauerdamm 19 • 10117 Berlin Telephone: +49-30-308 74 246 Fax: +49-30-28 23 692 e-mail: [email protected]

The Social Science Information Centre, the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research at the University of Cologne (ZA) and the Centre for Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) are institutional members of GESIS German Social Science Infrastructure Services, member of the Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (WGL)

mailto:[email protected]

NEWSLETTER Sozialwissenschaften - Osteuropa, July 2000 3

Editorial .......................................................3

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON EASTERN EUROPE: COUNTRY REPORTS

Austria Christian Haerpfer, Institute for Advanced Studies .......................................................4

Belgium Katlijn Malfliet, Institute for European Policy, Catholic University Leuven .............9

Denmark Ole Nørgaard, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus ..................13

Finland Markku Kivinen, Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Helsinki Pekka Sutela, Institute for Economies in Transition..................................................17

France Georges Mink, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ............................22

Italy Daniel Spizzo; Alessia Vatta, Department of Political, University of Trieste Science ....................................................27

Norway Anton Steen, The Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (NUPI)..............................33

Sweden Kerstin Nyström, Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University ....36

Switzerland Christian Giordano, Daniel Henseler, Andreas Künzli, Interfaculty Institute of East and Central European Studies, University of Fribourg...............................38

Spain Francisco Veiga, Departamento de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona .................................................42

United Kingdom George Kolankiewicz, School of Slavonic and East European Studies - SSEES -, University College London .......................45

RECENT PUBLICATIONS...............................50 CONFERENCES .............................................50

Editorial

Almost two years ago, the Social Science In-formation Centre published a special issue of our Newsletter (1998, No. 3) on the occasion of the 29th German Congress of Sociology in which ten articles on different aspects of Ger-man social science research on Eastern Europe were presented. The purpose of this undertak-ing was to highlight the main research issues in the frame of transformation research, which stood in the center of attention of German so-cial scientists after the fall of the Berlin wall. The September 1998 issue is available via Internet at http://www.berlin.iz-soz.de/publications/en/newsletter/socsci-eastern-europe/nl983/ or can be ordered free of charge1. The present issue is designed for the Sixth World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) to be held in Tampere, Finland, July 29 to Au-gust 3, 2000. This time we have addressed well known and recommended researchers2 in a number of North, West and South European countries with the invitation to report on the situation of social science research on Central and Eastern Europe in their countries. As far as we know, a similar review still does not exist anywhere. Our aim is to encourage and support mutual information, networking and cooperation between social scientists from different parts of Europe.

Although we had started our call for papers rather late our request was accepted very posi-tively. The invited authors were asked to deal with research topics, list outstanding research centres/institutions, name leading researchers in the field, describe institutions offering special information in the field, data sources and ar-chives, list research networks as well as recent publications, important research projects, par-ticipation in international research projects, na-tional funding sources/programmes. This was a very ambitious call for the time left for the con-tributors to prepare their articles was very short. We would like to thank the authors for their na-tional reports, which allow an insight into the framework of social science research in the dif-ferent countries.

We are proud to present articles on the follow-ing eleven countries: Austria, Belgium, Den-mark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, Spain,

1 Requests can be sent by mail to Social Science Informa-tion Centre, Schiffbauerdamm 19, D-10117 Berlin, Germany or by e-mail to [email protected]. 2 Our thanks go to all those colleagues who helped us find the right persons for the contributions.

http://www.berlin.iz-soz.de/publications/en/newsletter/socsci-eastern-europe/nl983/



4 NEWSLETTER Social Science in Eastern Europe, July 2000

Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. Countries missing will get a chance in later is-sues of this Newsletter.

Almost all contributions report on recent trends in research on Eastern Europe. Frequent pat-terns are the reorganization of or reduced fund-ing for the traditional area studies institutes (viewed upon as children of the Cold War) and the increasing interest of social scientists in fo-cusing their research on Central and Eastern Europe. New sources of funding have been opened especially with regard to comparative research involving mixed research teams. In countries like Italy and Spain with very weak traditional interests in the area, the political events aroused some enthusiasm for such en-gagement, which could be stabilized only in It-aly. Of all the countries presented the United Kingdom has the most elaborate tradition of re-search on Eastern Europe, which has been successfully restructured during the past dec-ade to meet the new demand for scholarly in-formation on Central and Eastern Europe.

Since the political bifocal division of Europe came to an end and the post-Communist coun-tries were relieved from the political restrictions being imposed on them by the Soviet Union, the specificities of the individual countries in the area of Central and Eastern Europe have reap-peared and had a chance to develop. Thus, some of the real or interpreted similarities be-tween the countries have disappeared and have lead to the prediction that in a not too dis-tant future most research on Central and East-ern European countries will be conducted within the frame of the different social science disci-plines or will get integrated into the newly de-veloping field of European studies. But even if it should be the case, we are of the opinion that there will be permanent demand for special in-formation from and about the countries in tran-sition.

We kindly ask our readers to comment on the articles offered and invite further remarks on the topic. Please feel free to submit articles from countries that have not been included so far. Yours editorial board

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON EASTERN EUROPE: COUNTRY REPORTS

Austria

Christian Haerpfer, Institute for Advanced Stud-ies3

Research on Social and Political Transfor-mations in Post-Communist Eastern Euro-pe: The Case of Austria In Austria, three research institutes have done extensive research on the dynamics of social and political change from the perspective of so-ciology and political science in the period 1990 until 2000. These specialised institutes are the 'Institute for Advanced Studies', the 'Austrian Institute for East and Southeast European Stud-ies' and the 'Institute for Human Sciences'. All three institutes are located in the capital of Aus-tria, Vienna. There is also some research on social and political transformations taking place in several Austrian Universities, but these activi-ties are less focused and specialised. A. Institute for Advanced Studies - IAS4 The Institute for Advanced Studies is the big-gest Austrian research institute in the social sciences with a staff of 110 research fellows and 30 administrative and technical personnel. The Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna has had a special research focus dealing with post-Communist Eastern Europe. The research programme in Sociology of Eastern European transformation is directed by Prof. Claire Wal-lace from the Department of Sociology, who is also Professor of Social Research at the Uni-versity of Derby (UK). The research programme in Political Science of Eastern European trans-formation is directed by Prof. Christian Haer-pfer. Christian Haerpfer is Head of the 'New Europe Centre' at the Institute for Advanced Studies and Visiting Professor of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK). The data base for the comparative research programme consists of survey data from the Austrian 'New Democ-racies Barometer', directed by Christian Haer-pfer, the 'World Values Survey' (1990, 1995) on the one hand and aggregate data from the Vi-enna Institute for International Economic Stud-

3 Stumpergasse 56, A-1060 Vienna, Austria; e-mail: [email protected], phone: ++-43-1-59 99 1-111, fax: ++43-1-59 70 635 4 Institut für Höhere Studien � IHS, Internet: http://www.his.ac.at


ies5 and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD, London) on the other hand. Another important data source are quali-tative data from the Eastern European House-hold Strategy Study, directed by Claire Wallace. Publications on Social Change: • Claire Wallace & Christian Haerpfer (1998):

Some Characteristics of the New Middle Class in Central and Eastern Europe: A 10 Nation Study, In: Nikolai Tilkidjiev (ed.): The Middle Class as a Precondition of a Sus-tainable Society (Sofia: AMCD Press), 158-168.

• Claire Wallace & Christian Haerpfer (1998), Three Paths of Transformation in Post-Communist Central Europe (Institute for Advanced Studies, Sociological Series, No. 28).

• Claire Wallace & Stein Ringen (1994): Societies in Transition: East-Central Europe Today. Prague Papers in Social Transition, Volume 1, Avebury/Gower.

• Claire Wallace & Stein Ringen (1994): Social Reform in the Czech Republic. Prague Papers in Social Transition, Volume 2, Central European University, Prague, 1994.

• Claire Wallace & Stein Ringen (1995): New Trends in Social Transformation. Prague Papers in Social Transition, Volume 3.

• Claire Wallace (1995a): "The family and social transition in Poland", Journal of European Social Policy, (1995) 5 (2), 97-109.

• Claire Wallace (1995b): "Citizenship and Social Policy in East-Central Europe" (1995) in Mendell, M. and Nielsen, K. (eds.) Europe Central and East, Black Rose Books, London, Montreal and New York.

Publications on Youth • Claire Wallace & Helena Helve (2000):

Youth, Citizenship and Empowerment, Ashgate, Gower.

• Claire Wallace & Sijka Kovacheva (1998): Youth and Society. The Construction and Deconstruction of Youth in Europe, Macmillan: London and St. Martin's Press: New York).

• Claire Wallace (1998): �Youth, Work and Education in Postcommunist Europe� in Korunk (in Hungarian).

• Claire Wallace & Sijka Kovacheva (1996): "Youth Cultures and Consumption East and West: an overview" Youth and Society, Vol. 28 (2): 189-214.

• Claire Wallace (1995): Young People, Social Change and the Labour Market in Poland (with Ken Roberts, Bohdan Jung, Tadeusz Szlumlicz, Adam Kurzynowski), Avebury Gower. Polish edition 1995 Post-

5 Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche � WIIW, Internet: http://www.wiiw.ac.at/

Komunistyczne Polonie (Ksiazka I Wiedza: Warszawa).

• Claire Wallace & Sijka Kovacheva (1994): "Why do youth revolt?" In: Youth and Policy No. 44: 7-20.

• Claire Wallace (1993): "Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in East and West Europe", International Bulletin of Youth Research, No. 6, pp 7-23, RC 34 International Sociological Association.

Publications on Migration • Claire Wallace & Dariusz Stola (2000):

Central Europe: New Migration Space (Macmillans: London).

• Claire Wallace (1999): �Crossing borders: the mobility of goods, capital and people in the Central European Region�, in: Brah, A., Hickman, M. and Macan Ghaill (eds.), Future Worlds: migration and globalisation (Macmillans: London).

• Claire Wallace (1999): Economic Hardship, Migration and Survival Strategies in East-Central Europe (Institute for Advanced Studies, Sociology Series, No. 35).

• Claire Wallace (with V. Bedzir, O. Chmouliar and E. Sidorenko) (1998): �Some Characteristics of Labour Migration in the Central European Buffer Zone� (Institute for Advanced Studies, Working Papers Series, Sociology No. 25).

• Claire Wallace (1998): Migration Potential in Eastern and Central Europe (International Organisation for Migration, Geneva).

• Claire Wallace & Andrii Palyanistsya (1995): "East-West Migration in the Czech Republic", Journal of Public Policy 15 (1): 89-109.

• Claire Wallace (1995): �The Eastern Frontier of Western Europe: mobility in the buffer zone�, New Community 22 (2): 259-286.

Publications on Xenophobia • Christian Haerpfer & Claire Wallace (1998):

Xenophobic Attitudes Towards Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, in: Frank H. Columbus (ed.), Cen-tral and Eastern Europe in Transition, Vol-ume 1 (New York: Nova Science Publish-ers), pp.183-213.

• Claire Wallace (1999): �Xenophobie in Zentral- und Osteuropa�, in: Fassmann, Heinz; Matuschek, Helga and Menasse, Elisabeth (Hg.), Abgrenzen, Ausgrenzen, Aufnehmen. Empirische Befunde zu Fremdenfeindlichkeit und Integration Drava Verlag/BMWV: Klagenfurt.

• Claire Wallace (1999): Xenophobia. Austria and Eastern Europe compared Project Report.

Publications on Economic Sociology • Christian Haerpfer (1995): Micro-Economic

Behaviour of Households in Post-Communist Societies. A Seven-Nation-


Study 1993-1994, in: Towards a Market Economy: Beyond the Point of No Return (Amsterdam: ESOMAR), 21-37.

• Claire Wallace & Christian Haerpfer (2000): Democratisation, Economic Development and Corruption in East-Central Europe. An 11-Nation-study (Institute for Advanced Studies, Sociological Series, forthcoming).

• Claire Wallace, Christian Haerpfer & Martin Raiser (2000): Formal Economy, Informal Economy and Economic Well-Being (EBRD-Working Paper, forthcoming).

• Claire Wallace & Endre Sik (1999): The development of open-air markets in East-Central Europe, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (4): 697-714.

• Claire Wallace (1997): �Work and Education in Poland and Ukraine�, in: Heinz, W. and Rabe-Kleburg, U. (eds.): Jahrbuch Bildung und Arbeit �97, Leske and Budrich: Opladen.

Contact person: Prof. Dr. Claire Wallace, Depart-ment of Sociology, Institute for Advanced Stud-ies, Stumpergasse 56, A-1060 Vienna, Austria, e-mail: [email protected], phone: ++43-1-59 99 1-213, fax: ++/43-1-59 99 1-191 Democratisation and Transformation Towards a Market Economy

Since 1991, Christian Haerpfer has served as Principal Investigator of a comparative research programme to analyse social, economic and political change in 17 post-Communist coun-tries. The Austrian research programme is called 'New Democracies Barometer' (NDB) and was conducted 5 times since 1991 (see ta-ble). Christian Haerpfer organised and co-ordinated 49 cross-sectional representative sample surveys in the period between 1991 and 1998 (see: cspp.strath.ac.uk/SEEC). Prof. Richard Rose from the Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) at the University of Strathclyde is International Scientific Advisor of NDB since 1991. Richard Rose is Principal In-vestigator of the 'New Russia Barometer' and the 'New Baltic Barometer', which are both or-ganised from the University of Strathclyde. The New Democracies Barometer was financially supported by the Austrian Ministry of Research and by the Austrian National Bank between 1991 and 1998. The New Democracies Ba-rometer 6 in 2001, which will include 17 post-Communist nations, is financed by the Euro-pean Union.

New Democracies Barometer. An Austrian Research Programme in Political Science, Political Sociology and Economic Sociology. Principal Investigator: Christian Haerpfer

Country 1991 1992 1994 1996 1998 2001 A. Central Europe NDB 1 NDB 2 NDB 3 NDB 4 NDB 5 NDB 6 1. Czech Republic 660(1) 1.408(8) 1.167(18) 978(29) 1.017(39) 2.000 2. Hungary 1.019(2) 970(9) 1.060(19) 1.067(30) 1.017(40) 2.000 3. Poland 1.193(3) 1.113(10) 1.057(20) 1.057(31) 1.141(41) 2.000 4. Slovakia 291(4) 625(11) 574(21) 1.117(32) 1.011(42) 2.000 5. Slovenia 1.049(5) 1.013(12) 1.023(22) 1.000(33) 1.000(43) 2.000 B. Southern Europe 6. Bulgaria 1.002(6) 1.164(13) 1.139(23) 1.184(34) 1.007(44) 2.000 7. Croatia * 1.000(14) 1.000(24) 1.000(35) 1.000(45) 2.000 8. FR Yugoslavia * * * * 1.000(46) 2.000 9. Moldova * * * * * 2.000 10. Romania 1.000(7) 1.000(15) 1.000(25) 1.038(36) 1.241(47) 2.000 C. Eastern Europe 11. Belarus * 1.225(16) 2.067(26) 1.000(37) 1.000(48) 2.000 12. Russia * * 3.535(27) * * 4.000 13. Ukraine * 1.000(17) 1.000(28) 1.000(38) 1.161(49) 2.500 D. Caucasus+Central Asia

14. Armenia * * * * * 2.000 15. Georgia * * * * * 2.000 16. Kazakhstan * * * * * 2.000 17. Kyrgystan * * * * * 2.000

(The numbers in cells are the number of face-to-face-interviews in a given country)



• Christian Haerpfer (2000): Post-Communism and Democracy (Harwood Academic Publishers: Amsterdam, forth-coming).

• Christian Haerpfer & Claire Wallace (1999): Attitudes towards democratization and mar-ketization in the Czech Republic, in: Martin Potucek (ed.): Ceska Spolecnost na Konci Tisicileti (Prague: Charles University).

• Richard Rose, William Mishler & Christian Haerpfer (1998): Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press) and (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1998a): Trends in Democracies and Markets: New Democracies Barometer, 1991-1998 (Stud-ies in Public Policy No. 308, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1998b): New Democracies Barometer V. A 12-Nation Survey (Studies in Public Policy No. 306, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1996): New Democracies Barometer IV: A 10-Nation-Survey (Studies in Public Policy No. 262, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1994a): New Democracies Barometer III: Learning from What is Happening (Studies in Public Policy No. 230, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow 1994).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1994b): Mass Response to Transformation in Post-communist Societies, in: Europe-Asia Stud-ies 46/1: pp. 3-28.

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1994c): New Russia Barometer III: The Results (Studies in Public Policy No. 228, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow 1994).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1994d): Eastern Europe�s Great Transition: Endors-ing the Churchill Hypothesis, in: The Public Perspective. A Roper Center Review of Public Opinion and Polling 5/6: 5-11.

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1993): Adapting to Transformation in Eastern Europe. New Democracies Barometer II (Studies in Public Policy No. 212, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow 1993).

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1992): New Democracies between State and Mar-ket. New Democracies Barometer I (Studies in Public Policy No. 204, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow 1992).

Publications on European Integration and En-largement of the European Union • Christian Haerpfer (1999): New Democra-

cies Barometer: Attitudes towards EU-

Accession in some CEE-Countries, In: Wirtschaftspolitische Blätter 46/1-2: pp. 95-105.

• Christian Haerpfer (1998): New Democra-cies Barometer: Attitudes towards EU-Accession in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, in: Zdenka Mansfeldova & Michal Klima (eds.): The Role of the Central European Parliaments in the Process of European Integration (Czech Academy of Sciences: Prague), pp. 183-198.

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1995): Democracy and Enlargement in the Euro-pean Union, in: Journal of Common Market Studies 33/3: 427-450. Reprinted in: Euro-pean University Institute Working Papers No. 95/12. Robert Schuman Centre (EUI - European University Institute: Florence).

Publications on Subjective Security and Military Integration • Christian Haerpfer, Cezary Milosinksi &

Claire Wallace (1999): Old and New Secu-rity Issues in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Results of an 11 Nation Study, in: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 989-1011.

• Christian Haerpfer & Claire Wallace (1997): Internal and External Security in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. Results of a 10-Nation Study (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Sociological Series, No. 20).

• Christian Haerpfer, Claire Wallace & Rich-ard Rose (1997): Public Perceptions of Threats to Security in Post-Communist Europe (Studies in Public Policy No. 293, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow).

Publications on Social Capital • Christian Haerpfer, Claire Wallace & Martin

Raiser (2000): Social Capital and Economic Performance (EBRD-Working Paper).

• Richard Rose, William Mishler & Christian Haerpfer (1997): Getting Real: Social Capi-tal in post-Communist Societies (Studies in Public Policy No. 278, University of Strath-clyde, Glasgow).

• Claire Wallace (1999): Investing in social capital. The case of small traders in Central and Eastern Europe, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (4): 751-770.

Publications on Comparison GDR - Eastern Eu-rope • Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1997):

The Impact of a Ready-Made State: East Germans in Comparative Perspective, in: German Politics 6/1: pp. 100-121.

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1996a): The Impact of a Ready-Made State. Die pri-vilegierte Position Ostdeutschlands in der


postkommunistischen Transformation, in: Helmut Wiesenthal (Hg.): Einheit als Privi-leg. Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die Transformation Ostdeutschlands (Frank-furt/New York: Campus Verlag), 105-140.

• Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer (1996b): The Impact of a Ready-Made State: Advan-tages of East Germans (Studies in Public Policy No. 268, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow).

Contact person: Prof. Dr. Christian Haerpfer, New Europe Centre, Institute for Advanced Studies, Stumpergasse 56 A-1060 Vienna, Austria, e-mail: [email protected], phone: ++-43-1-59 99 1-111, fax: ++43-1-59 70 635 B. Austrian Institute of East and Southeast Euro-pean Studies6 The research program of the Department for Social Sciences of the Austrian Institute of East and Southeast European Studies focuses on the development of the political cultures in the east-central and southeast European regions since 1989. The main program-lines are the construction of mental borders between west-ern and eastern Europe and a (east/west) com-parative view on national and European identity concepts in the process of European integra-tion. Another topic of research is the conflict be-tween gender-politics and family-politics during transition. Finally, we aim to build up a know-ledge base in the process of European integra-tion. Publications on the Political Culture of Transition • Brezovszky, Ernst-Peter; Suppan, Arnold;

Vyslonzil, Elisabeth (Hg.) (1999): Multikultu-ralität und Multiethnizität in Mittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa. Wien, Frankfurt am Main u.a., 342 S.

• Heuberger, Valeria (Hg.) (1999): Islam in Europa. Frankfurt am Main u.a., 131 S., Wiener Osteuropastudien, 9.

• Leube, Kurt, Pribersky, Andreas (Hg.) (1995): Krise und Exodus. Österreichische Sozialwissenschaften in Mitteleuropa. Wien: WUV.

• Plasser, Fritz, Pribersky, Andreas (eds.) (1996): Political Culture in East Central Europe. Avebury: Aldershot etc.

• Pribersky, Andreas, Unfried, Berthold (Hg.): Symbole und Rituale des Politischen. Ost- und Westeuropa im Vergleich. Frankfurt/M. etc.: Peter Lang Verlag, 1999.

Publications and Research Projects on Borders and Mental Borders • Haslinger, Peter (Hg.): Grenze im Kopf.

Frankfurt am Main u.a. 1999. 208 S., Wie-ner Osteuropastudien, 11.

6 Österreichisches Ost- und Südosteuropa-Institut � OSI, Internet: http://www.osi.ac.at

• Liebhart, Karin; Dejanovic, Sonja: Der Os-ten als Bedrohung. Anmerkungen zur me-dialen Berichterstattung über grenznahe Atomkraftwerke, in: SWS-Rundschau 1999/4, 39. Jg. (Wien 1999) S. 221 � 241.

• �Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen. Die Bedeutung der Grenze für die staatliche und soziale Entwicklung des Habsburger-reiches von der Mitte des 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts� (Principal Investiga-tors: Prof. Waltraud Heindl, Prof. Edith Saurer)

• �Gesellschaft und Konfession in Südosteu-ropa 1989-1997�. Strukturwandel und Transformationsprozess am Beispiel des Is-lam� (Principal Investigator: Prof. Arnold Suppan)

• �Migrationen im 18. Jahrhundert. Das Bei-spiel der Migrationen aus den österreichi-schen Niederlanden nach Wien, Linz, Brünn, Prag, Pressburg� (Principal Investi-gator: Prof. Waltraud Heindl)

Publications on Social and Political Change in Hungary • Grosser, Cornelia; Liebhart, Karin; Kurtán,

Sándor; Pribersky, Andreas (2000): Genug von Europa. Ein Reisejournal aus Ungarn und Österreich. Wien.

• Liebhart, Karin; Kurtán, Sándor; Pribersky, Andreas (1999): Ungarn. München (Beck' sche Reihe Länder).

• Pribersky, Andreas (Hg.) (1992): Das Mehrparteiensystem in Ungarn. Wien (Schriftenreihe des Renner Instituts, Heft 14).

• Pribersky, Andreas; Forray, Katalin (Hg.) (1992): Grenzüberschreitende Zusammen-arbeit und Bildung. Budapest (Oktatás Ku-tató Intézet).

Publication and Research Project on Regional Studies • Transcarpathia - a regional socio-economic

study (Principal Investigator: Prof. Peter Jordan)

• Polzer, Miroslav; Klopčič, Vera (Hg.) (1999): Wege zur Verbesserung der Lage der Roma in Mittel- und Osteuropa � Beiträge aus Österreich und Slowenien. Wien: Eth-nos, 54, 138 S.

Contact Persons: Prof. Peter Jordan, Deputy Di-rector, e-mail: [email protected] and Dr. Andreas Pribersky, Österreichisches Ost- und Südosteuropa-Institut, Head, Department for Social Sciences, A-1010 Wien, Josefsplatz 6, phone: ++43-1-512 18 95/48, fax: ++43-1-512 18 53, e-mail: [email protected] C. Institute for Human Sciences7

7 Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen � IWM, Di-rector: Prof. Krystof Michalski, Internet: http://univie.ac.at/iwm/





Research Field: Political and Social Transfor-mation in Central and Eastern Europe8 The Institute for Human Sciences� research program on transformation is multidisciplinary (involving economists, political scientists, soci-ologists and historians from both the East and the West), comparative (with an emphasis on East-East comparison) and - despite its history of ideas approach - policy-related. Special attention is given to the fact that indige-nous historical values, norms, attitudes and theories, as well as the exchange of ideas be-tween East and West, all play a crucial role in post-Communist transformations. Given that Western societies are currently undergoing far-reaching changes as well, the Institute�s trans-formation studies focus on the problems com-mon to both former blocs. While assisting the reintegration of academics of the former East-ern Europe in Western scholarship, Western experts are invited to reinterpret their own ap-proaches and paradigms in light of the results of the Institute's transformation research. During 1998/99, the research activities of the Transformation Program focused on the histori-cal results and future consequences of the 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. The Program culminated in a confer-ence Ten Years After 1989: Politics, Ideology and the International Order held in June 1999. Transformation research in 2000 will continue to analyse the new roles the state in ex-communist countries may play in a global con-text; the Seminars on State and Globalisation: Eastern Europe�s Two Transformations will be carried on. The project is pursued in coopera-tion with a research program led by Peter Ber-ger and Samuel Huntington on Cultural Global-isation, which examines the encounter of eco-nomic and political cultures from an interna-tional comparative perspective. The develop-ments in Central and Eastern Europe are inter-preted as a mix of US-style cultural imports, the effects of European integration, emerging Asian cultures in the region, remnants of the Soviet culture and specifics of national cultures. This program will lead into an international confer-ence scheduled for 2001, which will highlight the Central and Eastern European specifics of cultural globalisation. Recomposing Eastern Europe, a joint workshop of the Institute and the New Europe College, will be organized in Bu-charest in October 2000. The Institute for Human Sciences� transforma-tion studies provide an intellectual background for its policy-related programme on the reform of social policy in the region (SOCO), and for the Central European Fora, which offer an op-portunity for leading scholars and policymakers

8 Director of this research field is Janos Matyas Kovacs.

to discuss the most crucial issues of post-communist transformation. The Institute's long-term comparative pro-gramme on the Social Consequences of Eco-nomic Transformation in East-Central Europe (SOCO, Director: Don Kalb) has always paid at-tention to the institutional transformations in the welfare systems of the ex-communist countries of the region. There, a new mix of voluntarism, state regulation and market forces is in the making, from which new principles of social en-titlement are emerging. The SOCO programme has accumulated a fair amount of knowledge about the basic three components of that mix. The comparative household survey on the so-cial consequences of the transformation, which were conducted in five transforming countries of the region during 1995/96, resulted in a large database that allows for testing theories or poli-cies of any welfare reform. In the following phase of the research program, special atten-tion was paid to grassroots initiatives in the so-cial sphere: to the new NGO sector, the privati-sation and "communalisation" of welfare, the implementation of social policy at the level of local governments, the invisible social assis-tance in the informal economy, the coping strategies of families, etc The SOCO programme of the Institute for Hu-man Sciences provides adequate conditions to study the Eastern versions of welfare state re-form. During the past couple of years, many dozen-research projects on institutional change in social policy in selected countries of Eastern Europe have been completed. In the course of the next year, a comparative study of welfare reform in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Re-public in the 1990s will be finished. Contact person: Dr. Anita Traninger, IWM-Programmkoordination, Institute for Human Sciences, Spittelauer Lände 3, A-1090 Vienna, Austria, e-mail: [email protected], Phone: ++43-1-313-58-352, Fax: ++43-1-313-58-30

Belgium

Katlijn Malfliet, Institute for European Policy, Catholic University Leuven9

Social Sciences Research in the Area of Central and Eastern Europe: the Belgian Case Introduction The Belgian universities� map does not speak for itself, where it concerns area studies in Cen-

9 Professor, Research Director Central and Eastern Europe, Institute for European Policy, Catholic University Leuven, Van Evenstraat 2B, B-3000 Leuven, e-mail: [email protected]



tral and Eastern Europe10. It is indeed not an easy task to �discover� where exactly out-standing research centres or institutions, spe-cialised in �East European studies� (Osteuropa-kunde), and in particular in social sciences, are located. One could argue that research insti-tutes, specialised in Central and East European studies as a rule have �low profiles� in Belgium. Often they operate under a broader umbrella of a faculty, a department or an institute with a more general name. This picture did not really change after the col-lapse of communism. On the contrary, some specialised institutes on Central and Eastern Europe were merged into European institutes, with a broader pan-European scope or were in-tegrated in a faculty and lost their multidiscipli-nary character. Often, one has to look for spe-cific persons, fascinated by this area or for insti-tutes with more general names. There are some exceptions: rare institutes profiling them-selves as involved in the study of the region, such as the �Russian Institute� in Gent and the �Leuven Institute for Central and East European Studies�. Both institutes however are not focus-ing on social sciences but more on transition economics and (for the Russian Institute in Gent) on Russian language. The fact that Belgium has quite some research activity going on in the discipline of social sci-ences related to Central and Eastern Europe is not the result of a focused policy of the gov-ernments (the Belgian, the Flemish and the French speaking) nor of the universities to cre-ate some centers of excellence in area studies or in social sciences related to Central and Eastern Europe. Instead of a result of a well-balanced policy, we can talk about �the survival of the fittest� on the one hand and (fortunately) about interesting examples of interuniversity cooperation in a differentiated and divided framework. Area studies Area studies remain a difficult field, especially for research in Belgium. Research funding sources, such as the Fund for Scientific Re-search, do not recognize area studies as a spe-cific field of research. This implies that re-searchers have to apply trough the (discipline-oriented) faculties. This structural problem makes inter-disciplinary cooperation more diffi-cult. At the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB: the French speaking Free University), one discov-ers several centres involved in Central and East European studies. The ULB can rely on a tradi-tion of several decennia of multidisciplinary re-search in Central and Eastern Europe. Prof. 10 I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Wim Coude-nys (Slavonic Studies at K.U.Leuven) for the many pieces of information he kindly passed to me.

René Dekkers, a well-known specialist in civil and comparative law, at the end of his career became fascinated by Russian law and East European policies during communism. He esta-blished a �Centre des Pays de l�Est� at the Insti-tut de Sociologie (Institut Solvay) at the Univer-sité Libre de Bruxelles. This centre disposes (the collection is still there) of some rare sources dating from the forties and fifties of the communist regime in the field of social sciences in all Central and East European countries. Dur-ing the communist period, China was included as well. Post-communist transition brought some fun-damental changes in the ULB-concept of Cen-tral and East European studies. The Sociology Institute of ULB currently hosts a �Multidiscipli-nary Research Centre on the Transition of East European Countries to the Market Economies (CRITEME)�11. On the other hand, the Univer-sité Libre de Bruxelles has developed a Faculty Centre for International Research, which is re-lated to its program of International Relations (Centre Facultaire de Recherches Internation-ales: CERIS)12. Central and Eastern Europe is one of the favourite research fields as some of the professors involved are specialised in Cen-tral and East European policies (for example Prof. Mario Telo). The research topics are as diverse as the interests of the participating scholars, ranging from �Democratic Transition in Eastern and Central Europe� and �Cold War and Civil Society� to �The Exile of Central Euro-pean Intellectuals since 1945� and �Frontier Towns at the Turn of the 21st Century�. Some publications, published by Editions de l�université de Bruxelles: �Repenser l�Europe�, edited by Mario Telo and P. Magnette, 1996; �La gauche face aux mutations en Europe�, edited by P. Delwit and J. -M. De Waele, 1993; J.M. De Waele, �L�émergence des partis politiques en Europe centrale�, 1999. In the Flemish part of the country, the university of Ghent hosts a Russian Institute, which is cur-rently organising an educational programme in Russian Studies. In 1990, the State University of Ghent and the steel concern Sidmar founded this institute that by means of courses in history, literature, economics, law, politics, art etc. wants to contribute to the development of Belgo-Russian commercial relations. It is linked to both the Slavonic Department and the Centre for Central and East European Economies of 11 Centre de Recherches Pluridisciplinaires sur la Transi-tion des Pays de l�Est vers l�Economie de Marché (CRITEME), Institut de Sociologie, ULB, av. F.D. Roosevelt, 1050 Brussels. 12 Université Libre de Bruxelles. Sciences Politiques. Li-cence en Sciences Politiques, orientation relations interna-tionales. Module de specialisation Europe Centrale et de l�Est (Centre facultaire de recherches internationales (CERIS) ULB, avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 1050 Brussels.


the Faculty of Economics and Business Ad-ministration (which provides the director of the Russian Institute). The president of the Russian Institute is Prof. Hugo de Maegd, specialised in Russian economy. The director is Prof. Koen Schoors. Its functioning is currently under re-consideration, but it will resume its work from September 2000 onwards13. The Leuven Institute for Central and East Euro-pean Studies (LICOS) was founded in 1990 as a multidisciplinary center, bringing together re-searchers of different disciplines who were wor-king on Russia and her former satellite states. Soon afterwards, this institute was formally incorporated into the Faculty of Economics. It became a centre for Transition economics, focusing on labour market implications of developments in transition economies. It is no longer confining itself to Central and Eastern Europe, but tries to study China as a transition economy as well14. Some publications: Alan Mayhew (1998), �Rec-reating Europe. The European Union�s Policy towards Central and Eastern Europe�, Cam-bridge University Press. Jozef Konings (jointly with F. Abraham), �Does the opening of Central and Eastern Europe de-stroy Jobs in the West?� Leuven European standpoint 1, 1997. Some publications: K. Malfliet and P. Ver-meersch, �Labour Market and Social Policy in Poland�, Garant, Leuven, 1998; A. Krekeler-Joris, �Turkey: A Bridge to Central Asia?� IEP Working paper, 1998, 34p; K. Malfliet and R. Laenen, �Minority Policy in Central Europe. The Link between Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy and European Integration, 1999. Last March, both the Institute for European Studies at the Catholic University Leuven and the Institute for European Policy at the Catholic University Leuven were engaged in a project to create a chair �Baillet-Latour� on the relations between Russia and the European Union. This project will not only focus on the economic and political aspects of this relationship, but it will also take into account the specific historical di-mensions of the problem. At the same time, it is a careful attempt to develop Slavic and East European Studies as a real Area Study, refuting the splitting up of disciplines. Both institutes will organise teaching and research in this field, they will cooperate to analyse the new relation between Russia and the European Union. The chair aims to foster studies on Russian identity, Russian self-definition, throughout time as well as today. Likewise, The Chair will support the study of European policy towards Russia. Dur-

13 Russisch Instituut, Sint-Pietersplein 4, 9000 Gent 14 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, LICOS, DeBériotstraat 34, 3000 Leuven http://www.econ.kuleuven.ac.be/licos/

ing the 2000-2001 academic year the chair will sponsor a series of lectures. At the Free University of Brussels, the Flemish counterpart of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Prof. Erik Franckx is an expert on East Euro-pean law systems within the Center for Interna-tional Law15. Prof. Franckx is the successor of professor Frits Gorlé, who founded the Centre for the Study of East European Socialist Law Systems (the so called �Centrum Oost�), at the end of the seventies. The recently founded Baltic, Central and East European network, situated in the heart of Brussels, is a non-profit organisation that offers a meeting place to anyone interested in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Baltic re-gion, whether from official (governmental), pri-vate (corporate) or scientific origin16. European institutes At Louvain-la-Neuve, the study of Central and Eastern Europe is integrated in the Institut d�études européennes. The institute gathered quite some knowledge on Central Europe, with Prof. Reszohazy (a specialist in Hungary) and Prof. Bernard, who studies, among others, the social policy of some countries of Central and South-eastern Europe. The institute is primarily involved in the study of the European enlarge-ment. It is also the stake of ECSA Belgium (European Community Studies Association - Belgian Branch. The director of the institute is Prof. Michel Dumoulin (a well known historian). At Leuven University (the Flemish counterpart of Louvain-la-Neuve), the Institute for European Policy (IEP) aims at the multidisciplinary study of institutional system transformations on the European continent. The IEP�s realm of study includes the European Union countries as well as those of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The institute consists of two research groups: �Institutions and Policy of the European Union� (Prof. Delmartino) and �Institutions and Policy of Central and East European Countries� (Prof. K. Malfliet)17. Each group has its own profile and approaches the European issues from its distinct point of view. Both groups have a coordinated policy, take joint initiatives and have common research pro-jects. Concrete projects of the research group �Institutions and Policy of the Central and East European Countries� are for example: The fed-eral concept of Russia; Russian foreign Policy, Russian minorities in the Near Abroad, Institu-

15 Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Vakgroep Internationaal Recht, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel http://www.vub.ac.be/INTR/ 16 BCE Network, De Warande, Zinnerstraat 1, 1000 Brus-sel, http://www.bce-network.org/ 17 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Instituut voor Europees Beleid, Van Evenstraat 2B, 3000 Leuven http://cwisdb.cc.kuleuven.ac.be./onderzoek/T/groep 151115.htm.


tional development in the CIS, Health Policy in Bulgaria, Roma minorities in Central Europe, Hungarian minorities in Central Europe, Political and social implications of EU-enlargement, EU-Russia relations. At the European Institute of Ghent University, Prof. Marc Maresceau has made some major contributions - both in theory and practice, to the constitutional reforms in several countries of Central and Eastern Europe18. Legal aspects of EU-enlargement towards the countries of Cen-tral and Eastern Europe are in the focus of in-terest of this institute. Prof. Maresceau organ-ised several conferences on this theme, the last one in February of this year on the problem of borders and enlargement in Europe. On the other hand, the Institute for European Studies is doing research in the field of enlargement of the European Union towards Central and Eastern Europe. The institute hosts a well-organised li-brary and a documentation centre with a com-plete collection of official documents of the European Union. The �Institut d�études européennes� at the uni-versité Libre de Bruxelles coordinates the dis-persed knowledge of Europe, spread over dif-ferent faculties of the university. Several sub-centers created a distinct profile in specific fields or disciplines. Besides ECARE (European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics), there is CEVIPOL, Centre d�étude de la vie politique, a cooperation between the Institut d�études européennes and the Faculty of So-cial, Political and Economic Sciences. CEVIPOL is involved in the study of political parties, party programs and ideologies on the (pan) European continent19. Some publications: �De la question albanaise au Kosovo� (J.M. De Waele and Kolë Gjeloshaj, (eds.), Brussels, 1999; �La démocratisation en Europe centrale. La coopération paneuro-péenne des partis politiques� (P. Delwit and J.M. De Waele, Paris, 1998. Besides these university institutes, Brussels harbours some European centers, which estab-lished themselves close to the European institu-tions and which have European officials and diplomats as their target public. The Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) is a typical example of a research institute, specialising in policy studies and bringing together diplomats and European officials. SEP stands for the Study Group for European Policy and although it generally focuses on EU-matters, it turned in the last years to enlargement problems as well. SEP is a member of an international network of European institutes and centers: TEPSA (Trans 18 Universiteit Gent, Europees Instituut, Universiteitsstraat 4, 9000 Gent http://www.law.rug.ac.be/europe/index.html 19 Université Libre de Bruxelles, Centre d�étude de la vie politique (CEVIPOL), http://www.ulb.ac.be/soco/sevipol/

European Policy Studies Association). This in-dependent network promotes international re-search on European integration in order to stimulate discussion on policies and political op-tions for Europe. TEPSA projects include re-search and studies commissioned by the Euro-pean institutions (Parliament, Commission, So-cial and Economic Committee), foundations and national public and private authorities. These studies address the functioning of the political system of the Community and its institutions and relations with national and regional struc-tures. Research is also carried out on several Community policies such as: the economic and monetary union, Economic and Social Cohe-sion, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Justice and Home Affairs, Economic and Social Policy in the Perspective of Enlargement. Some publications: Jacques Vandamme (ed.) �Dialogue social et fonction consultative profes-sionnelle dans la communauté européenne�, Presses universitaires européennes, 1993; Paul van den Bempt and Greet Theelen �From Eu-rope Agreements to Accession. The Integration of the Central and Eastern European Countries into the European Union�, Presses Universi-taires européennes, Brussels 1996; Achille Hannequart, �Economic and Social Cohesion in Europe. A New Objective for Integration, Routledge, London and New York, 1992. The �Observatoire Social Européen� (OSE), founded in 1984 is an information and research centre focussing on the social aspects of Euro-pean integration20. Its aim is to provide - espe-cially trade unionists, researchers, politicians, officials, journalists and students - with analyti-cal data and critical comment relating to the Eu-ropean Union�s activities and policies. The OSE works in three areas in particular: institutional matters generally, social policy and citizenship, economic and monetary Union (EMU). An academic scientific committee carefully monitors the quality of the work of OSE. The Observatoire Social Européen�s monthly four-page e-letter, focussing on European social news is available on the Web. Recently, OSE published a working paper on social policy im-plications of the enlargement: Cécile BARBIER, �L�élargissement de l�Union européenne aux pays d�Europe centrale et orientale�, 1999, 28p. The Royal Institute for International Relations (Koninlijk Instituut voor Internationale Betrek-kingen) is involved in European and interna-tional studies and publishes the review �Studia Diplomatica�21. This review publishes regularly

20 Observatoire Social Européen: Rue PE Janson, 1050 Brussels (http://www.ose.be) 21 Koninklijk Instituut voor Internationale Betrekkingen (Royal Institute for International Relations), Liefdadigheids-straat 13, 1210 Brussels. Tel. 02/223.41.14; fax: 02/223.41.16.


on Central and Eastern Europe, related to in-ternational relations and diplomatic issues. Individual research in the faculties Individual expertise in Central and Eastern Europe can be found at different faculties of the Belgian universities. At the Free University of Brussels, the Flemish counterpart of the Université libre de Bruxelles (VUB) Prof. Bruno Coppieters of the Depart-ment of Political Sciences is a specialist in the Caucasus region, especially in problems of na-tionalism, state building, secessionism and fed-eralism22. He published several books on this issue. In Slavonic studies, the knowledge of the Bal-kan countries is quite developed owing to the special expertise of Prof. R. Detrez, a specialist in the languages and cultures of South-eastern Europe 23. Problems of defence and security related to Central and Eastern Europe are intensively studied by the �Koninklijk Hoger Instituut voor defensie� (KHID) with its Defensie Studiecen-trum and at the royal military academy. One PhD student (M. Van Bladel) is for example preparing a study on the Russian army. Prof. Yvan Vanden Berghe of the Faculty of Po-litical and Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp has a solid reputation in the field of the history of the cold war. At the same university, L. Tasmowski is leading a centre for Romanian studies, focussing on linguistics24. Prof. Bergmans, professor of sociology at K.U.Leuven is the Belgian representative in the Observatoire Social Européen, which focuses on social policy in Europe. This research group published a paper on the implication for social policy of European Union enlargement. Interuniversitary initiatives Notwithstanding the general lack of governmen-tal support and the catastrophic dispersal of people and funds, there are some remarkable inter-university initiatives. The Belgian Centre for Slavonic Studies, grouping some 20 schol-ars, is no longer merely philological and opened up to a broader field of disciplines. The Belgian Slavonic journal, �Slavica Gandensia�, which is closely related to this center, publishes articles in the field of languages and literature, with ex-ceptionally some articles related to other disci-plines. The interuniversitary Centre for East European Studies organises since 1978 an MA in East

22 Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Politieke Wetenschappen, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel (http://poli.vub.ac.be/) 23 http://www.slavnet.com/ 24 Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen, Departement Politie-ke en Sociale Wetenschappen, Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Wilrijk; Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen, Centrum voor Roemeense Studies (CERES), Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Wilrijk (http://www.ua.ac.be/nl/onderzoek/index.html).

European Studies. This graduate programme, organised with the financing of the National Fund of Scientific Research, offers a rich inter-disciplinary programme of courses in Central and East European affairs in the Flemish uni-versities of the country. The group publishes a �Contactblad Oost-Europakunde�. Research be-tween the universities resulted in a book, hon-ouring Prof. Frits Gorlé: P. de Meyere, E. Franckx, J. -M. Henckaerst and K. Malfliet, �Oost-Europa in Europa. Eenheid en Verschei-denheid� (Eastern Europe in Europe. Unity and Diversity), 1998, VUBpress, Brussels, 368p. Both initiatives will have to prove their viability in the future. However, for the time being they are the only sustainable ways of bringing to-gether knowledge, people and means in the field of Central and East European Studies.

Denmark

Ole Nørgaard, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus25

Social Science on Central and Eastern Europe in Denmark Since the Second World War Denmark has been politically and culturally oriented toward the Anglo-American world. This point of refer-ence has had its definite impact on cultural and scientific developments. In Soviet and East European Studies, the dividing between pro-Western and pro-Eastern scientists was obvi-ously reinforced, as the approach to and inter-pretation of their object of study had wide-ranging moral and political connotations. Being a small country with but a handful of people working in the field, the divide was at times rein-forced by professional, institutional and even personal factors. After the fall of communism, Soviet and East European Studies in Denmark are, as in other countries, gradually loosing their professional isolation, becoming gradually integrated into the general social sciences. Soviet and East European Studies in Denmark in the 1980s Soviet Studies were a product of the political needs generated by the cold war. Whether seen from the pro-Soviet left or from the anti-Communist and Western oriented right, the un-derstanding of the Central and East European societies, up till the very collapse of commu-nism, provided ammunition for the political and ideological disputes about the virtues of capital-ism versus socialism. Various professional and institutional perspectives were added to this di-vide.

25 e-mail: [email protected], Tel.: +45-89-42 1334; fax: +45-86-13 9839


Until the mid-1970s East European Studies (or Soviet Studies, the terms of that time) in Den-mark were concentrated in the Slavic Depart-ments at the universities of Copenhagen, Aar-hus, and Odense. Led by a few classical histo-rians, among them in particular the late profes-sor Noerretranders at the University of Copen-hagen, they emphasized traditional area stud-ies. The ambition was primarily to understand the logic and functioning of the communist countries - and definitely not to engage in broader theory building. In mainstream social sciences remained the exception at the political, economic and social science departments for East European Studies. Impeded by linguistic barriers, by political sensitivities and in particu-lar the absence of hard data during the heyday of behavioralism, social scientists avoided this region. The challenge to the area study approach came from a new generation of scholars with a dual competence in a social science discipline and a Slavic (mostly Russian) language. While few in number, this new generation also benefited from the deténte of the early 1970s, which partly revived social sciences in a number of the communist countries, partly provided oppor-tunities for travel and scientific exchange pro-grams. Yet, it was not until the early 1980s that this new generation of scholars had reached an academic age that opened positions at major social science departments. This new trend be-came institutionalized particularly at the De-partment of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, and at the University Center of South Jutland. Here a small group of people attached to the 'Institute of East-West Studies', had worked since the early 1970s on economic and political issues related to the East-West division and especially the deténte process. The Co-penhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI), established as an independent institute by the Danish Parliament in 1985, also aimed at sup-porting and strengthening multidisciplinary re-search on Peace and Security, contributed sig-nificantly to East European Studies in their as-signed field. Yet, when communism collapsed, East European Studies in Denmark remained largely monopolized by the Slavonic depart-ments. This was to change radically in the 1990s. East European Studies in the 1990s The 1990s marked a significant shift in Danish East European Studies. While the Slavonic de-partments maintained their area study focus, a number of social science research institutions allocated substantial resources to the study of Central and East European politics, societies and economies.

Among these especially the Department of Po-litical Science at the University of Aarhus,26 has hosted a sizeable number of major research programs related to developments in the former communist block. This development was initi-ated with the appointment of a few junior schol-ars specializing in Soviet Studies in the mid-1990s, and further augmented by a deep in-volvement in a number of bilateral and EU funded technical assistance programs on edu-cation and research in former communist coun-tries. The research resulted in a number of ma-jor research publications: on socio-political development in Central Europe (Curt and Lene Sørensen); on Baltic Politics and Society (Ole Nørgaard and Lars Johannsen); on Russian Foreign Policy (Mette Skak); on Russian legal development (Karin Hilmer Petersen); on envi-ronmental policies in the Baltic States (Ole Nørgaard and Karin Hilmer Pedersen); on con-stitutional development in post-communist countries (Lars Johannsen), and on the inter-play between economic and political reforms (Ole Nørgaard). This research is being contin-ued in two major programs. One program man-aged by Curt Sørensen, on nation building, mass politics, and cleavage structures in Cen-tral Europe, applies a historical-sociological ap-proach in an effort to improve our understand-ing of politics in post-Communist Central Europe. Another program, 'Democracy, the State and Administrative Reforms' managed by Ole Nørgaard, explores the function and role of the state and state administration in fostering democracy and economic development in the post-communist world.27 The program com-bines statistical analyses with macro-insti-tutional and case studies. The comparative case studies focus on the capacity of state ad-ministrations in the privatization of telecommu-nications and agriculture. During the 1990s the 'Institute of East-West Studies' at the University Center of South Jut-land maintained its focus on Central and East-ern Europe, and made a number of important contributions in the field: on Russian domestic politics (Jens-Jørgen Jensen and Märta-Lisa Magnusson); on Eastern Europe and the EU (Finn Laursen and Søren Riishøj). In addition Märta-Lisa Magnusson achieved international standing as a major expert in Russian regional politics, in Caucasian politics and in particular in developments related to the conflict in Chech-nya. However, at the turn of the century the Uni-versity Center of South Jutland merged with the University of Odense to become the new University of South Denmark. In that process the 'Institute of East-West Studies' was dis-

26 http://www.ps.au.dk/ 27 http://www.demstar.dk/


solved and the staff integrated into the newly established Department of Political Sciences at the new university.28 Yet, the research focus of the staff remains on Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular on Russian European policy (Jens-Jørgen Jensen), Central European politics and society (Lene Bøgh Søresen), po-litical parties (Søren Riishøj), and center-periphery conflicts and federalism in Russia (Märtha-Lisa Magnusson). Turning to economic research, economists at Roskilde University Center29 have made impor-tant contributions in the field of political econ-omy (Klaus Nielsen), environmental economy (Hans Aage), and environmental law, regula-tion, and policy (Børge Klemmensen). A signifi-cant development in Danish East European economic research was the establishment of the Center for East European Studies (CEES)30 in 1996. Since the beginning of 2000 it has been affiliated with the Department of Interna-tional Business and Management. Directed by Niels Mygind, the Center focuses its activities in particular on governance and enterprise re-structuring, on management in transition, and foreign investments in Eastern Europe. Also the Slavonic Institutes maintain islands of social science research. The Slavonic Depart-ment, University of Aarhus, hosts the leading Danish expert on Czech politics (Peter Bugge) and a Ph.D. program comparing political cul-tures in the Czech and Slovak republics.31 At the University of South Denmark, the Center for Russian and East European Studies32 (Bent Jensen and Erik Kulvig) concentrates on Dan-ish-Russian relations and on internal develop-ments in the former Soviet Union, taking advan-tage of the newly opened archives. At the East European Institute33 of the University of Co-penhagen Niels Erik Rosenfelt has made impor-tant contributions to our understanding of the power structures in the Soviet system, and younger scholars are engaged in research on church-state relationships in Eastern Europe and on Russia-EU relations. Finally, two major research institutions are con-tinuously engaged in research related to do-mestic and international developments in Cen-tral and Eastern Europe, but each with their own focus. The Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI)34 is an independent government funded research institution established by stat-ute in 1995. The institute's aim is to strengthen 28 http://www.sam.sdu.dk/eindex.htm 29 http://www.ruc.dk/ 30 http://www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/sider/object.html 31 http://www.au.dk/en/hum/slavisk/ 32 http://www.ou.dk/hum/studier/slavisk/index.html 33 http://www.hum.ku.dk/osteuro/ 34 http://www.dupi.dk/

Danish research, analysis and information ac-tivities on international relations and Danish foreign policy. In that context, Central and East-ern Europe obviously occupy a central position. Research at the institute is ordinarily under-taken upon governmental or parliamentary re-quest if they require a thorough analysis of a specific topic. The focus is presently laid on three main areas of research: the New World order, the organization of Europe, and finally, Denmark's place in a new regional and interna-tional context. The Copenhagen Peace Re-search Institute (COPRI)35 was established by the Danish Parliament in 1985 for the purpose of supporting and strengthening multidiscipli-nary research on Peace and Security. Also here research on Central and Eastern Europe has had an important position, and at present the program on Security in the Nordic and Baltic Sea Area (NORD) in particular provides impor-tant insights into the dynamics of the post-communist countries in the Baltic region. Concluding observations Studies on Central and Eastern Europe (or So-viet Studies) in Denmark were born out of the political necessities generated by the cold war. These needs defined the research agenda and politics, framed the alternative perspectives on the communist system - and the ensuing con-flicts. In addition, during the 1980s a new gen-eration of researchers had made their way into academia, challenging the traditional area stud-ies tradition. All, of course, changed with the collapse of the communist systems. With the disappearance of the old systems, however, the expertise on those systems was outdated too. Some scholars continued passionately to fight the battles of yesteryear - who had been right about what and when. However, the field be-came open to a new cohort of social scientists who used new and generally broader compara-tive methods and had theoretically based per-spectives on Central and Eastern Europe. In this process the traditional strongholds of Cen-tral and Eastern European Studies (the Sla-vonic departments) returned to cultural studies, to history or to languages, and only a few main-tained a social sciences based perspective on the region. This role was instead taken over by major social science institutions, where a grow-ing group of younger scholars became engaged in 'transitionalogy', or whatever became the la-bel for those engaged in the study of the grand transformation in post-communist countries. All the general social scientists that have or are in the process of including Central and Eastern Europe into broader comparative ventures are beyond the scope of this article. From a Danish perspective, this seems, however, to be the general trend. The days of the East European 35 http://www.copri.dk/


specialist are over. In the future, we will see East European Studies becoming a 'normal' part of the social sciences - just as we hope and believe that the post-Communist countries themselves will become normal societies. Selected list of recent publications on Central and Eastern Europe by Danish scholars36 • Aage, Hans: Environmental transition in

Nordic and Baltic countries, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998.

• Bugge, Peter: �Democracy and Parliament in Czech Politics�, pp. 161-177 in Lene Bogh Sorensen and Leslie E. Eliason (eds.): Forward to the Past: Continuity and Change in Political Development in Hun-gary, Austria and the Czech and Slovak Republics, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997.

• Bugge, Peter: Czech Perceptions of the Perspective of EU Membership: Havel vs. Klaus, San Domenico di Fiesole,: European University Institute Working Paper, RSC No. 2000/10, 55 p., 2000.

• Faurby, Ib in co-operation with Märta-Lisa Magnusson, �The battle (s) of Groznyj�, in: Baltic Defence Review, no. 2, 1989, pp. 75-87, Baltic Defence College, Tartu.

• Friis, Lykke and Anna Murphy: EU Govern-ance and Central and Eastern Europe - Where are the Boundaries? HCM Occa-sional Paper 35, October 1997, from the Danish Institute of International Affairs: www.dupi.dk.

• Friis, Lykke: Eastern Enlargement - A com-plex juggle (with Anna Murphy) in M.G. Cowles and M. Smith (red.): Risks, Re-forms, Resistance or Revival: The State of the European Union (forthcoming 2000), from the Danish Institute of International Af-fairs: www.dupi.dk.

• Hansen, Birthe and Bertel Heurlin, (red.), The Baltic States in World Politics, Birthe Hansen, Bertel Heurlin, (red.), Surrey, Cur-zon, 1998

• Johannsen, Lars The Constitution and De-mocracy: The Choice and Consequence of the Constitution in Post-Communist Coun-tries, Aarhus: Politica, 2000 forthcoming.

• Loees-Beck, Michael S. and Martin Paldam: Electoral Studies � Economics and Elec-tions, vol. 19, no. 2-3, June-Sept., 2000.

• Magnusson, Märta-Lisa: �The Failure of Conflict Prevention and Management: The Case of Chechnya. Part 1: Conflict As-sessment and Pre-war Escalation.� Paper presented at a Conference on �Conflict and Forced Displacement in the Caucasus - Perspectives, Challenges and Responses�, Danish Refugee Council, Copenhagen

36 Compiled by Luise Pape Møller.

Sept. 28th- 30th, 1998. Published in Tom Trier & Lars Fuch, (eds.) Conflict and Forced Displacement in the Caucasus. Copenhagen, Danish Refugee Council, 1999, pp. 62-71.

• Meyer, Klaus: Institutions, Transaction Costs and Entry Mode Choice in Eastern Europe, working paper, electronic version: www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/download1.html, 2000.

• Mygind, Niels: Societies in Transition, elec-tronic version: www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/sit/p1.html, 2000.

• Nielsen, Klaus: The Transformation Proc-ess in Eastern Europe. Economic Reform, Social Conflict and Institutional Change, Research Report, 1997 (in the process of extension and revision, to be published by Routledge, 2000).

• Nielsen, Klaus: Industrial Restructuring and Industrial Policy. The Dynamics of Change of Industrial Policy in Central and Eastern Europe in Response to Domestic Needs and External Requirements, Working Pa-pers on European Integration and Regime Formation, TKI, SUC, 42/98.

• Nørgaard, Ole and Lars Johannsen: The Baltic States after Independence, Chelten-ham: Edwin Elgar, 1999.

• Nørgaard, Ole: Economic Institutions and Democratic Reform. A Comparative Analy-sis of Post-Communist Countries, Chelten-ham: Edwin Elgar, 2000.

• Pedersen, Karin Hilmer: Rusland mod årtu-sindskiftet. Feudalstat, retsstat, velfærdsstat, eller ...? [Russia towards the millennium: Feudal State, Constitutional State, Welfare State or�?] Jurist- og Øko-nomforbundets forlag, København, 1998.

• Petersen, Karin Hilmer: �Political Parties in the Decision Making of the Russian Federa-tion� and "Postscriptum" in: Eckerberg and Pedersen (eds.), Democracy's Dawn: Par-liamentary Elections in North West Russia, Umeå University, Research Report 1998.

• Riishøj, Søren and Finn Laursen: The EU and Central Europe � Status and Pros-pects, Esbjerg: South Jutland University Press, 1996.

• Rosenfeldt, Niels Erik: �By the Grace of His-tory - Political Language, Ideology, and Le-gitimacy in Communist Regimes", En slavist i humanismens tegn. Festskrift til Kristine Heltberg, Copenhagen 1994, pp. 155-67, from the East European Institute (University of Copenhagen): http://www.hum.ku.dk/osteuro/medarb/rosenfeldt.html.

• Rosenfeldt, Niels Erik: Stalin's Secret Chancellery and the Comintern, Copenha-

http://www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/download1.html

http://www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/download1.html

http://www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/sit/p1html

http://www.econ.cbs.dk/institutes/cees/pub/sit/p1html

http://www.hum.ku.dk/osteuro/medarb/rosenfeldt.html



gen 1991, at the East European Institute (University of Copenhagen): http://www.hum.ku.dk/osteuro/medarb/rosenfeldt.html.

• Semjonov, Aleksei: Estonia: Nation Building and Integration. Political and Legal Aspects, 8/2000, from the Copenhagen Peace Re-search Institute: www.copri.dk/menu/pumenu.htm.

• Skak, Mette, From Empire to Anarchy: Postcommunist Foreign Policy and Interna-tional Relations, London: Hurst , 1996

• Sørensen, Curt: �The European Participa-tion Crises: The Problem of Democracy� in Erik Beukel et al. (eds.), Elites, Parties and Democracy, Odense University Press, 1999.

• Sørensen, Lene Bøgh and Leslie B. Eli-ason: Forward to the past: continuity and change in political development in Hungary, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Repub-lics. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997.

• Sørensen, Lene Bøgh and Leslie B. Eliason (eds.): Facism, Liberalism and Totalitarian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press (forthcom-ing).

• Zlatko, Isakovic: Democratization, Democ-racy and Ethnic Conflicts in the Balkans, 9/2000, from the Copenhagen Peace Re-search Institute: www.copri.dk/menu/pumenu.htm.

Finland

Markku Kivinen Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Hel-sinkii37, Pekka Sutela, Institute of Economies in Transi-tion38

Social science research on Eastern Europe in Finland39 Although Russia is Finland�s largest neighbour, Russian studies have traditionally not been deemed as a major field of the Finnish social sciences and humanities. This has been the case in spite of the fact that Finnish-Soviet trade was very significant for both sides and Finnish neutrality in foreign policy was based on the agreement on �Treaty of Friendship and Mu-

37 P.O. Box 59, FIN-00114 University of Helsinki. Tel.: +358-9-19122787; fax: +358-9-19123822, e-mail: [email protected] 38 Bank of Finnland, PB 160, 00101 Helsinki 39 This article is an abbreviated version of the �Introduction� in: Russia: More Different Than Most, Markku Kangaspuro (ed.) forthcoming in Kikimora Publications, series B, July 2000

tual Assistance� with the Soviet Union. In other Scandinavian countries, several institutes ex-isted during Soviet times. Finland was a rare exception: there were no organised Soviet stud-ies to speak of. One really cannot point out any major Finnish academic experts on the Soviet world, at least not outside of Russian language and literature studies. Why was this the case? What was the Finnish relationship to the big neighbour in intellectual terms? One of the main explanations for the scarcity of Soviet studies was plainly the lack of genuine intellectual interest. It should be noted in this context that Finnish social sciences and hu-manities were more generally concentrated on national issues. Not much interest in American society or even in European societies existed. One could almost claim that social and cultural studies were seen as an aspect of state build-ing. It would be misleading, however, to argue that there were no Soviet studies whatsoever in Finland before the 1990�s. Some major contri-butions were published as dissertations in eco-nomics (Sutela 1984) and in political science (Susiluoto 1982, Iivonen 1990). Issues of Soviet trade were also analysed (Salminen 1981). Many books were published concerning the his-tory of relations between Finland and Russia. Many important works were produced within the departments of Russian languages and litera-ture. Altogether, by the mid 1990�s, the total number of doctoral dissertations concerning Russia was more than fifty. Even in those fields of study where general interest in Soviet issues was very marginal, prominent individual re-searchers were following their own way. This was the case, for example, with Juha Tolonen in legal theory (see e.g. Tolonen 1976). It is char-acteristic of the Finnish case that these and other scholars of the period are fundamentally self-taught. No Finnish university offered courses or seminars in Soviet and East Euro-pean studies at the time. As international links were also almost totally lacking, this research has many of the hallmarks of individual effort. One existing institutional basis for Soviet stud-ies in Finland was the Finnish-Soviet Commit-tee for Scientific and Technological Co-operation. This committee had working groups in several disciplines both in the natural sci-ences and in the social sciences and humani-ties. And it was in this framework that Finnish scholars had the opportunity to get to know their Russian colleagues. In the beginning, con-tacts were restricted mainly to Moscow but dur-ing the Perestroika years, they already had en-joyed a broader geographical coverage. Al-though in many cases the joint empirical re-search done was not at an international state-of-the-art level, this co-operation did make initial empirical data collection possible. Even if theo-



http://www.copri.dk/menu/pumenu.htm

http://www.copri.dk/menu/pumenu.htm


retical discussions were not always convincing, they opened up new relations and possibilities, which could be used when times were changing and ideological restrictions became increasingly obsolete. For example, in the working group on sociology in the 1980�s, there was active joint research and discussion on the following topics: • gender issues; comparative analysis of so-

cial structure; time budgets; • the media and images of the Soviet Union

in the Finnish press and vice versa; • working life and conditions of work; and so-

cial problems, especially alcohol policy. Many issues were dealt within a comparative context. Research groups produced joint re-ports. Although they were not theoretically so-phisticated, they produced valuable data for ongoing discussions. Within Finnish sociology, a specific relationship with Polish sociologists had been established already before (Allardt and Wesolovsky, 1978) on a more equal pro-fessional basis. Cooperation with the Estonians had also started already in the 1960�s. Multi-disciplinary co-operation had been going on within the Nordic countries on studying Rus-sian and East European issues. In the years of Perestroika, some enthusiastic efforts were made to develop this co-operation on a more organised basis. A jointly compiled journal was published in English and the Nordic Committee for Research on Eastern States (Nordisk ko-mitet för öststatsforskning) worked as a forum for discussion. This interest however, though genuine, was not on a sufficiently firm footing and after a few years such formal Nordic co-operation faded away. Research communities in different countries were too small and diverse to maintain the necessary degree of cohesion. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, among other things, a huge intellectual challenge. It had several important implications for Western institutes of Soviet studies. Originally, only few could see the true complexity of the transition. Expertise in Russia, her history, culture, and the Soviet system seemed no longer necessary. Even worse, it could be a handicap. An econo-mist versatile in the Russian language had to be a specialist of the planned system. There-fore, he had the wrong mindset for the tasks of transition. So, ignorance of a country perversely became a benefit. Interest in Russian studies diminished and, above all, the political interest in financing specific institutions for this purpose was not nearly as compelling as it had been during the cold war period. Several institutes were reorganised. The tendency to integrate Russian and East European studies within a broader framework of European studies was rather strong.

In 1995, Finland became a member of the European Union (EU). The Finnish membership of the EU implied that the relationship with Rus-sia was no longer a relationship between a su-perpower and a small country. Finland is quite determined in seeing its own situation as a part of a broader constellation between the Euro-pean Union and Russia. In this context, a search for Finnish expertise on Russian issues was inevitable, not only for Finland, but also for Europe in more general terms. That partly ex-plains the recent upsurge of Russian and East European studies in Finland. In the middle of the 1990�s, the Finnish Ministry of Education started two comprehensive efforts to promote Russian studies in Finland. The first initiative was to launch a distinctive research programme at the Academy of Finland. The second initiative was to establish the Alek-santeri Institute40 as a special institution at the University of Helsinki. The institute is working as a nation-wide network for Russian and East European studies. The networking of the Fin-nish universities was regarded as inevitable be-cause of the need for job sharing and the lim-ited resources in individual universities. Finland has a highly dispersed set of universities, most of which have been founded within the last few decades, often as regional policy measures. Almost all of them have at least some activities in Russian and East European studies. The Aleksanteri Institute has good connections to the administration and to economic life. The Ministry of Education provides its basic funding. The various research and development projects are financed with national and EU project fund-ing consortia. In 1999, total funding was over 10 mill. Finnish marks, in 2000, the budget is about the same. Its staff comprises about 20 persons and is directed by Professor Markku Kivinen. The mission statement of the Institute is to • promote research on Russian and Eastern

Europe • promote and coordinate academic studies

and continuing education on Russia and Eastern Europe

• maintain databases and information ser-vices

• offer expert services concerning research on contemporary issues in the region

• promote networking in the academic com-munity with actors in business, politics and public administration

• promote Finnish expertise abroad • offer consulting services particularly in

connection with the EU funding of academic projects

• publish research results in Kikimora Publi-cation series.

40 http://www.halvi.helsinki.fi/aleksanteri/English/


In 1998, the Institute started both an M.A. pro-gramme and a Ph.D. programme for the field. About 25 young scholars are currently enrolled in the doctoral programme of the Aleksanteri Institute. The programme is based on multidis-ciplinary courses and it is assumed that all new scholars in the field have a rather thorough knowledge of transition, Russian culture and history and also of Finnish-Russian political and economic relations. The doctoral programme involves co-operation with leading Western and Russian specialists. The M.A. programme has a similar kind of multidisciplinary profile. Each of the Finnish Universities has developed a profile of its own in teaching Russian and East Euro-pean issues. For example, the University of Lapland is active in arctic issues, while the Uni-versity of Joensuu, which is geographically lo-cated near the Eastern border, is concentrating on the problems of Karelia and other border re-gions. The University of Jyväskylä is active in intercultural communication and the University of Tampere has a long tradition in analysing the working life and social structure of Russia. Of course, Russian culture and history is taught in several universities and the University of Hel-sinki has several strong departments in different faculties. Such division of labour is, of course, not determined from above, and it is all the time changing according to the interests of the re-searchers and students. Several universities have also launched their own M.A. courses and have even established a few professorships, al-though only on a temporary basis so far. Specific units for studying East-West trade have long been working at the Turku School of Eco-nomics and Business Administration and more recently also at the Technological University of Lappeenranta. The Helsinki School of Econom-ics and Business Administration has recently established a new institute for Russian and Bal-tic issues. In addition to the universities, several research institutes are working in the field. The Bank of Finland has an internationally renowned Insti-tute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT), and an important body of Russian expertise has been groomed at the Finnish Institute of For-eign Affairs. Many Finnish ministries have been active in funding more practically oriented re-search and several development projects, fi-nanced by regional councils and the EU, have a research component in their approach. Worth mentioning here is the Finnish Institute for Rus-sian and East European Studies (FIREES), which concentrates its activities on support ser-vices, such as library supply and conference organisation41.

41 http://www.rusin.fi

The recently founded Finnish polytechnics have also been activating their teaching and even been conducting some research on Russian and East European issues. The research programme of the Finnish Acad-emy was started with a comprehensive discus-sion of its focus. For example, the following is-sues were raised in the discussion: To what extent should the programme concen-trate on current political and economic issues? The Ministry of Education, which provides fund-ing for the programme, was keen to point out the priority of economic, political and adminis-trative topics. On the other hand, it was argued by many in the Academy that the present could be understood and analysed only on the basis of fundamental research on Russian culture and history. • To what extent should the development of

Finnish research and expertise be focused on those regions of Russia, which geo-graphically are most attractive for practical interests , that is, mainly on northwest Rus-sia?

• Should the funding be concentrated on the already existing strong fields, or should it especially generate interests in new disci-plines, especially those that would be rele-vant for contemporary change?

• Should the programme support rather large research groups or individual researchers?

Given the fact that many universities and disci-plines are represented in the decision-making research councils of the Academy of Finland the result seems to be a compromise allowing many kinds of approaches and emphasising the fact that the focus should not be too restrictively defined. In the actual programme, strong fields of study appeared to be social sciences (seven projects) and history (six). Culture and lan-guage were represented by several projects, al-together five. Four projects dealt with economic issues while only one project had a politological profile. Only one project dealt with change in the legal system. The relative quantitative weakness of political and legal studies in the programme is a clear problem, and presumably reflects the small amount of interest in these disciplines. Due to the lack of sufficiently strong proposals from the research community, the original priorities of the Ministry could not be fully implemented. As the discussion above should make clear, the interest in Eastern and Central Europe in Finland is primarily a matter of interest in Rus-sia. However, there are intensive connections with Estonia which result in a wide range of re-seach projects. Since co-operation with Estonia is regarded as mainly problem-free, it needs much less co-ordination than its bigger neighbour Russia. At Aleksanteri Institute, there


are eg. research projects conducted on: �Accul-turation and Identity of Ingrian-Finns. Estonians and Russians in Finland� (by Eve Kyntäjä), �Everyday Life and Coping Strategies of the Ru-ral Population in Estonia� (Anna Kokko), and �The Estonian Orthodox Church in Soviet For-eign Policy 1917-1923�. Poland, Hungary, and other post-socialist Central Europan countries are of interest also, but the number of Finnish research projects targeted at Central Europe, is small. For example, the contacts with Hungary are still tight, especially in the field of Finno-Ugric studies. The programme of the Finnish Academy of Sciences also concentrates heavily on Russia. There were several projects on the Baltic countries but only two dealing mainly with Eastern Europe in more general terms. At the original launching of the programme some em-phasis was put on the nearby regions, but it is a matter of conjecture as to whether this priority was actually carried through. As far as the or-ganisation was concerned, many projects were fairly large and in many cases umbrella projects with a somewhat dispersed focus. It should be no surprise, given the background outlined above, that most projects did not really have a strong leader. Much of the output consists of li-centiate and doctoral dissertations rather than of work of well-established senior scholars. That, naturally, also raises the issue of continu-ity in research funding. All in all, the programme seemed to be a mix of compromises between different orientations and disciplines. Social sciences were actively involved. The programme clearly enforced Rus-sian studies in that field. The scope of the pro-jects was large and the orientation mainly em-pirical. It might be asked whether this is due to the empiricist nature of current sociology in general or whether it is simply a wise approach in the circumstances, where not very many theories on a social sphere in transition can be found anywhere. In any case, Finland is now one of those rather few countries where lots of sociologists are collecting and analysing em-pirical data on Russia. There can be no doubt that the professional level of empirical analysis has been improving. Jukka Gronow (1997) and Markku Kivinen (1998) made efforts to bring forth some new theoretical openings. Gronow analysed much neglected issues on Soviet pat-terns of consumption whereas Kivinen made an effort to conceptualise the Soviet system based on the basic cultural code of the Bolshevik revo-lution. The relative lack of politological analysis is an obvious defect of the programme. Civil society, democracy and the law-based state are still the key political issues in Eastern Europe. With the exception of Juha Tolonen and his junior col-leagues dealing with civil law, (e.g. Lehtinen 1997) Finnish research has not been able to

create any comprehensive research group thus far, let alone a Finnish School on these issues. However, individual contributions were of a high quality. Within the programme, Christer Pursiai-nen (1998) produced a very fundamental analy-sis of the �End of Sovietology�, analysing the change of the paradigm concerning Russian foreign policy. He used the first war in Chech-nya as the basis for his empirical case study. Some important individual contributions have been presented outside of the programme. Marja Nissinen (1999) analysed the political as-pect of Latvia in transition whereas Timo Aarre-vaara (1999) made an empirical analysis on change in the Ukrainian administration. The fact that economics was not as strong in the programme as might have been expected, is probably explained by the specifics of Finnish academic economics, which tends to be more theoretically than country oriented. Among the economics projects, two approaches seem to dominate. There was much research on trade and particularly investment, but also network-based studies on empirical topics. History, as mentioned above, was a strong as-pect of the programme. Here, as might have been expected, the emphasis was on the utili-sation of newly available Russian archives, in particular concerning Soviet-Finnish relations and the influence of Soviet authorities on Finland. Books on such issues by Ohto Man-ninen, Hannu Rautkallio, and Kimmo Rentola have been major best sellers. Antti Laine and others also did path-breaking work on the politi-cal history of Soviet Karelia. Cultural studies, spanning Russian language to art and litera-ture, were another major priority in the pro-gramme at the time. The research programme includes 28 projects, which present the great variety of disciplines, approaches and of universities. The project by Ritta Kosonen and Asta Salmi (both at the Hel-sinki School of Economics and Business Ad-ministration) utilises a network-based approach to empirical material. But, the materials utilised are quite different, and so are the theoretical approaches. Markku Lonkila (University of Hel-sinki) comes from a different discipline and makes use of different material - everyday life in St. Petersburg - but comes close to Kosonen and Salmi in utilising a network-based ap-proach. Altogether, the research of Lonkila and others on everyday life in Russia is an impor-tant part of the whole programme. Erkki Kaukonen, Joan Löfgren and Gerd Schienstock (University of Tampere) tread a path between economics, industrial organisation, manage-ment and sociology. Their topic, industrial and technological modernisation, is a key issue for Russia�s future. This project is also a product of long-term co-operation between Finnish, Rus-sian and other scholars.


Ilari Karppi, 0lli Kultalahti and Heikki Rantala (University of Tampere) base their research on the labour flow aspects of the European Union enlargement on the empirical work they have conducted together with local researchers in Central Europe. Mikko Kivikoski (University of Turku) is a historian with the approach of a cur-rent Woorian. The relation between pre-revolutionary dissident thought and post-revolutionary realities will continue to offer food for thought for a long time to come. Markku Tykkyläinen (University of Joensuu) is a geog-rapher of rural change; he takes a comparative approach, looking at survival in the rural com-munities of Russian Karelia and Hungary. The programme was rich in social and cultural projects. Three of them highlight different as-pects of this field. Marianne Liljeström�s (Swed-ish University of Abo) research is the happy product of a coincidence of Russian studies, women�s studies and the autobiographical re-search approach in modern sociology. The work of Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen (University of Jy-väskylä) focuses on a relatively neglected but surely crucial topic, Russian education. Finally, the research by Tomi Huttunen, Pekka Pe-sonen, Sanna Turoma et al. is perhaps the largest of all the projects in the programme, studying different aspects of modernity and modernism in Russian culture. The programme of the Academy of Finland on Russian and East European studies has been completed. As mentioned, this was an excep-tionally large programme in social and cultural studies by Finnish standards. Priorities by defi-nition must be temporary, but the Academy has an intention to finance high-quality Russian and East European research in the future as well. From the very beginning, science policy plan-ning in Finland has opted for the discipline-based as opposed to an area-based approach. The scholars involved in this programme - like all researchers funded by the Academy of Finland - were based in research institutes and university departments, maintaining close con-tacts with their disciplines. In the Ph.D. and M.A. programme of the Aleksanteri Institute as well, students must have a disciplinary compe-tence first and become Russian and East Euro-pean experts thereafter. The decision made by the Ministry of Education in the early 1990�s to make Russian and East European studies a science policy priority was, as pointed out above, in some sense an anom-aly. By now a firm basis has been created for the future of the field in Finland. There will be an outside assessment of the programme, but the final assessment will be made by the inter-national research community in the years to come. The Finns may not have always been there, but they have come, and will not go away. Much, naturally, remains to be done.

Some things will depend on the future devel-opment of the countries involved, but in all probability the old wisecrack will remain rele-vant: all nations, all countries, all states, all people are different, but Russia is more differ-ent than most. References • Aarrevaara, T. (1998), Councillors and Civil

Servants in the Ukrainian Self-government. Kyiv: Naukova dumka.

• Allardt, E., Wesolowski, W. (eds) (1978), Social Structure and Change: Finland and Poland in Comparative Perspective. War-saw: Polish Scientific Publishers.

• Gronow, J. (1997), The Sociology of Taste. New York: Routledge.

• Iivonen, J. (1990), Independence or Incor-poration? � the Idea of Poland's National Self-determination and Independence within the Russian and Soviet Socialism from the 1870s to the 1920s. Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

• Kivinen, M (1998), Sosiologia ja Venäjä. Helsinki: Tammi

• Lehtinen, L. (1997), Venäläinen osakeyhtiö. oikeudellisen perustan kehittyminen suunni-telmataloudesta markkinatalouteen siirty-vässä valtiossa yritysmuotojen ja erityisesti osakeyhtiön oikeudellisen aseman kannalta tarkasteltuna. Helsinki: Lakimiesliiton kustannus.

• Nissinen, M, (1999), Latvia's Transition to a Market Economy. Political Determinants of Economic Reform Policy, Basingstoke: Macmillan, New York: St. Martin's Press.

• Pursiainen, C. (1998), Beyond Sovietology: International Relations Theory and the Study of Soviet I Russian Foreign and Se-curity Policy. Helsinki: Ulkopoliittinen insti-tuutti.

• Salminen, A. (1981), Idänkauppa ja hallinto: tutkimus Suomen idänkaupan rakenteesta, sopimusjärjestelmästä ja hallin-to-organisaatiosta esimerkkinä sosialisti-maiden ja markkinatalousmaiden talousyh-teistyöistä. Tampere: Finnpublishers.

• Susiluoto, I. (1982), The Origins and Devel-opment of Systems Thinking in the Soviet Union: Political and Philosophical Contro-versies from Bogdanov and Bukharin to Present-day Re-evaluations. Helsinki: So-cietas scientiarum Fennica. (Annales Aca-demiae Scientiarum Fennicae. Dissertatio-nes humanarum litterarum; 30).

• Sutela, P. (1984), Socialism, Planning and Optimality - a Study in Soviet Economic Thought. Helsinki: Societas scientiarum Fennica. (Commentationes scientiarum so-cialium; 25)

• Tolonen, J. (1976), Neuvostoliiton talousjär-jestelmä ja sen oikeudelliset perusteet.


Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, yhteiskunta-tieteiden tutkimuslaitos. (Yhteiskuntatietei-den. tutkimuslaitos, Tampereen yliopisto, A: Tutkimuksia; 48)

France

Georges Mink, Centre National de la Recher-che Scientifique42

French Research on Eastern Europe French social science research on Russia and Eastern Europe is bearing marks of its origin. French visitors and social scientists have al-ways had a strong fascination for Russia (among the best known the Marquis de Custine or Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, but also Durkheim�s followers Marcel Mauss and Célestin Bouglé and even occasionally Emile Durkheim himself 43). After 1917, the Soviet Union, and after-wards, from 1945-1948 on, the whole Soviet bloc gave rise to lots of divisions about just in-terpretation, with strong ideological contents (aggravated by lack of information), motivated by partisan purposes, involving often political exiles. But an upsurge of research marked the turn of the 60s and 70s. Three sets of facts caused the scholars� interests to change: first, the arrival of new generations of social scientists who were able to get their inquiries free of certain inher-ited ideological burdens; second, increased transparency in East European countries; and finally, entering into the field, beside linguistic studies and classical studies of civilisations, both related to area studies, of social science approaches which, instead of emphasizing the specificity of this part of the world, applied to it their own paradigms and methods. Thus, economists, sociologists, historians, demogra-phers, political scientists have contested the va-lidity of culturalist paradigms or more simply culturalist hypotheses. This modernised ap-proach has questioned explanations grounded on the uniqueness of political systems or on ethno-historical causalities. Since the 1980s, the scientists that have been studying this area have become increasingly aware of its complexity and diversity, as well as of the necessity to place their hypotheses into particular contexts. Moreover, French scientific work has gone international and French scholars, often invested with leadership roles, have become involved in multinational teams, particularly those with European Union�s 42 E-mail : [email protected] 43 See « Sociologues et politistes français face aux révolu-tions russes », ed. by Dominique Colas, Cahiers A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Pa-ris, Cahiers nb. 1, 1998, p. 80.

with European Union�s funding. However, as regards financial resources, British research has an advantage over the French one as it has better foothold in Brussels, whereas German research has another advantage, that of enjoy-ing better funding thanks to half private half public foundations. 1. A short history Before 1989, as regards the development of studies on Soviet Russia, the USSR and East-ern Europe, different periods can be distin-guished. The first period goes from the 1917 revolution to the creation of the Soviet bloc in the wake of the World War II. So, in 1917, the review Le Monde slave was started in Paris, which permitted Ernest Denis to bring together people for whom the Russian upheavals were worthy of scientific investigation. This period was marked by two kinds of empirical re-sources: evidence produced by émigrés and visitors back from the USSR44. In both cases, suspicion about partiality of analyses caused their audience to be limited. As for the émigrés, �wrapped up in their personal tragedies, over-come by their bitterness, paralysed by the re-cent date of the event, haunted by the hope of a possible about-turn, (they) were only rarely able to go beyond plea and passion and achieve scientific objectiveness�45. The evidence pre-sented by French intellectuals (Jacques Sa-doul), as well as the Russian-born ones (like Victor Serge or Boris Souvarine) was suspected of being partial and in consequence rejected, because �passion � be it admiring or horrified � outweighs objectiveness and the science has nothing to gain by it�46 Let us note for that pe-riod the strong intellectual ascendancy of somebody like Pierre Pascal, a Bolsheviks� friend, who reportedly �deliberately chose to keep silent�47. In the aftermath of the 1939-1945 war a new state of political affairs marked the beginning of a new period, but France, in spite of its tradition showed little interest in East European studies. Yet the stabilization of the Soviet regime, its ex-tension to Eastern Europe, followed by the cold war, provided sufficient reason not only for sci-entific studies but also for public support of such an undertaking. By contrast such supports were largely provided to scientists in the United States and Germany, while their French col-

44 See the introduction by Hélène Carrère d�Encausse to the research guidebook L�Union Soviétique, by Lilly Marcou, Armand Colin, 1971, pp. 11-29. 45 Idem, p. 13. 46 Idem, p. 14. In fact, these statements also reveal how demanding the political arena was in the sixties as to care-fully chosen words, the major argument being that of positivism, for those who aspired to become specialists of the Soviet Union. 47 Idem, p. 14.


leagues had to wait for changes that occurred in the sixties when De Gaulle�s particular politi-cal views on the question (based on the con-vergence theory) made French foreign policy independent of its American ally. But intellectual curiosity appeared before, maybe with the first big crisis of the Soviet bloc in 1956 that in a roundabout hit the pro-communist French elites. It was after the revelations at the 20th Soviet communist party congress and their conse-quences for the satellite countries that the stranglehold on the French research studies and university work got relaxed, so that the availability of new documentary resources (spreading of Soviet documents, liberalization of scientific exchanges, increasing numbers of personal accounts, and, since the beginning of the sixties, proliferation of dissident literature) opened new avenues to studies of the Soviet world. From that moment, historical studies made much progress in France (Georges Haupt, Marc Ferro, Michel Heller), as well as the studies of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union (Alexandre Bennigsen, Chantal Quelquejay, Hélène Carrère d�Encausse), of the social, po-litical and juridical system, even of geostrategy (Basile Kerblay, René Girault, Michel Lesage, Henri Chambre, Jean Laloy, Pierre Hassner, Moshe Lewin before his leaving for the United States), of the economic system (Eugène Zale-ski, Georges Sokolof, Marie Lavigne, Pierre Naville), of the cultural activity (Georges Nivat, Jean Bonamour), of the satellite countries (Pi-erre Kende, François Fejtö, Georges Mond, Pavel Tigrid, Zdenek Strmiska, Thomas Lowit), of the international communism (Annie Kriegel, Ylios Yananakis)48. The seventies and eighties brought about vari-ous incentives for research work, such as: the appearance of democratic opposition leading to the epic Solidarity upsurge (that produced a major impact on French public opinion and the elites), the regime liberalization in countries such as Hungary and Poland, after attempts made at openings which had resulted in the Helsinki Conference, and a contrario, the Bre-zhnevian stagnation that reached its highest point with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Ceaucescu regime, the Czech and German gerontocracies. This is the period when certain institutions, such as French government agen-cies condescended to grant some additional funding to research groups, as for example P. Kende�s and Z. Strmiska�s Group for Inequality Studies, or Sociological Observatory for the USSR and Eastern Europe (Z. Strmiska and G. Mink) inside the Centre National de la Recher-che Scientifique, or yet the Alain Touraine�s re-

48 This enumeration, of course, is not exhaustive.

search team which studied Solidarity (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). But some weaknesses inherited from that pe-riod had consequences for the state of mind of scholars and their readiness to undertake re-search work after 1989. Among teachers and inside the French educational system there has been little interest in the outside world, a ten-dency that only recently began to be reversed thanks to European challenges and educational pressures of globalisation. Another reason for this state of affairs was a double-ideologisation of the Sovietology research field, mostly turned to the study of the political system to the detri-ment of the observation of particular national societies, while the political elites in power were convinced that the Soviet empire was immuta-ble. As a result for the research policy, there was a lack of interest on the part of institutions and therefore a lack of funding for studies fo-cused on national specificities and breakdown dynamics. 2. After 1989-1991: Actors and scientific activity There are several actors in France dedicated to and implied in studying and doing research work on Central and Eastern Europe, in teach-ing about and specializing in it. They can be di-vided in two categories: • institutional actors (universities, public re-

search institutions, government�s institu-tions)

• non-governmental institutions, actors com-ing from civil society (associations ruled by the 1901 law, as for example the Associa-tion of Slavists at the Institut d�Etudes Slaves (founded in 1919 by Ernest Denis), Transitions � a grouping of former students of Central and Eastern Europe, the ex-USSR included, from the Paris Institut d�Etudes Politiques49).

The first category includes more or less impor-tant actors (for their human potential, the scope of their activity, their impetus capability, their fi-nancial resources, the latter determining all the rest). Universities: Many French universities have Slavic lan-guages or Slavonic studies departments, cou-pled sometimes with civilisation studies. At some of them teaching staff has created re-search teams. In our field, certain universities have assumed leading parts. In Paris, these are University Paris IV, the Institut National des

49 The relative weakness of professional association activ-ity prevents me from speaking about it in this paper; it will be enough to mention that, though a Slavists� association exists inside the Institut d�Etudes Slaves, there is no global unifying association like the AAASS in the United-States or other European countries that could bring together all social sciences disciplines dedicated to that geo-cultural area and could, for example, take responsibility for organizing na-tional congresses etc.


Langues Orientales (INALCO), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and similarly, in all university towns there are universities that have developed area studies (as, for example, Polish studies at Lille Univer-sity). Particularly worth mentioning is a doctoral degree course at the Institut d�Etudes Politiques in Paris, now in charge of Dominique Colas (af-ter Hélène Carrère d�Encausse), comprising multidisciplinary teaching covering the whole of the geo-political space of the former Soviet bloc. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi-que (CNRS) This is an institution completely and exclusively dedicated to scientific research. Though it pos-sesses its own research teams, its present pol-icy tends to co-finance joint teams. Interface teams It is common practice in universities to house research units (called joint or associated units when they are backed by funds and personell-coming from the Centre National de la Recher-che Scientifique). Among the best known, doing scientific work on Russia and/or Eastern Europe, is the Centre d�Etudes des Relations Internationales (CERI), a part of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, that is spe-cialized in international relations and area stud-ies (P. Hassner, Anne de Tinguy, Jacques Rup-nik, Marie Mendras, Kathy Rousselet among others). A laboratory associated with Nanterre University Paris X, the Laboratoire d�Analyse des Systèmes Politiques (LASP) has brought together a number of sociologists and political scientists interested in Central Europe�s devel-opments (Michel Dobry, Aleksander Smolar, Georges Mink, Jean-Charles Szurek, Myrianna Morokvasic, Mihnea Berindae). As for the economists, one of the most important laborato-ries is ROSES at University Paris I (founded by M. Lavigne, headed afterwards by Wladimir Andreef, Xavier Richet and now Gérard Duchêne). At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) there is a unit spe-cialized in historical, demographic and socio-logical research on the ex-USSR, the Centre Russe, headed by historian Wladimir Bere-lowitch and demographer Alain Blum, with, among other associates, Nicolas Werth. When necessary, other specialists may be invited to join the activity of the centre, such as econo-mists Jacques Sapir or Bernard Chavance, or sociologist Alexis Berelowitch. Other research units have some activity sectors focused on that part of the world, such as CADIS (Centre d'Ana-lyse et d'Intervention Sociologiques), special-ized in studies of social movements, headed by Michel Wieviorka. Other researchers, members of different centres of the EHESS, have been working on various East European regions, as, for example, Daniel Bertaux (life stories and so-

cial mobility), Victor Karady (sociological theory, anti-Semitism), Patrick Michel (sociology of re-ligion), and also Krzysztof Pomian, Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux (of the Centre d�Etudes His-toriques), or Ewa Bérard and many others. Certain very active scholars have been working at research centres linked to provincial universi-ties (François Bafoil in Grenoble, Gilles Lepesant in Bordeaux, Frédéric Sawicki or Mi-chel Maslowski in Lille, Joanna Nowicki and Paul Gradhvol, Dominique Redor at Marne-la Vallée, and so on). State administration Three research centres have distinguished themselves by their results and/or knowledge they have acquired of Eastern Europe. The most important beyond any doubt is the CEDUCEE (Le Centre d'études et de documen-tation sur l'ex-URSS, la Chine et l'Europe de l'Est at the Documentation Française) that was founded in 1962 by Françoise Barry, at French government�s special request, in accordance with General De Gaulle�s policy and placed close to the Prime Minister (Edith Lhomel, Marie-Agnès Crosnier, Michèle Kahn, Alain Giroux, Jaroslava Blaha, Daniela Heimerl, Cé-line Bayou are the centre�s outstanding mem-bers). Marked by the political climate of the time of its creation (war threats from the �opposing bloc� in the sixties and seventies), the centre developed economic analyses based on sec-ondary sources. Its financial means, however superior to those of universities, were nonethe-less inferior to those American scientists had at their disposal, whose works, published by the Joint Economic Committee, were taken as a model. Apart from this centre, intended for documentary purposes, there is the CEPII (Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'informations Internationales), an organism embodied in the Commissariat Français du Plan, grouping some very good economists, specialists of Russian and Chinese economies (G. Sokolof, Gérard Wild, Françoise Lemoine, among others). In both cases, the resources at the scholars� dis-posal were their good knowledge of centrally administrated economies, as well as of accounting tools necessary for correcting �official� data through cross-national comparisons, and the construction of Industrial Exchanges Tables. Later on (after 1989), another group was estab-lished inside the Administration. Expertise activ-ity of the Regional Development (Aménage-ment du territoire � DATAR), needed coopera-tion of specialists suited for initiating work in Eastern Europe under transition, in the domain of industrial conversion, a domain in which France possesses rich experience. The centre had a team that worked from 1990 to 1996 un-der the leadership of geo-politician Michel Foucher and the region�s specialist Jean-Yves Potel. This centre has now been taking part in


various consortiums funded by the European Union, but its expertise activity has been given priority over its research tasks. It is worth noting, as a sign of a late recognition of the expertise ability of the specialists in this geo-cultural area, but also of their more ex-tended scientific basis that Michel Foucher has been appointed head of the Centre d�Analyse et de Prévision (CAP) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1999, while this function is usually car-ried out by a diplomat, and that Prof Marie-Claude Maurel, a renown specialist in agrarian issues in Russia and Eastern Europe, has been appointed director of the Département des Sci-ences de l�Homme et de la Société (in 1997) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti-fique50. Between private and public spheres, there is the Institut Français des Relations Internation-ales (with geo-politicians like Dominique Moisi or Thierry de Montbrial and an economist specialist of the ex-USSR, Anita Tiraspolsky), as well as some smaller units such as that of Pascal Boniface (IRSIS). Paper media Two main reviews have been in charge of pub-lishing multidisciplinary works in that field. First of all, Le Courrier des Pays de l�Est (editor in chief, Marie-Agnès Crosnier), a monthly re-view - a periodicity that makes it rather an in-formation and trend review - published under the care of the CEDUCEE, a unit of the Docu-mentation Française, with a public funding, though it has a quite satisfactory subscriber ba-sis (about 800). The Documentation Française has been issuing now and then, in the series Problèmes Politiques et Sociaux, special issues on Eastern Europe, made up of selected papers on a given subject. Up to the year 2000, every year since the seventies, the Documentation Française published a yearbook on Central and Eastern Europe. The Revue d�Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest (directors A. Blum and G. Mink, and editor in chief K. Rousselet) is the reference journal for academic circles. With a less large circulation, the review is multidisciplinary and all social sci-ence disciplines are represented in its editorial board. Anonymity principle as well as a double referees system serve as guarantees of scien-tific quality of the published articles. The review is financed by the CNRS. It has been able to gather some representative members of young generation scientists (Anne Gazier, Catherine

50 It is more or less common that specialists of this geo-cultural area apply for positions connected with scientific di-plomacy, as for example A. Berelowitch who was appointed to be cultural attaché in Moscow, or historian Antoine Mares appointed director of the Centre Français des recherches en Sciences Sociales in Prague.

Perron, Catherine Goussef, Jean-François Rav-iot). The Institut d�Etudes Slaves publishes the Re-vue d�Etudes Slaves. The Institut also issues the Bibliographie européenne des travaux sur l�ex-URSS et l�Europe de l�Est, and it carries out policy of publishing works such as foreign lan-guage handbooks or proceedings of scientific meetings. It is also in charge of an editorial se-ries Cultures et Sociétés de l�Est. The Russian centre, mentioned above, at the EHEES, pub-lishes the Cahiers du Monde Russe. Two inde-pendent reviews that had their moments of glory during the eighties, the Nouvelle Alterna-tive and the Autre Europe, are now striving to survive. However, certain general matter publishers are showing some more interest in East European subjects these days. The main issues seem to be the years 1989 and 1991, the wars in former Yugoslavia, the extension of the European Un-ion, the consequences of the archive openings, the emergent economies, the Russian circum-stances. 3. Expansion of the research after 1989 The process of breaking up of the Soviet-type system and almost general opening of research and observation fields, that previously had not been easily accessible if not completely forbid-den, on the one hand, and demand for more or less basic expertise and knowledge concerning certain socio-economic reality undergoing revo-lutionary transformation, on the other hand, put pressure on the authorities to grant substantial funding, as they never had in the past, for stud-ies of Central and Eastern Europe. A program valid for a number of years, given the title �Intel-ligence of Europe�, a part of which was entitled �Transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe�, was launched on July 20, 1989 by two major institutions, the Scientific Research Minis-try and the CNRS. The program, which was in operation until 1994, was endowed with impor-tant financial resources. In 1991 and 1992, 202 projects were presented, 66 of which were ap-proved with grants amounting to 11 million francs. In 1992, as a response to a second call for proposals, 115 projects were submitted and 40 were accepted, but with diminished funding (3.5 million francs, to which 1.2 million was added for researches on enterprises, technol-ogy and work problems). According to the evaluation report requested by the Scientific Research Ministry51, these programs permitted to identify 27 CNRS research units, 20 units from universities and 8 units coming from other bodies, all of which having proved their capabil-

51 Report on the science teaching and research, Central and Eastern Europe, to the Mission scientifique et tech-nique (DSPT 6), March 1995.


ity to quickly come up to expectations of the au-thorities. It is certain that this exceptional institutional support gave a momentum to French social science research. Sociology, economy and his-tory have most benefited from it, juridical sci-ence, political science, demography and geog-raphy coming next. Thanks to these grants, several works were published and dozens of reports were submitted for assessment to the Scientific Research Ministry. As a part of the programs, dozens of scholars from Central and Eastern Europe could afford to spend between a month and a year working in French research units. The works carried out were related to the following fields: • analysis of attitudes of people faced with

social, economic and political constraints during the period of regime transition (30% of research work carried out). Studies were focused on very different subjects: adaptive strategies of individuals and social classes (farmers), or social groups (elites, ethnic minorities), emergence of partisan move-ments (political parties, counter-power, etc.)

• privatisation, competitiveness of economy (30% of research work)

• job management and employment, emer-gence of new managers, salary and wage policy and problems directly connected to enterprises were subjects of a dozen of studies

• re-interpretation of history and its use was also a subject of a dozen of studies52.

4. Some problems The collateral effects of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc have destabilized the profession of researchers specialized in Central and East-ern Europe (Russia included). Several causes can be considered: 1) Endogenous facets of the professional le-gitimacy crisis - The upsetting of the frontiers in the real world has unsettled the boundaries between scientific disciplines. The collapse of the ideological fronts and crumbling of the single true frontier that was the border separating the Soviet sys-tem as a whole53 from the rest of Europe, then a growing number of new geo-political frontiers, as well as new sub-groups in search of their particularity (Russia, CIS, Central Europe, Bal-kan Europe, selection of candidate countries for entry into the European Union), all these facts have raised new and relevant questions about the dividing lines between professions. Should 52 Information letter PECO, « Intelligence of Europe », no. 3, March 1993, p. 14. 53 Didn�t people use to say, by way of joke, that Poland had 5 borders with the USSR : those with East Germany, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and also those with the sky and the sea�

in future Russian studies be separated from those of Central Europe as from those of South-eastern Europe? What kind of unity in the real world justifies the maintenance of the ancient professional unity? - Constraints of professional legacies didn�t stop operating. Before 1989, the professional body was actually disunited, cliquish and overideolo-gized. The perverse effects of this legacy ap-pear in continuing partisan views and are shown in some people�s need to justify their past views by projecting their concepts onto the present. Let us just remind the multiplicity of self-definition �concepts�: post-socialism, post-Communism, post-Sovietism, �authentic� social-ism. The debate that opposed �shock therapy� to �gradualism� was ideologically distorted, which also revealed how the past was pressing down on the present. Some focused their atten-tion exclusively on the social effects in order to condemn the market; others neglected social problems in order to give the market absolute priority. - It was the field�s unity that was seriously thrown into confusion, revealing to what extent the profession was ill at ease. What could justify the perpetuation of a multidisciplinary body of regional specialists? Is it geography, Slavic eth-nic origin, a dominant linguistic family, similar trajectories of emergent economies, the begin-ning of political pluralism, or, last but not least, a common starting point, that is, the end of the Soviet system? 2) Exogenous questioning of the profession�s legitimacy - The profession was to undergo the sudden ar-rival of comparative transitology, which asked �its share of the cake� of the knowledge con-cerning that geo-cultural area, but its claim was based on the knowledge gained through study-ing other societies that had managed to get rid of their authoritarian regimes (Latin America, Southern Europe, etc.). This special branch of political science was seen by many specialists of Central and Eastern Europe as a threat of competition, even a danger of calling into ques-tion the very usefulness of post-communist transition studies. - The advent in the field of approach diversity that put forward particular disciplines (economy, sociology, demography, etc.) and behind, in second place, the area specificity, did not pro-duce good results only. For a moment, highly specialized economists disputed the capability of Soviet or post-Soviet economy experts to ac-count for the current state of affairs, which in their opinion pertained to the methods of classi-cal economy54. Initially disconcerted by this 54 See for that the report by the evaluation panel regarding the CEPII works on Eastern Europe (members: J.P. Des-sertine, J.M. Guehenno, P. Lenan, G. Mink, M. Nuti, D.


claim, economists specialized in the area later were able to show to what extent the dialectics between �break-up� and �continuity� was impor-tant in the cases of post-Communist econo-mies. The �path-dependence� theory gained new followers among the ex-sovietologists. In any case, the time was on the side of ex-sovietologists and legitimated their work: the af-ter-effects of the Soviet system that these first specialists alone had been able to decipher ac-companied the differentiation processes. Conclusion A new generation of scholars are fretting at the doorstep of different scientific institutions and waiting for achieving full academic status. Things were easier for them than for previous generations. First of all, the access to these countries is quite easy nowadays; so, for ex-ample, doctoral degree course students at the Institut d�Etudes Politiques in Paris can make their field trip to Eastern Europe in order to ac-complish empirical surveys before writing their theses. This is made all the easier by scholar-ships granted for particular subjects. In general, long-term scholarships have been increased in numbers and they have been diversified. Today there are doctoral grants for the best students but there are also European scholarships. A set of new academic institutions is ready to accept French doctoral students (Central European University, Natolin branch of Bruges College, Collegium Budapest, etc.) France has created new establishments like kinds of out-posts for scientific observation that have been taking care of doctoral students, as the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, the Centre Français des Recherches en Sciences Sociales in Prague, and there will be soon a similar cen-tre in Moscow. This active policy of direct con-tact with the field is a sine qua non condition for the advent of new generations in the research domain of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, partisan cleavages are losing ground, giving way to promotion on the meritoc-racy criteria alone, which is a fact of paramount importance for the future of this generation of scientists. Getting East European scholars out of their locked up condition was a real performance test for French social scientists. The challenge con-sisted in being able to offer these scholars a value-added that was impossible for them to gain in Eastern Europe. For example, France could offer to sociologists coming from the post-communist world a different tradition in social theory, more focused on qualitative sociology issues (life histories applied to social mobility, conversion theory and symbolic, social and cul-tural capital theories, sociology of social move-

Rosati, J. Sapir), internal document, Paris, November 12, 1992, 9 p.

ments). The most spectacular of all was undoubtedly French historians� contribution to the �archives revolution�, even if now and then there was some lack of epistemological dis-tance toward their contents. We can say that the results of the past decade are rather good: the changes that took place in the East forced the research and university units to react quickly and properly; they were able to defend their specificity against attacks coming from outside their domain. The weak point, a kind of �French deficiency�, by contrast with many other countries is the lack of a unique professional corporation functioning in accord with democratic principles, imposing its authority as a national and representative asso-ciation.

Italy

Daniel Spizzo; Alessia Vatta, Department of Po-litical Science, University of Trieste 55

Italian Research on Eastern Europe56 After the Second World War, the interest of Ital-ian social scientists for socio-political events in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe had been , rather margina for several decades. Only the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989-90 attracted their attention towards Eastern Euro-pean issues. During the last ten years, this con-tinuously growing interest has not only resulted in a large number of publications, but it has also stimulated the creation of new research centres at the main universities of Northern and Central Italy. Nowadays, we can observe that it has de-veloped into a broad research area that can hardly be reviewed in its entirety. The following selection of contributions of Italian social science on Eastern Europe should be considered simply as a rough outline, which in-tends to present a purely indicative introduction to this research area. Being there, to our knowl-edge, no articles or essays which could be considered as a sort of guide-book to this continuously burgeoning research area, this ar-ticle aims only at presenting the first results of a provisory recognition over this field. Thus, con-ceived in this light, it should not be misunder-stood as a value judgement attributed to indi-vidual research works. In the next paragraphs, we will focus our atten-tion on five sub-sectors of Italian social science: 55 OSDEE-Observatory on Democracy in Eastern Europe, e-mail: [email protected] 56 We are grateful to Laura Bergnach, research fellow at the ISIG, for her bibliographical help concerning Italian so-ciological research on Eastern Europe. Daniel Spizzo wrote the Introduction and the first four paragraphs, Alessia Vatta wrote the part dedicated to Italian economic research.


political science, international relations, sociol-ogy, history and economics. We will use a rather loose 'common sense' criterion for distin-guishing the different scientific sub-fields of ref-erence of every single researcher. We will look mainly at their institutional affiliation at depart-mental level. This classification may seem arbi-trary as there are strong inter-disciplinary over-lappings (especially among political scientists and political sociologists or between historians of international relations and scholars of com-parative sociology and political science), but this vague criterion allows us to put a minimum of order in this research sector. Focal points of Italian political science A major focal point of Italian comparative politi-cal research on Eastern Europe lies in the field of regime change and democratic consolidation. The first attempts to interpret regime transition in Eastern Europe were presented in the late eighties. At this stage, the researchers' interest focused mainly on the institutional aspects of regime transition in Central and Eastern Euro-pean countries (Grilli di Cortona 1989a and 1989b). During the nineties, especially those scholars who were attracted by a new-institutionalist approach to political system change have continuously cultivated this re-search area. Great attention was paid to the processes of constitution-, state- and/or nation building in East-central European countries. (Bartole/Grilli di Cortona 1998, Morlino 2000, Ie-raci 1999, Spizzo 1999). With regard to the non-institutional dimensions of democratisation processes, great concern was also shown for the new parties and party systems in Eastern Europe. There have been several works dedicated to the impact of long-term socio-economic and political cleavages on the resurgence of new Eastern European par-ties (Cotta 1992 and 1995). Deeply studied are also the fields of party coalition dynamics and electoral behaviour (Grilli di Cortona 1997). We can find also some case studies of communist and nationalist parties (Bosco 1999 and Grilli di Cortona 2000) The main Italian research centre in political sci-ence in this field of research is the Observatory on Democracy in Eastern Europe (OSDEE) of Trieste. The Observatory, which was created in 1998 and which is headed by Prof. Liborio Mat-tina, is an association promoted by the Depart-ment of Political Science of the University of Trieste and other research institutions, such as the Department of Political Science of the European University Institute, the Center for European Documentation appointed at the De-partment of Political Science and Sociology of the University of Florence and the Jacques Maritain International Institute of Rome. The main goal of the association are: a) to fos-ter the promotion of studies dedicated to de-

mocratic consolidation and to the impact of the EU enlargement strategy on the process of in-stitutional transition in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans; b) to set up a documentation cen-tre which should be able to offer to the scientific community and to several political institutions useful information on the political transforma-tions under way in the young democracies of Eastern Europe, and; c) to organise seminars and conferences where social scientists can discuss the results of their research on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Over the last three years, the OSDEE has organised several international seminars. During the annual meeting of the Italian Political Science Association (SISP) in Trieste in September 1999, the Observatory promoted several workshops specifically dedicated to Eastern Europe. A major research project, aimed at understanding the consequences of the political impact of the EU institutions on the Central European countries� candidates to become members states, is now carried out by the Observatory, under Prof. Liborio Mattina�s direction. The Italian Ministry for University Re-search mostly finances the project. A special edition of the yearly journal Studi poli-tici (Political Studies) was dedicated in 1999 to the fundamental research results of the OSDEE group presented during the SISP meeting. The-re were three chapters dedicated to Eastern Europe, which concerned respectively: the institutional consolidation of democracy, the role of parties and interest group in the transition to-wards democracy and the impact of the Euro-pean Union on the national question in Eastern Europe. Main focal points in International Relations A second research area of Italian political sci-ence research on Eastern Europe, which has been particularly influenced by the Italian ex-perts in international relations, pertains to the study of foreign and security policies. Thorough theoretically and empirically oriented analyses were dedicated mainly to the problems of geo-political stability and security in Eastern and Balkan Europe (Santoro 1990, Vitale 1998, Bozzo/Simon Belli 1997, Lucarelli 2000). During the nineties, the main Italian journals special-ised in international relations, Politica Internazi-onale (International Politics), Relazioni interna-zionali (International Relations) and Limes pub-lished several essays dedicated specifically to the wars in former Yugoslavia and to the former Soviet Union. One of the most investigated themes was surely the impact of ethno-nationalism on the balance of power of the whole region (Santoro 1995, Bonanate 1997, Conciatori 1998, Spizzo 2000). There were also numerous studies carried out in this research sector concerning the Eastern Enlargement of the EU and the integration in the EU of Eastern European countries (Istituto Affari Internazion-


ali-IAI 1991, Marasà 1993). The downfall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of the East stimu-lated new research perspectives especially among the experts of international organisa-tions (EU, NATO or UN) (Di Francesco 1999). In this perspective, the Istituto Affari Internazi-onali (IAI) of Rome occupies an important role. The IAI is a non-profit organisation, which was founded in 1961 by Altiero Spinelli. The IAI be-longs, among others, to the following interna-tional network of research centers which have in the last years demonstrated a great interest in Eastern Europe: the European Strategy Group (ESG); the Conflict Prevention Network (CPN); the European Security Analysis Network (ESAN) and the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA). One of the main fields of research of the IAI is dedicated to the problems of transition in Eastern Europe. There is a spe-cial research project, co-directed by Ettore Greco, which is entitled: Fostering peace in South-eastern-Europe: the role of regional co-operation. The IAI has also promoted the crea-tion of a Laboratory of International Affairs and Economics which is directed by Prof. Paolo Guerrieri and which, in the period 1998-1999, has focused its attention on the following two projects that are relevant for our purpose: Cen-tral-Eastern European countries and EU Enlargement and Reconstruction and Mid-term prospects for the Balkan Area: Italy's role. There are also two other research centres spe-cialised in International Relations which have in the past years dedicated some of their research projects to Eastern Europe: the Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (Cespi) of Rome, which is directed by Prof. Marta Dassù and the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI) of Milan whose co-director of its scientific commit-tee is Prof. Carlo Maria Santoro. Sociological research on Eastern Europe in Italy In the case of Italian sociological research on Eastern Europe, there is especially one area, which deserves special mention: the study of ethno-national minorities. Italian sociologists from the Northeastern regions have published innumerable analyses concerning, for instance, the socio-economic characteristics, the cultural specificities and the territorial settings of the most relevant ethnic groups and minorities of Eastern Europe (Demarchi 1993, Berg-nach/Sussi 1993, Gasparini 1994, Berg-nach/Delli Zotti 1994, Piccolomini 1995, Gubert 1996). Many of those researches can be con-sulted in three Italian journals specialised in so-ciological research: Futuribili, Isig Magazine and Rassegna italiana di sociologia. The leading research centre in this field is cer-tainly the Istituto di Sociologia Internazionale di Gorizia (ISIG). The main research interest of ISIG, whose director is Prof. Alberto Gasparini, lies in the field of sociology of borders, with spa-

tial and political reference to the concepts of centre and periphery and in the area of regional sociology, with reference to regionalism and the relations between regions (Europe of regions) viewed as a transcendence of nationalisms. The scientific and cultural activity of the Institute is at present carried out in five departments, which in their turn are subdivided into research programmes. The Department of International Sociology carries out the great majority of re-searches on Eastern Europe. The main collabo-rators of the ISIG, which have dedicated some of their research projects to Eastern Europe, are principally Laura Bergnach, Luca Bregan-tini, Giovanni Delli Zotti, Antonella Pocecco and Emidio Sussi. Another research centre, which is particularly active in the field of research on ethnic minori-ties in Eastern Europe, is the Interuniversity Center "Etnicos" of the Department of Sociol-ogy at the University of Milan. Currently, Etnicos participates at a joint research project with the University of Sarajevo, which aims at interpret-ing the origins of the war in Bosnia and the fu-ture institutional developments of the federa-tion. Among the most prominent Italian experts (sociologists, historians and political scientists) on Eastern Europe who participate to this pro-ject, we can find Prof. Paolo Calzini from the University of Milan, Marco Dogo, Paolo Segatti and Carlo Tullio-Altan from the University of Trieste and Stefano Bianchini from the Univer-sity of Bologna. Historical research on Eastern Europe Historical studies on Eastern Europe have cer-tainly a longer tradition than the three socio-scientific sub-fields mentioned before (Tam-borra 1973). For this reason many Italian histo-rians have been the first academics to under-stand immediately the great importance of the Big Transformation of 1989-1990. Among the Italian experts of medieval, modern and con-temporary history of Eastern Europe, we can cite Marco Dogo (1993, 1999), Georg Meyr (1995), Franca Mian and Annamaria Vinci from the University of Trieste. One of the best-known contemporary Italian historians in this area is Stefano Bianchini, sen-ior researcher of East European History and Politics at the University of Bologna/Forlì. His works on the Yugoslavian contemporary politi-cal history are particularly stimulating (Bianchini 1991, Bianchini /Shoup 1995 and Bian-chini/Dassù 1999). Bianchini is actually director of the Centro per l'Europa centro-Orientale e Balcanica (CECOB) and coordinator of the In-ternational Network "Europe and the Balkans". Established at the end of 1993, the Network was aimed to develop academic research pro-jects that can meet the everyday needs for in-formation regarding Southeast and Central-East Europe. For this reason it is actively supported


by the University of Bologna, the Bologna and Forlì City Councils, the Emilia-Romagna Re-gional Council, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Af-fairs and the European Commission, while at-tempting � at the same time � to raise financial aid from business enterprises in the country. The aim of the Network is to foster the growth of relationships among scholars focusing on Balkan and East European issues. One of the main goals of the Network is to examine Europe�s view of the Balkan countries and vice versa, in order to determine the language regis-ters � in the fields of politics, mythology, eco-nomics and law � that allow for closer commu-nication and those that, on the other hand, hin-der it, due to the negative influence of stereo-types. In order to achieve its goals, the Network ac-tively promotes an interdisciplinary approach. This aspect has been developed through an-nual work-in-progress meetings and concluded in 1996, when all the results were gathered in four books to be used for diplomats, policy-makers, journalists, and educational purposes within the European Union. Research has been focused on the following themes: nation and state building; international and regional rela-tions; economic integration processes; geopoli-tics and geoeconomics; national and minority issues; the formation of civil societies and intel-lectuals; security and the political manipulation of history aimed at the legitimisation of power. Meetings and round table conferences have been organised by the Network in different countries, amongst which Italy, Israel, and United States. After 1996, the Network pro-moted new researches on several topics, as fol-lows: self-determination, the role of small and medium-sized enterprises in East-Central Europe, intercultural relations in Bulgaria and Bosnia, Albanian State collapse and reconstruction, Italian-Hungarian co-operation. Furthermore, a newsletter and a series of publications guarantee adequate dissemination of the results attained by the scholars involved. Economic Scientific Research on Central and Eastern Europe Before 1989, economic research on Central and Eastern European countries was strictly re-lated to the debate regarding the opposed fea-tures of socialism and capitalism. Especially in macroeconomic textbooks, it was possible to find sections devoted to Marxist theories, usu-ally limited to specific subjects like inflation or economic policies (for an exhaustive biblio-graphic review, see Jossa 1987). Apparently, research in that area tended to be strongly separated from studies regarding Western eco-nomies, and probably nobody expected that such an abrupt change was going to take place at the end of the eighties. After 1989, the de-velopment of a market economy in former

Communist countries has become a subject of interest to many scholars, on the ground of the different aspects of the transition. This opened the way to a series of works regarding the com-parison of economic systems (Dallago 1993; Frateschi e Salvini 1994). At first, the situation in Central Europe was analysed with reference to its beginnings and to the perestrojka (De Vincenti e Mulino 1990), but later scholarly at-tention concentrated on specific topics, like pri-vatisation and structural reform, agriculture, in-dustrial relations, trade and monetary policy. As far as privatisation is concerned, it has ini-tially been treated with reference to the different "national ways" adopted in the countries in-volved in this process (Pedersini 1998), and to the consequent creation of small and medium firms after the beginning of liberalization (Revoltella 1998). Special attention has been devoted to those countries where Italian in-vestments have proved to be more substantial, and to the innovations deriving from the privati-sation process (Dallago, Ajani e Grancelli 1992). The state and the prospects of agricul-ture in Central and Eastern Europe have raised considerable concern, especially in connection with the possible reform of the Common Agri-cultural Policy of the European Union; interna-tional assistance has also been studied, due to its often complicated procedural aspects and disputed results (Cannarella 1999; Corazza 1998; Brunori e Segrè 1995). The reflection on industrial relations has started from the consideration of the socialist model (Grancelli 1987), to proceed with analyses con-cerning labour market policies (Boeri 1994; Boeri et al. 1993) and changes in labour law and in the role of economic actors and interest groups (Casale 1997; Vatta 1999). Particularly in this field, English prevails as the working lan-guage of Italian experts, since their reports are often published by international organizations (mainly the OECD and the ILO). To some ex-tent, this is true also of a number of publications regarding monetary and banking policy, either prepared or co-authored by Italian scholars for institutions such as the World Bank and the In-ternational Monetary Fund (Barbone e Marchetti 1994; Coricelli 1998; Manzocchi 1999; Giavazzi e Dornbusch 1999). However, there are indeed Italian sources on this subject (Manzocchi e Ottaviano 1999; Lanzoni 1994), even if - in the latest years - much debate has risen especially about the EU enlargement and its possible effects (Bruzzo 1998; Frateschi 1999; Tarditi 1998; Coricelli 1996). The discus-sion has been promoted mainly by some jour-nals and academic structures. Among the for-mer, Est-Ovest, Europa Europe, Economia Ita-liana, L'Industria, la Rivista di politica agraria, la Rassegna economica, Banche e banchieri are possibly those, which most frequently included


contributions about Central and Eastern Euro-pe. As far as research structures are con-cerned, thematic studies have been carried on in some traditionally important Italian institutions (like the Bocconi University, and the State Uni-versity in Milan, and the European University Institute in Florence), and academic associa-tions have organised seminars on Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) (e.g. the Associazione Italiana per lo Studio dei Sistemi Economici Comparati, AISSEC http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/aissec/) The comparatist perspective, especially on EU-related matters, tends to be favoured, like in other social sciences, but case studies are also frequently found. However, there is a geo-graphical factor influencing the research re-markably, since universities and other organiza-tions located in the north-eastern part of Italy seem to be more often involved in studies and contacts with the Central European area. This is the case of the universities of Padua, Trento and Trieste, where the enlargement of the European Union has originated interest and re-search in recent years. At the University of Trento there is a research centre called Eu-roest, with a specific interest for economic and social developments in Central and Eastern Europe. It cooperates with the European Asso-ciation for Comparative Economic Studies. In Trieste, beyond the ISDEE (Istituto di Studi e Documentazione sull'Europa dell'Est), which is-sues the quarterly Est-Ovest, the Faculty of Po-litical Sciences of the University offers courses in International Diplomatic Sciences, with a final degree? The lessons take place in Gorizia and include several economic topics, aiming to train accomplished personnel ready to operate on in-ternational economic markets, with a key orien-tation towards Central and Eastern Europe. Since the first years of the transition, there has actually been a certain connection between sci-entific research and concrete investment policy by firms (Mutinelli e Piscitiello 1996). After Germany, Italy is one of the main foreign inves-tors in this area. This led to the establishment of information centres for those entrepreneurs will-ing to invest in the CEECs: it is the case of the ISDEE in Trieste, of INFORMEST in Gorizia and of the Centro Studi Nord Est in Venice. The latter also issues the review Mittelforum, which presents both research contributions and eco-nomic information. The cooperation of practitio-ners has somehow helped to expand knowl-edge, particularly regarding firms and their strategies in this area (Costariol 1995), and to link academic debates with empirical observa-tion. In this sense, the most important economic and financial Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 ore, publishes a weekly supplement dealing with economic and political developments in Central and Eastern Europe.

E-mails and web sites of some Italian research centres with special interest in Eastern Europe: CECOB � International Network Europe and the Balkan http://www.spfo.unibo.it/balkans/eurobalk.html Ce.REPI � Centro Ricerche Etno-politiche in-ternazionali [email protected] CSNE � Centro Study Nord-Est http://www.alpeadriadonau.it/aboutcsne.htm ETNICOS � University of Milan [email protected] EUREST - Centre on the Evolution in EE Coun-tries http://euroest.gelso.unitn.it/Euroest/euroest.htm IAI - Istituto Affari Internazionali http://www.iai.it/ ISDEE � Institute of Study and Documentation on EU and EE http://www.isdee.it/ ISIG - Istituto di Sociologia Internazionale di Gorizia http://www.univ.trieste.it/~isig/ OSDEE � Observatory on Democracy in East-ern Europe [email protected] Other Italian organisations with special interests in research on Eastern Europe ALPE-ADRIA � Alps Adriatic Working Commu-nity http://www.alpeadria.org/ CEI � Central European Initiative http://www.ceinet.org/ FNE- Fondazione Nord-Est [email protected] INFORMEST http://www.informest.it/ Bibliography • Barbone, L. e Marchetti, D., Economic

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• Vatta, A. (1999), Gruppi d�interesse e si-stemi delle relazioni industriali nell�Europa centro-orientale, in:�Studi Politici�, vol. 3, pp. 181-204

• Vitale, A. (1995), "Le prospettive di disinte-grazione della Federazione Russa e le pos-sibilità di collasso dello stato territoriale" in: Futuribili, 1-2, pp. 63-80.

• Vitale, A. (1998) "L'ampliamento della Nato ad Est: la percezione europeo-orientale" in: Relazioni Internazionali, 46, pp. 54-58.

Norway

Anton Steen, The Norwegian Institute of For-eign Affairs (NUPI)57

Social Science Research on Eastern Europe and Russia After more than 40 years of research, NUPI is one of Norway�s foremost independent centres for research and information in the fields of in-ternational politics and economic questions. NUPI has a long tradition for studies in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Russian department of the institute continuously produces reports about the domestic political development in Russia and its relationships to Norway and other countries as well. Current research projects: 1) Russian security- and foreign policies: Some projects are analysing conflicts in the former Soviet areas; others are focused on the rela-tionship to Europe and in particular on the Northwestern regions of Russia and the Bar-ents-area. 2) Institutionalisation and consolida-tion of the Russian Federation includes projects about the functioning of new democratic institu-tions (The state Duma and the government), the new constitution and political parties. 3) Centre-periphery relations are increasing in im-portance and some projects are studying how the more powerful regions influence these rela-tions. Important aspects are consequences for the military forces and the position of the central government. Selected publications: In �Russia Today�, researchers from the Centre for Russian Studies comment the political de-velopment in Russia. So far this year (2000), twelve issues have been published. Books: • Godzimirski, Jakub (2000): New and Old

Actors in Russian Foreign Policy, NUPI, Oslo.

• Kristensen, Anita (1999): Latvia and Nor-way - Neighbours Re-Discovered. NUPI, Oslo.

• Risnes, Brynjulf (ed.) (1999): The Legal Foundations of the New Russia. NUPI, O-slo.

57 Postal address: NUPI, P.O. Box 8159 Dep., N-0033 Oslo, Norway, Internet: http://www.NUPI.no.


Reports: • Tyldum, Guri (1999): Economic Security

and National Pride: An Analysis of the 1995 Parliamentary Election in the Russian Fed-eration, NUPI-report, No. 252.

• Risnes, Brynjulf & Blakkisrud, Helge (eds.) (1999): Perspectives on the Development of Russia as a Federation, NUPI-report, No. 243.

• Godzimirski, Jakub (ed.) (1996): Russia and Europe, NUPI-report, No. 210.

Working Papers: • Neumann, Iver B. (1999): Central Europe

1950-2000, Working Paper, No. 594. • Knudsen, Olav F. (1997): Long-Term Pros-

pects for Nordic-Baltic Security: Diagnostic Statements by Governments in the Baltic Sea Region, December 1996-July 1997, Working Paper, No. 583.

• Ferreira, Margarida P. (1996): The Foreign Trade Regime of Russia- An Overview of recent Changes, Working Paper, No. 556.

• University of Oslo Department of Political Science58 Current research projects: • �Governance and economic reforms in Rus-

sia: the Role of the Elites�; • �Elites and democratic development in the

Baltic States�. Selected publications: • Steen, A. (1997): Between Past and Future:

Elites, Democracy and the State in Post-Communist Countries. A Comparison of Es-tonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Aldershot: Ash-gate.

• Mydske, Per Kristen (ed.) (1994): Compar-ing Nordic and Baltic Countries. TemaNord No. 572.

Department of East European and Oriental Studies59 Current research projects: • �Nation-building and ethnic integration in

post-soviet societies� Selected publications: • Kolstø, Pål (2000): Political construction

sites. Nation building in Russia and the post-Soviet States. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

• Kolstø, Pål (1999): Nation-building and eth-nic integration in post-Soviet societies. An investigation of Latvia and Kazakstani. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

• Kolstø, Pål (1999): Territorializing Diaspo-ras: The Case of Russians in the Former Soviet Republics, Millenium - Journal of In-

58 Postal address: P.O. Box 1097 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway, Internet: http://www.statsvitenskap.uio.no. 59 P.O. Box 1030 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway, Inter-net: http://www.hf.uio.no/east.

ternational Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 607-631.

University of Tromso60 Department of Political Science Current research projects: • �Social classes, power and democracy in

post-communist societies�; • �Political change in Russia and the role of

the West� International Peace Research Institute (PRIO)61 Founded in 1959, PRIO was one of the first centres of peace research in the world and is Norway�s only peace research centre. The foundation of the institute and its early influence was instrumental in promulgating the idea of peace research. PRIO is an independent, inter-national institute in staff, audience and perspec-tive. Current research projects: • �Nationalism and the Russian Army: Getting

settled in a new state�; • �Regionalism in Russia and transformation

of the Russian army�; �Russian military development�

Selected publications: • Tunander, Ola et.al. (1997): Geopolitics in

Post-Wall Europe: Security, Territory and Identity. Sage Publications, London.

• Tishkov, Valeri (1997): Ethnicity, National-ism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Un-ion. Sage Publications, London.

• Simonsen, Sven Gunnar (1997): Conflicts in the OSCE-Area. International Peace Re-search Institute, Oslo.

Baev, Pavel K. (1997): Russia�s Policies in the Caucasus. Royal Institute of International Af-fairs, London. Baev, Pavel K. (1996): The Russian Army in a Time of Trouble. Sage Publications, London. The Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR)62 The Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research is an independent institute for applied social science research. Its main office is situ-ated in Oslo but NIBR also has a department in Northern Norway. Current research projects: • �Polish policies in the European border-

lands�; • �Modern environmental strategies and sin-

gle enterprise towns in Russia and Latvia�; • �Co-operation in the Barents-region� Selected publications: 60 Postal address: Institutt for Statsvitenskap, SV-fak., N-9037 Tromsø, Norway, Internet: http://www.sv.uit.no/seksjon/statsvit/index.htm. 61 Postal address: Fuglehauggata 11, N-0260 Oslo, Nor-way, Internet: http://www.PRIO.no. 62 Postal address: Norsk institutt for by- og regionforskning, P.O. Box 44 Blindern, N-0313 Oslo, Norway, Internet: http://www.NIBR.no.


• Holm-Hansen, J. (1999): Polish Policies in the European Borderlands. Ethnic institu-tionalisation and transborder-co-operation with Belarus and Lithuania. NIBR�s Pluss series 7-99.

• Tesli, A. and Holm-Hansen, J. (eds.) (1999): Building the State. Political Mobilisation, Rhetoric and Social Differentiation in Ka-zakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia and Soma-lia. NIBR�s Pluss series 2-99.

• Jacobsen, B. (1998): Local Self-Government in Russia. A decade of change. NIBR. Working paper.

The Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI)63 The Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI) is an inde-pendent foundation engaged in applied social science research on international issues con-cerning energy, resource management and the environment. The academic approach is multi-disciplinary, with emphasis on political science, economics and international law. The Institute collaborates extensively with other research in-stitutions, in Norway and abroad. Current research projects: Polar Programme, European Energy and Envi-ronment Programme. Selected publications: • Hønneland, Geir & Jørgensen, Anne-Kristin

(1998): Closed Cities on the Kola Penin-sula: From Autonomy to Integration? Polar Geography, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 231-248.

• Hønneland, Geir (1998): Identity Formation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 277-297.

• Moe, Arild & Kryukov, Valery A. (1998): Joint Management of Oil and Gas Re-sources in Russia. Post Soviet Geography and Economics, Vol. 39, No. 7, pp. 588-605.

• Stokke, Olav Schram (1998): Nuclear Dumping in Arctic Seas: Russian Imple-mentation of the London Convention. In �The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice�. Ed. by Rustiala, Vik-tor&Skolnikoff, E.B. Cambridge, MA; Lon-don, UK. MIT Press.

• Kotov, Vladimir (1997): Implementation of International Environmental Commitments in Countries of Transition, MOCT-MOST, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 103-128.

Institute for Applied Social Science (FAFO)64 FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science is an institute for commissioned research. The re-

63 Postal address: Fridtjof Nansensvei 17, P.O. Box 236, N-1326 Lysaker, Norway, Internet: http://www.FNI.no. 64 Postal address: Forskningsstiftelsen Fafo, P.O. Box 2947 Tøyen, N-0608 Oslo, Norway, Internet: http://www.FAFO.no.

searchers are primarily political scientists, soci-ologists and economists. Current research projects: • �Comparative living conditions in the Baltic

states�; • 'Social policy and social exclusion in the

Baltic countries�. Selected publications: • Grønningsæter, Arne (1999): Social Policy

in Transition - income maintenance in Esto-nia, compared with Norway. Fafo-paper 1999:21.

• Hansen, Erik & Tønnessen, Arnfinn (1998): Environment and Living Conditions on the Cola Peninsula, Fafo-paper 1998.

• Aasland, Aadne et. al. (1997): The Baltic Countries Revisited: Living Conditions and Comparative Challenges, Fafo-rapport 1997.

The Defence Research Institute (FFI)65 The Defence Research Institute has as its goal to carry out research and outline development for the Norwegian Defence. The FFI acts as an advisor to the political and military top-leaders within the Norwegian Defence. Current research projects: Strategic Analysis. Selected publications: • Bukkvoll, Tor et al. (2000): Russia - To-

wards Chaos or Stabilization: end report (Russland - mot kaos eller stabilisering: sluttrapport), 99/04446, FFI.

• Flæte, Jan (2000): Intellectuals as Idea En-trepreneurs in Russian Foreign Politics (In-tellektuelle som idéentreprenører i russisk utenrikspolitikk), 99/04212, FFI.

• Baev, Pavel K. (2000): Russian Military De-velopment: �Muddle through� from 1992 to 1998 and beyond. 99/01229, FFI.

• Andresen, Rolf; Vogt, Inge (2000): The Ris-ing of the Oligarchs in Russia (Oligarkiets fremvekst i Russland. 99/01132, FFI.

• Kjølberg, Anders (2000): Russia and the European Institutions (Russland og de eu-ropeiske institusjoner), 99/00932, FFI.

Sweden

Kerstin Nyström, Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University66

Social Science Research on Eastern Europe in Sweden

65 Postal address: Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, Postboks 25, N-2027 Kjeller, Norway. Internet: http://www.FFI.no. 66 Box 514, S-751 20 Uppsala, Tel.: +46(0)184711693, e-mail: [email protected], Internet: http://www.east.uu.se


The development of Russia is no longer crucial for Eastern Europe - actors in Russia and Cen-tral Europe, respectively, have now different teleological perceptions. The Baltic states are orientating themselves in relation to Russia, the Nordic countries and Europe. The Bulgarian and Romanian political leaderships aspire to develop their countries into European states. However, they are situated in the Balkans, where the security political situation is quite dif-ferent from that of Russia and Europe. In the bipolar world of East and West, the term Eastern Europe implied a certain problem orien-tation, referring to the position of the states as Soviet satellites. This implicit problem orienta-tion is now gone, and the use of the term might prevent us from identifying what important pat-terns are emerging from the structure of the new multipolar situation of world politics. Contacts between researchers in Western, Central and Eastern Europe develop continu-ously. States, which formerly belonged to East-ern Europe, will be included in the multifaced Europe. Therefore we could expect that in the near future, research on Eastern Europe will become part of �normal� research on Europe and will be carried out together with - or at least in dialogue with - the researchers in this area of study. Research on Eastern Europe will proba-bly disappear as a phenomenon, at least as re-gards problems of modern Europe. Social sci-ence research on Russia, the Baltic states and the Balkans will find research problems with their roots in the structure of the present day situation of these former East European regions which are increasingly becoming very different from one another. The last ten years have accentuated the need for rethinking the label Eastern Europe as a handy name, summarizing the states included in the former Soviet sphere. Which countries are included in the term today? Russia, the Bal-tic states, the Russian Federation, including the problem complex involving the states in North and South Caucasus? Is Central Europe to be considered part of Eastern Europe - Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary; possi-bly also Slovenia and Croatia? Germany is si-tuated in Central Europe but is not considered as part of Eastern Europe. Should Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia together with Bul-garia, Romania and Albania be labelled the Balkans again and, consequently, these former East European states should be excluded from Eastern Europe in the 21st century? Or is South-eastern Europe a proper term for this re-gion to be included in Eastern Europe? The term Eastern Europe grew out of the Cold War and denotes a specific political and cultural reality. For a decade, this reality has existed only as a common historical heritage of a num-ber of states, which are developing along many

different tracks. The difference between these states might be more important than their com-mon recent past. Thus, it might be misleading to use this term for contemporary conditions. With Maria Todorova�s words: �Isn�t Central Europe dead?�67 If that is so: what about Eastern Europe? Social science in Sweden, dealing with re-search on countries traditionally referred to un-der the label Eastern Europe, is carried out at university departments and at specific research institutes, among them some institutes with an obligation to do research of relevance for the needs of the country, i.e. they are financed by the government. The Department of East Euro-pean Studies, Uppsala University, is the only institution in Sweden, which is designed to study the region from a social science perspec-tive. There are three professors with chairs in East European history, law and economics, re-spectively. The other departments where re-search on Eastern Europe is carried out, are the usual discipline based departments, such as political science, sociology, economics. The same is the case with the special institutes fi-nanced by the government, such as the De-fence Research Establishment (Swedish: FOA) and The Swedish Institute of International Af-fairs (Swedish: UPI). Centers for European studies are created with the aims of promoting studies on Europe, sometimes including East and Central Europe. For instance Centrum för Europaforskning, CFE (Center for Research on Europe) at Lund Uni-versity and Center for European Research (CERGU) at Göteborg University. These cen-ters are pooling resources from both the social sciences and the humanities, such as history and languages. Generally, research is organized in projects, and in many cases, a research project involves scholars from different departments, at the same university or at different universities. Thus, if a project is based in a department, let us say in Uppsala, the participating researchers may come from other departments, both in Uppsala and from other parts of the country. Moreover, the projects may involve depart-ments belonging to different faculties, such as a department of History and/ or a department of Slavic languages. Consequently, to name the host department of a research project does not necessarily mean that all research in the project is done at only this department. In the following, some tendencies in Swedish social science research on Eastern Europe are highlighted. The presentation is based on hast- 67 Maria Todorova: �Isn�t Central Europe Dead? A Reply To Iver Neumann� in Central Europe: Core Or Periphery? (Ed. Christopher Lord), Copenhagen Business School Press 2000, pp. 219-231.


ily compiled information and not on a system-atic and thorough investigation of all that is done in the field at the various universities and university colleges in Sweden. Swedish Social science research on Eastern Europe is focussing on the following themes: Security problems and war Russia and especially Northwestern Russia from a security perspective, including problems of national interest and national identification, is a theme which occupies researchers at several social science departments in Sweden, among them the Department of East European Stud-ies, Uppsala University, the departments of Po-litical Science at the universities in Uppsala, Stockholm and Lund, and the Department of Cultural Geography, Umeå University, the De-fence Research Establishment (FOA) and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm (UPI). - There is also a researchers� network �Northwest Russia and the Nordic Area� on the Internet. A programme on crisis management in a na-tional and international perspective is initiated by the Swedish Agency for Civil Emergency Planning (ÖCB) and is financing research on crises in Russia and Eastern Europe at various university departments, FOA and UPI. From a security perspective, including political, economic and social developments as well as questions of the bases of identity formation and perceptions of threat, the Baltic states are dealt with at the Department of East European Stud-ies, the Department of Political Science and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. These departments form an integrated research and educational center in the heart of Uppsala, Gamla Torget. This center at Gamla Torget consists of the departments of East European Studies, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Research, Center for Multi-ethnic Research, the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS), and the Department of Law: division International Law. Research on the Baltic states from a security perspective is also conducted at Södertörn University College as well as at the above mentioned institutes UPI and FOA. Further research topics are: • Ethnopolitical conflict in the Caucasus (De-

partments of East European Studies and Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala Uni-versity)

• The Stability Pact on South-eastern Europe (Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University)

• Genocide in the Balkans (Uppsala Pro-gramme for Holocaust and Genocide Stud-ies, Center for Multiethnic Research, Upp-sala University).

Transition: economic consequences

• Economic developments during transition and the development of privatisation and a market economy in Russia (Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University)

• Economic developments during transition and the development of privatisation and a market economy in Eastern Europe (Economists at Stockholm University, in some cases in cooperation with researchers in the respective East European countries)

• Comparisons between underdeveloped countries and �emerging economies� (Economists at Stockholm University).

Transition: social and political consequences • Transition - its social consequences, de-

mocracy and the development of civil soci-ety in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states (departments at Gamla Torget, Uppsala University, at the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University and the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, the De-partment of Political Science, Lund Univer-sity, and at some regional university col-leges)

• Transition and the problems of democracy in Russia (project with researchers from the Departments of East European Studies, Po-litical Science and the Department of His-tory at Uppsala University.

• Social problems in Russia (doctoral stu-dents at the Department of Sociology, Göteborg University and the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.

• The public health situation in Russia and the Baltic states 1960-95 (Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, see the journal Sociologisk Forskning No 1/2000)

Eastern Europe and Europe • Northern Europe: the Baltic Sea community

(Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University and the Department of History, Lund University

• Regional Developments in Europe and the role of history in creating models for the fu-ture, especially concerning Eastern Europe (Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University)

• Europe as a community of intellectuals and the role of science and cultural endeavours in shaping the state as a project in the 17th century (Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University)

• Criminal activity across boundaries (De-partment of Criminology, Stockholm Univer-sity)

Other research activities Some of the research projects at the Forum for Central Asian Studies, Stockholm University are dealing with former Soviet Central Asia. At many social science departments at the various


universities in Sweden there are individual doc-toral studies on Russia, the Baltic states and Central Europe from social, political, economic, social geographical, sociolinguistic perspec-tives, and from many other disciplines.

Switzerland

Christian Giordano, Daniel Henseler, Andreas Künzli, Interfaculty Institute of East and Central European Studies, University of Fribourg,68

Social Science on Eastern Europe: Country Report Switzerland Introduction Whereas research in the field of Slavic Lan-guages and Literature in Switzerland possesses a long tradition, and East European history as well as Soviet philosophy may also look back on a certain tradition here (see Roland Ae-gerter, Die schweizerische Wissenschaft und der Osten Europas. Zur Geschichte der Slav-istik und Osteuropakunde, Slavica Helvetica Peter Lang 1998), it was not until 1989 that re-search institutes of other academic disciplines in this country showed a strong interest dealing with East and Central European topics. The so-cial sciences are the most predominant of these �new� disciplines. If one considers the term �so-cial science� in its broadest sense, the following fields can be considered to be working with Central and East European themes: sociology, political science, ethnology, social history, eco-nomics, law and socio-linguistics. The reason for this delayed interest in Central and Eastern Europe is obvious; reliable data and source ma-terials, which form the basis for any serious study, were hardly available to Western re-searchers during the period of Communist rule. In the cases of sociology and ethnology � the disciplines that are expressly empirically de-fined � the possibilities for proper fieldwork (with the exception of Yugoslavia and Poland) were extremely limited. Police control, bureau-cratic hindrances, and limited freedom of movement discouraged many potentially inter-ested social scientists from realizing research projects in Communist-ruled countries. It was only after 1989, when barriers fell in the short-est amount of time, that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe began to open themselves to social scientists from Switzerland. Institutions and Researchers Different Swiss universities offer courses in so-cial science education and research relating to Central and Eastern Europe, but only a few in- 68 Rte des Bonnesfontaines 11, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland; Tel.: ++41-26-300 78 41, Fax: ++41-26-300 96 64, E-Mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

stitutions have institutionalised East European research. The actual center for East European research in Switzerland is considered the Inter-faculty Institute of East and Central European Studies (IIECE, www.unifr.ch/ieo) at the bilin-gual University of Fribourg/Freiburg). It was founded in 1997 and continues the tradition es-tablished by the Institute of East European Studies, which was founded in 1958 by J.M. Bochenski and which, at the time, was con-cerned with Marxist philosophy. The IIECE, in its current form, seeks to plan, offer, and coor-dinate continuing education and research activ-ity relating to Central and Eastern Europe, sup-port interdisciplinary research and develop con-tacts both with the countries of this region and with similar institutions. The institute currently includes the following fields: Slavic Languages and Literatures (Rolf Fieguth), Philosophy of Culture (Edward M. Swiderski), Political Sci-ence (Nicolas Hayoz), Ethnology (Christian Giordano), Law (Paul Volken), Economics (Pawel Dembinski) and Religion and Culture in Eastern and East-Central Europe (Barbara Hal-lensleben). Additionally, the Institute publishes the journal Studies in East European Thought (Edited by Edward M. Swiderski, Kluwer Aca-demic Publisher, Dordrecht). The main research focus of the institute covers the broad category of the social sciences in-cluding ethnology: peasant societies and agri-cultural reform; ethnicity and nationalism; transi-tion and privatisation strategies; multiculturalism and citizenship. Political Science: political soci-ology, especially state sociology; state and power structures and their transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (esp. Russia); the emergence and transformation of structures of trust and networks of power in Russia. Econom-ics: competition in global industries; financial vs. real economy; development of small and mid-sized companies; entrepreneurship; The role of finance (stock markets) in the transition; sys-tems analysis of transition; transition from a planned economy to a market economy; privati-sation; inflation; unemployment; budget deficit; recession. Larger research projects currently in progress with a social science component in-clude: �Ethnic Albanian Emigration to Switzer-land since 1970�; �Civil Society and National Religion in the Work of Vladimir Solov�ëv� (Swiderski, in collaboration with the University of Nijmegen); �The Restructuring of Intellectual Elites, Social Sciences, and Transitional Devel-opments in Post-Communist Discourse� (E.M. Swiderski); �Perceptions and Self-Perceptions of Roma in Central and East European Coun-tries� (Christian Giordano, in collaboration with the Centro per le Scienze Sociali, Rome); �Terre, territoire et nation� (Christian Giordano, in collaboration with the Laboratoire d�Anthropologie Sociale, Paris, and the Maison


des Sciences de l�Homme, Paris). In respect of individual countries, the emphasis is placed on the Russian Federation and Poland, as well as on the states of South-eastern Europe, espe-cially Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. Courses at the Institute are held in German and French, and in Russian and Polish. The Institute is planning a closer level of cooperation with the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) in Moscow that foresees, among other developments, the setting-up of a branch of the Institute in Moscow. At the History Department of the University of Zurich there is a special field of concentration in East European History (www.hist.unizh.ch/oeg/ OEG.html). The chair was created in 1971 and its holder has, since then, been Carsten Goe-hrke. East European History in Zurich concerns itself especially with the early history of Eastern Europe and with researching diplomatic rela-tions between Switzerland and East European countries. The research focus includes the his-tory of emigration, diplomatic history, gender history, Siberia and comparative urban history. The History Department of the University of Ba-sle (www.unibas.ch/histsem) has had a Chair for East European History since 1991. Heiko Haumann, Professor for East European and Modern History, holds the chair. Field concen-trations in Basle include the history of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century and allow specialization in social and economic history. It includes also the history of East European Jewry. The departments in Basle and Zurich at-tempt to make their course offerings as com-plementary as possible. At Geneva�s Graduate Institute of International Studies (heiwww.unige.ch), which has existed since 1927 and is dedicated to the �pluridiscipli-nary study of international relations�, André Lie-bich, Director of the International History and Politics section, has specialized in East Euro-pean topics. His research interests include statehood and nationalism, minority issues, di-aspora politics and current political issues in post-Communist Europe. Courses are offered in the fields of history, politics and foreign policy of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the USSR, as well as in 19th and 20th century ide-ologies. East European topics are also researched at the Institute for Ethnology at the University of Bern (www.cx.unibe.ch/ethno/) under the direc-tion of Hans-Rudolf Wicker. These include is-sues on the ethnology of migration (the return of refugees to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to Kosovo) and ethnicity, culture and nation-alism, as well as peacekeeping. The Institute of Federalism (www.federalism.ch) of the University of Fribourg should be men-tioned as a research center that, among other things, occupies itself with Central and Eastern

Europe. Under the direction of the constitutional lawyer Thomas Fleiner, the processes of politi-cal transformation and consolidation in the post-socialist democracies are examined, above all, in respect to their compatibility with federal insti-tutions. In conclusion, Patrick Sériot, professor at the University of Lausanne, must be mentioned here for his work with the Russian language, because he emphasizes the importance of the socio-linguistic dimension. In Bern is located the Swiss East Europe Li-brary (Schweizerische Osteuropabibliothek) which is the largest library in Switzerland spe-cializing in Eastern Europe with its collection of about 150,000 volumes and journals (www.stub.unibe.ch/html/sob/index.html). Its collection concentrates on the successor states of the former Soviet Union, East Central Europe, the Baltic states and the countries of South-eastern Europe. Topical concentrations include materials concerning the development and history of East European countries and so-cieties in the 20th century, especially during the communist period. There is also extensive documentation of current political, economic and social transformation processes, as well as the reappraisal of the communist past, latent fields of conflict in Eastern Europe (the prob-lems of nationalities and minorities), as well as the problem of the comparative historical back-wardness of Eastern Europe in its significance for contemporary development. The collections of the library date from the period following the Second World War; about 60% of the materials are written in East European languages. Among the larger libraries that maintain archives of pa-pers related to the social science and social his-tory of Eastern Europe, the Social Archive (Sozialarchiv) in Zurich (www.sozialarchiv.ch) and the library of the Institute for Agriculture (Institut für Agrarwirtschaft) in Zurich (www. ethbib.ethz.ch/bibleth/Agrarwirtschaft.htm) should be named. Publications If one continues with our original conception of the social sciences as a broadly-defined collec-tion of disciplines, one may point to not a few research papers and publications in Switzerland that have more or less strong connections to East Central and Eastern Europe. While at most sociological institutes in Switzerland East Central and Eastern Europe were hardly exam-ined before 1989, the East European historians were able to fill this gap somewhat. Until the present time, publications have mainly been submitted from the disciplines of East European Studies and Slavic Studies, which, however, look at the societal dimension in Central and Eastern Europe. The just published collection Transformation und historisches Erbe in den Staaten des europäischen Ostens (Bern: Peter

http://www.stub.unibe.ch/html/sob/index.html


Lang Verlag 2000) edited by the Zurich Eastern Europe historians Carsten Goehrke and Se-raina Gilly, is marked, for example, by the above-mentioned interest in social historical questions which touch burning contemporary issues on the part of Swiss historians. Carsten Goehrke (University of Zurich) has supervised numerous dissertations and theses in the cour-se of his professorship, some of which deal with socio-historical topics. The Zurich dissertations published so far dealt with the following topics: 1998: Müller, Derek. Der Topos des Neuen Menschen in der russischen und sowjetrussi-schen Geistesgeschichte. Peter Lang Bern. 1996: Boskovska, Nada. Die russische Frau im 17. Jahrhundert. Böhlau Köln-Weimar-Wien. 1996: Mumenthaler, Rudolf. Schweizer Wissen-schaftler im Zarenreich (1725-1917). Hans Rohr Zürich. 1996: Rüesch, Andreas. Staatsbetrieb, Wirt-schaftsreform, Kampf der Interessen. Die Be-deutung der Unternehmensdirektoren und der �Industrielobby� in der Sowjetunion und in Russland nach der Wende. Pro Universitate Sinzheim. 1996: Soom, Jost. �avancement et fortune�: Schweizer und ihre Nachkommen als Offiziere, Diplomaten und Hofbeamte im Dienst des Za-renreiches. Hans Rohr Zürich. 1994: Schneider, Harry. Schweizer Theologen im Zarenreich (1700-1917). Auswanderung und russischer Alltag von Theologen und ihren Frauen. Hans Rohr Zürich. 1991: Bühler, Roman. Bündner im Russischen Reich, 18. Jahrhundert bis Erster Weltkrieg. Ein Beitrag zur Wanderungsgeschichte Graubün-dens. Disentis-Mustér 1991. 1990: Tschudin, Gisela. Schweizer Käser im Zarenreich. Zur Mentalität und Wirtschaft aus-gewanderter Bauernsöhne und Bauerntöchter. Hans Rohr Zürich. Current dissertations with socio-historical com-ponents that are being written under the aus-pices of the Chair for East European History in Zurich deal with the colony of Swiss in Russia on the eve of the First World War, the Sovietiza-tion of Old Believers in the Transbaikal region, political emigration from the Czarist realm in the 19th century, the identity of high-born Russian women in the 18th century, the Murids of the Caucasus, as well as the Eurasian movement, and the Ruthenian city of the Early Modern Pe-riod, etc. The habilitation (postdoctoral thesis) submitted in 1979 to Professor Goehrke by Andreas Kap-peler, an Eastern Europe historian, who taught for a long time in Cologne and who currently teaches in Vienna, dealt with the nationalities of Russia. From this work, a standard reference for Russian history appeared (Russland als

Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung, Gechichte, Zerfall, 2nd revised edition, 1993 C.H. Beck). A few current theses with socio-historical com-ponents from the above-mentioned department treat topics such as �Writers as Political Opposi-tionists in Czechoslovakia�, �Soviet Youth Policy in the Early Brezhnev Era Using the Komsomol as an Example� and �The Value of Switzerland for the Russian Revolutionary Emigration from the End of the 19th Century until 1917 in an In-ternational Comparison�. Andreas Künzli, co-author of this article, graduated from the Uni-versity of Zurich with a degree in Slavic Lan-guages and Literature and East European His-tory in 1992 with a thesis about �Interlinguistik und Esperanto-Bewegung im Zarenreich und in der Sowjetunion� (Prof. Peter Brang). A full habilitation, dissertation and thesis list, as well as information about publications of the Eastern Europe section of the History Depart-ment at the University of Zurich, can be found on the website of the East European History Department (OEG) at Zurich (www.hist.unizh.ch/oeg). Numerous contributions of Swiss Eastern Europe historians and Slavicists outlining socio-historical perspectives have been published in periodicals such as the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, Zeitschrift für Ostfor-schung, Acta Baltica, Cahier du monde russe et soviétique, etc. The cooperation of the East European History Department (Carsten Goehrke, Werner G. Zimmermann) with the Zurich Slavicists (Peter Brang, Robert Zett and their successors) should also be acknowledged here. This interdiscipli-nary cooperation between linguists and histori-ans, which has been particularly initiated by the Slavicists, has resulted in a few publications relevant to social scientists. The Swiss National Science Foundation (www.snf.ch) provided the financial support: • �Bild und Begegnung�. Kulturelle Wechsel-

seitigkeit zwischen der Schweiz und Osteu-ropa im Wandel der Zeit. Schwabe & Co. AG, Basel 1996.

• �Zwischen Adria und Jenissei� (Reisen in die Vergangenheit), Hans Rohr, Zürich 1994.

• �Zuflucht Schweiz�. Der Umgang mit Asyl-problemen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Hans Rohr, Zürich 1994.

• �Asyl und Aufenthalt�. Die Schweiz als Zu-fluchtsort und Wirkungsstätte von Slaven im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert. Schwabe & Co. AG, Basel 1994 sowie

• �Fakten und Fabeln�. Schweizerisch-slavische Reisebegegnung vom 18. bis 20.

http://www.snf.ch/


Jahrhundert. Schwabe & Co. AG, Basel 1991.

• The �Kommentierte Bibliographie zur slav-ischen Soziolinguistik�, a three volume bib-liography which was published in 1981 as part of the series Slavica Helvetica by Prof. Peter Brang and Monika Züllig (née Bankowski) can by right be considered as a pioneer effort in this field.

In Heiko Haumann, Basle has found a re-searcher whose work is marked by socio-historical and social science methodology. He made a name by his Geschichte Russlands (Piper 1996) and especially by his important Geschichte der Ostjuden (appeared in a re-vised, updated edition with Deutscher Taschen-buch Verlag (dtv-Verlag) in 1998). This panorama of socio-historical works should be closed by mentioning the comparative and politically oriented study Das Fanal von Sara-jevo. Ethnonationalismus in Europa (Zurich: NZZ Verlag 1997) by Urs Altermatt, professor for Modern and Swiss History at the University of Fribourg. This book analyses the political roots of the new nationalistic tendencies and movements in the eastern part of the continent. In addition to this rich variety of social historical works, sociologists, political scientists, econo-mists and ethnologists have offered relevant contributions to the diverse problems that are encountered in the continuing phase of post-socialist transformation. Iris Stucki of the Institute for Ethnology at the University of Bern analysed social networks of Bosnian households in Basle as well as local and cross-national relations as a resource for healthy integration (www.cx.unibe.ch/ethno/ diss-liz.htm). The works of André Liebich in Geneva, espe-cially the books From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy After 1921 (Harvard 1997) and Les Minorités nationales en Europe cen-trale et orientales (Georg 1997) as well as his numerous articles about the Soviet past should be mentioned. Some issues of the Geneva journal Relations internationales have also been dedicated to Eastern European topics in recent years. Nicolas Hayoz from the University of Fribourg published L�Etreinte soviétique: as-pects sociologiques de l�effondrement pro-grammé de l�URSS (Geneva: Librairie Droz) in 1997. Pawel Dembinski, who is also an instructor at the University of Fribourg, wrote, among others, L�endettement de la Pologne ou les limites d�un système (Paris: Editions Anthropos 1984), Les économies planifiés. La logique du système (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1988), The Logic of the Planned Economy. The Seed of the Collapse (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), �La Bourse dans la transition� (Revue d�Études Comparatives Est Ouest 1994 Vol. 25, No.

1:59-81) as well as La privatisation en Europe de l�Est (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1995). The results of research in South-eastern Europe (especially in Romania and Bulgaria) and in the Baltics (Latvia and Estonia) by Chris-tian Giordano, Chair of the Department of Eth-nology at the University of Fribourg, appear in his numerous contributions to collections and international journals (Études Rurales, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, Focaal. Journal for Anthropology, Ethnologica Balkanica, Journal of Rural Cooperation, Studi di Sociologia, etc.). Christian Giordano edited in cooperation with Edouard Conte not only the special issue on �Paysans au-delà du mur� of the French journal Études Rurales (1995: No.138-140, 270 pages), but also the collection Es war einmal die Wende� Sozialer Umbruch der ländlichen Gesellschaften Mittel- und Süd-osteuropas (Berlin: Les Travaux du Centre Marc Bloch 1998). Both works portray the at-tempt to shed light on the diverse and difficult problems surrounding rural transformation in post-socialist Europe with a comparative per-spective. His most important contributions re-garding ethnicity, nationalism and citizenship are to be found in Hans-Rudolf Wicker (Ed.), Rethinking Nationalism and Ethnicity. The Struggle for Meaning and Order in Europe (Berg: Oxford and New York 1997); in Robert Hettlage, et al (Eds.), Kollektive Identitäten in Krisen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1997); in Balint Balla and Anton Sterbling (Eds.), Eth-nicity, Nation, Culture, Central and East Euro-pean Perspectives (Hamburg: Krämer Verlag 1998); in Rupert Moser (Ed.), Die Bedeutung des Ethnischen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Einbindungen, Ausgrenzungen, Säuberungen (Bern, Stuttgart, Vienna: Paul Haupt Verlag 2000); in Umberto Melotti (Ed.), Etnicità, Nazi-onalità e Cittadinanza (Rome: Edizioni SEAM 2000). Under the direction of Christian Giordano, two MA theses were prepared on topics concerning Central and Eastern Europe (Andrea Boscoboinik, �Images of Change: Bul-garia�s Transformation to a Post-Communist Society� in 1996 and Geneviève Piérart, �Na-tionalisme et gestion de l�identité ethnique. Les Hongrois de Transylvanie et L�enjeu de l�Histoire� in 1998). At the time there are also four dissertations being prepared on the con-struction of national identity in Slovenia, Roma-nia and Bulgaria by Elke-Nicole Kappus, Mari-lena Nitu, Teodor Nitu and Maria Pescheva. Concluding Remarks Undoubtedly, one may conclude that although Central and East European topics in Switzer-land do not form an area of specialization in the social sciences and although the coordination of relevant branches and structures need


strengthening in the future, a small group of motivated researchers has crystallized and has gained international recognition due to its stimu-lating academic efforts.

Spain

Francisco Veiga, Departamento de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona69

The situation of research in the social sci-ences on Eastern Europe: A Spanish over-view70 In Spain, the landscape of the studies in the so-cial sciences on Eastern Europe is a desert with some isolated oases. The reasons for this situa-tion are very logical. Spain has not maintained regular contacts with Eastern Europe in its near historical past: no commercial relationships, neither cultural contacts nor strategic implica-tions existed. There are not even significant colonies of immigrant populations from Eastern Europe in Spain. The traditional interest of Spanish academics on the social sciences was focused on South America and, in a very minor scale, North Africa and Western Europe. The last decade brought a new interest in those countries, due to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the wars in Yugoslavia, especially when the Spanish Army and NGOs were involved in some of the crises. But, unfortunately, the im-pact of those events was too much disturbing for a society long time unconscious of the East-ern half of the European continent. During the change from the eighties to the nineties, the debate on the �Spanish pattern of transition� from the dictatorship of Franco to democracy was very animated in our country. So, the wide-spread discussion in the western countries about the political and historical meaning of the collapse of the Soviet system, or the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia mixed in Spain with the de-bate on papers of the leftist parties and the na-tionalism in the Spanish autonomic regions. The result of this intense politicisation was the proliferation of self-proclaimed experts in East-ern Europe or Russian affairs in Eastern Europe or Russian matters, and a frequent con-fusion among academic debates and passion-ate political opinions. Ten years of political transition in Russia - not always easy to understand - the calm and pro-gressive admittance of Central Europe to the 69 c/Villarroel, 197, 5° 4a, E-08036 Barcelona, Spain, Tel.: ++34-93-322 21 46, ++34-93-245 06 68, Fax: ++34-93-322 21 46, E-Mail: [email protected]/ [email protected]) 70 I have a debt of gratitude to Ruth Ferrero and Roberto Rodriguez for their valuable help in the elaboration of this report.

structures of the European Community, and four bewildering wars in former Yugoslavia, all this tempered many passions and brought a growing indifference again. The strikes of NATO against Yugoslavia and the new protectorate in Kosovo have not contributed to reactivate the lost interest. Therefore, the inexpert enthusiasts of the first half of the nineties now work on new fashionable topics. Their defection has crum-bled ambitious but weak institutions, such as the Eastern European Institute (Instituto de Eu-ropa Oriental �IEO-), which was founded at the beginning of the nineties at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). The IEO was closed down in 1996 and the same fate hit the magazine "Cuadernos del Este" that had been fed more with translations than with the intellec-tual production of Spanish academics. Nowadays, no Spanish academic institution ex-ists that is completely devoted to studies on Eastern Europe. Only a handful of social sci-ence professors continue with research in that field and train new scholars. These professors are the last representatives of the �first genera-tion" that emerged at the beginning of the eight-ies. In our days, a small group of young profes-sors, graduates and scholarship holders are al-ready the �second generation". They come from three centers: Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, although there is also some activity in Oviedo and Santiago de Compostela. In Madrid, the Department of Political Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) is the largest center for graduate work on politics in Eastern and Cen-tral Europe. The programme on Eastern Europe and on the former Soviet Union�s political transi-tions71 provides eight courses coordinated by Prof. Carmen González, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the Hungarian transition at the begin-ning of the nineties72 and is now leading two research groups on national minorities in East-ern Europe. The first one, on the Hungarian mi-norities in the countries neighbouring Hungary. The second, financed by the Gutierrez Mellado Institute, is researching the political tools for the management of conflicts among ethnic minori-ties in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. The Gutierrez Mellado Institution is not devoted to Eastern European topics, but at present it fi-nances a number of research projects in this field73. Two other professors working as full-time staff members of the Department of Politics in the UNED, and teaching Master of Philosophy or Doctor of Philosophy programmes are: Jesús de Andrés, a researcher on Russian transition,

71 http://www.uned.es/guias/g3cd/d151.htm. 72 http://www.uned.es/guias/g3cd/d151.htm. 73 [email protected].


and Ignacio Torreblanca, whose subject is the enlargement of the European Union towards Eastern Europe74. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) has lost the leadership in this particular field of research since the closure of the Insti-tuto de Europa Oriental, but its Department of Applied Economics still has a great weight in the analysis of post-socialist economies. In the UCM, the professors Fernando Luengo75 and Enrique Palazuelos76 are two of the most re-markable names in the �first generation� of Spanish specialists in Eastern Europe econom-ics, and the founders of the Instituto de Europa Oriental. They teach, respectively, the subjects: "The external insert of the economies of Central and Oriental Europe� and �The energy sector in the economy of the Russian Federation"77. But not all professors of the Complutense special-ized in Eastern Europe are economists. Juan Carlos Monedero is a political scientist, and he studies the former GDR; Mercedes Herrero, a professor in Communication / Journalism, is a researcher specialized in the political evolution of Poland from 1989 onwards. At the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Department of Political Sciences, professor Carlos Taibo, one of the outstanding academics in the �first generation", is the author of a doc-toral thesis on the Red Army78 and director of the Program of Russian Studies. This program was born ten years ago, but today it stagnates because of lack of financing. Although initially an expert in the Soviet political system, profes-sor Taibo has also worked on transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet repub-lics. He has published a large amount of diffu-sion books, written for the general public, some of them dedicated to the wars in former Yugo-slavia with more political conclusions that aca-demic ones. At the Universidad de Valencia, the Department of Constitutional Law supported interdisciplinary contacts among Spanish experts in matters of Eastern Europe. The first �Encuentro Español de Estudios sobre la Europa Oriental� has taken place in November 1998, thus opening a window that brought fresh air for the first time since the end of the Instituto de Europa Orien-tal. A group of political scientists, jurists, histori-

74 Some of the doctoral theses in course of the UNED are those of Ruth Ferrero, on national minorities in Ukraine, Slovakia and Romania and Pedro Chaves, on enlargement of the European Union to Eastern Europe. 75 http://www.ucm.es/info/eid/html/luengo.html. 76 http://www.ucm.es/info/eid/html/palazuelos.html. 77 Professor Pedro Gómez Serrano, the only expert in Bal-kan Economy (former Yugoslavia and Albania) five years ago, now he abandoned that research line. 78 Published under the title: Las fuerzas armadas en la cri-sis del sistema soviético (1993).

ans and economists from all generations worked together in an atmosphere of open co-operation. The promoter of this experience was doctor Carlos Flores, professor of Constitutional Law with wide experience in the study of the ju-ridical structures of Eastern Europe. His almost 50 publications have been focused mainly on the comparative study of electoral processes, the formation of party systems and the institu-tion building processes in the new East Euro-pean democracies79. The Research Unit Social Formations in Transi-tion (Unidad de Investigación Formacions So-cials en Transició80 -UIFST-), at the University of Valencia attached to the Department of Ap-plied Economics also should be mentioned. UIFST is directed by professor Antonio Sánchez Andrés and has a very qualified staff of Valencian and Russian professors81. UIFST analyses the transformation processes that be-gan at the end of the eighties in the old econo-mies with centralized planning, although its main center of attention is the Soviet Union and the present Russian Federation82. UIFST works in close collaboration with the Group for Analysis of Economic Transition Economy (Grup d´Anàlisi de la Transició Econòmica -GATE-) based in Barcelona. Al-though GATE is not devoted explicitly to studies on transitions in Eastern Europe, it has some veteran researchers of the first generation, such as Benjamín Bastida, director of GATE, and Teresa Virgili. They are both experts in the eco-nomic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Also, Xavier Martí works on the eco-nomic transition in Poland, whereas Carles Batlle studies the Czechoslovakian case. Worth mentioning in Barcelona is also the CIDOB Foundation83 (Centro de Información y Documentación de Barcelona). It is a research, teaching and documentation centre on interna-

79 He has been a Fulbright Scholar (1993-94) and visiting professor (1994-95) at the University of California-San Die-go, as well as a guest researcher at the Universities of Veszprém and Budapest (1992), Virginia and Triest (1996) and the Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Re-search Institute in Munich (1993). He has edited Las nue-vas instituciones políticas de la Europa Oriental (Mad-rid/Valencia, 1997), Derechos y libertades en las nuevas democracias de la Europa del Este (Pamplona, 1998-9). 80 http:// www.uv.es/uifst. 81 Professor José Maria March, co-author with professor Antonio Sánchez Andrés of several books on the socio-economic transition in Russia, some translated into Russ-ian, is an outstanding scholar, also remarkable are the pro-fessors Isabel Plà and Vicenta Fuster. Thanks to the close relationship that the center keeps up with the Russian Uni-versity of the Friendship of the Peoples, the Russian pro-fessors Nikolay A. Shkolyar and Gyennadiy I. Martyuschyev have worked in the staff of UIFST. 82 Professor Raúl de Arriba researched and published on the economic transition in Bulgaria. 83 http://www.cidob.org/.


tional relations and development studies. It was registered in 1973 as a non-profit association. In 1979, it became a private foundation with a board consisting of several institutions and indi-viduals. The main geographical areas are Latin America, the Mediterranean and the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, East-ern Europe and the former USSR. The respon-sible person for research is Carmen Claudín, a researcher who studied in Moscow. She is also the director for studies in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. CIDOB has its own documentation databases, hotline service and library. Among the seminars and confer-ences that CIDOB offers every year, at least one is dedicated to issues of the day in Eastern Europe or Russia. Francisco Veiga84, the author of this contribu-tion, also works in Barcelona. He is one of the very few Spanish historians who are experts in Eastern Europe, he teaches two subjects at the Department of Contemporary History of the Autonomous University of Barcelona: "History of Eastern Europe, 1919-1945� and a doctorate programme: "Of Yalta to Dayton and Ram-bouillet, 1944-1999: Guidelines for the study of Eastern Europe in the second half of the XX. century". In 1987, he presented his doctoral thesis about fascism in Romania, published in 198985, and later on, he wrote two books on the political and social crises in the Balkans be-tween 1989 and 199986. Two of these works have been published and translated into Roma-nian and Bulgarian87. He is a member of the Council of the CIDOB Foundation and collabo-rates as an expert in Balkan politics with sev-eral Spanish and international media, such as "El País" or the BBC (Spanish programmes). At present, professor Veiga supervises several re-search works on issues related to the history or the politics of Eastern Europe and the Bal-kans88. Together with the three core institutions men-tioned above, it is also necessary to name two minor centres: Galicia and Asturias. At the Uni- 84 http://blues.uab.es/historiamc/cvfveiga.htm. 85 Francisco Veiga, La mística del ultranacionalismo. Histo-ria de la Guardia de Hierro. Rumania, 1919-1941. Eds. de la universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 1989. 86 Francesc Veiga, Els Balcans. La desfeta d´un somni, 1945-1991, Universitat de Girona and Vic, Eumo, 1993 and 1994; Francisco Veiga, La trampa balcánica. Una crisis eu-ropeoa de fin de siglo, Grijalbo, Barcelona, 1994. 87 Francisco Veiga, Istoria Garzii de Fier, 1919-1941. Misti-ca ultranationalismului, Ed. Humanitas, Bucuresti, 1993 and 1994; Ф. Вейга, Балканският капан, Aмaдеуc´c Kъмпани, OOД, Sofía,1999. 88 Professor Roberto Rodriguez Milán, who lives and works in Athens, works on a thesis on the Party New Democracy and the contemporary Greek right. It is also necessary to highlight the researches of Teodora Toleva on the relations-hips between Bulgaria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

versity of Santiago of Compostela, professor Xosé M. Núñez Seixas is a veteran researcher of the Central European nationalities, and es-pecially the Czech national process. His thesis, presented in 1992 at the European University Institute of Florence is entitled: "The problem of the nationalities in the interwar Europe. The Congress of European Nationalities (1925-1938)". From then on, professor Núñez Seixas has completed many research works of great quality on nationalism and the derived national-ist doctrines resulting from the Great War89. Another historian but professor of political sci-ence at the same university is Raimundo Viejo, a significant academic of the second generation who is now working on a doctoral thesis about the German reunification. The Department of Contemporary History at the Universidad de Oviedo (Asturias) has become an organizing centre for conferences and courses on politics in Eastern Europe. Thanks to their initiatives, every summer some groups of Spanish experts can meet with other col-leagues coming from Eastern Europe. Since 1990 and by professor's José Girón�s initiative, the University of Oviedo has organized at least six courses on political transition, economic evolution, ethnic conflicts and wars in Yugosla-via, with the participation of professors and Spanish experts in Eastern Europe. The same university publishes most part of the conference proceedings and reports presented during the summer courses90. Although the enumeration of the institutions and Spanish researchers dedicated to Eastern Europe have filled several pages, the situation is not satisfactory. Spain is a country of 39 mil-lion inhabitants, member of the European Un-ion, with more than four big cities and 74 uni-versities. Despite of this, there is no single aca-demic institution dedicated entirely to social science studies on Eastern Europe. In fact, there prevail the isolated researchers who, un-fortunately, persist in being isolated from one another. Most of them only trust in public financ-ing, and private institutions and companies that work in Eastern Europe don't usually trust them. As there is no money, there are no important projects. There are no indicators that the situa-tion will improve and it will take a long time be-fore we will again have an Institute of Studies on Eastern Europe; and still more time, before Spanish researchers and professors of the di-verse social sciences will again work together. 89 Soon he will publish the book: Entre Ginebra y Berlín. La cuestión de las minorías nacionales y la política internacio-nal en Europa, 1914-1939 (Madrid: Akal). 90 Jose Giron (ed.): La transicion democratica en el centro y este de Europa, 2 tomos, Ed. Universidad de Oviedo, O-viedo, 1997. José Girón y Slobodan Pajović (eds.): Los nuevos Estados de la antigua Yugoslavia, Ed. Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, 1999.


United Kingdom

George Kolankiewicz, School of Slavonic and East European Studies - SSEES -, University College London91

Continuity and Change in United Kingdom Transition Research The social sciences in the United Kingdom (UK) dealing with Eastern Europe have in general successfully met the intellectual challenges of the nineties. The gestalt switch required when a major paradigm, however defined, underpinning research activity, loosely understood, is re-placed has been achieved. In other words, there is life after sovietology! Suffice to say that the as yet incomplete replacement paradigm currently concerned with transition or transfor-mation92 research is being produced out of a melting pot of ideas and data that have been generated in the words of one eminent authority through the �collaboration between specialists on authoritar-ian regimes who never had the opportunity to conduct serious survey research and political scientists experienced in survey techniques but ignorant of the cultures and languages of the countries which have become candidates for inclusion in wider comparative studies.�93 The last ten years of transition social science research in the UK, confined in this case to po-litical science and sociology and related disci-plines, can be summarised for the purposes of this all too brief overview by examining the role of • Co-ordinated research programmes • Dedicated research centres • Research issues • Human capital Research Programmes Serendipity placed a key comparative, interdis-ciplinary research programme, namely the Eco-nomic and Social Research Council�s (ESRC) East-West Programme in the right place at the right time. Originally conceived on the cusp of the collapse of communism in 1989/1990 out of an interest in the processes of decentralisation evident at the time, it provided the first vehicle for the tentative collaboration mentioned above. 91 E-mail: [email protected]/ [email protected]. 92 Richard Sakwa Postcommunism. Open University Press 1999 pp. 97-113 Sakwa has produced some of the more analytic monographs on the post Soviet space especially his Russian Politics and Society. Routledge 1996. 93 Archie Brown �The Study of Totalitarianism and Authori-tarianism� in Jack Hayward, Brian Barry and Archie Brown (eds) The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press 1999 p. 388. This provides a wide ranging summary of political science and related research endeavour with a good bibliography.

Subsequent triangulation as it came to be called, bringing together language, area and social science disciplinary specialists reconfig-ured east European studies. More importantly it did not assume that research into the post communist transformation would be self-terminating but that the changes underway, however liminal, would nonetheless require sustained long-term research endeavour. As a recent conference amply demonstrated the leg-acy of state socialism will remain a fruitful area of research for the foreseeable future.94 The East -West Programme comprised of 20 projects selected out of over 300 initial appli-cants. It sought to understand the processes at work at the level of the enterprise, farm and household including changes in property re-gimes, management and labour relations. It dealt with social issues such as homelessness, the family and law, youth and most importantly political parties, elites, local democracy, social movements and changing political attitudes.95 It is generally accepted that no other study was in a position to capture this particular moment in time of systemic collapse and thus provide not only valuable insights into the early stages of transition but also lay the foundations for sub-sequent research. The programme was constrained however by the intellectual agenda of scholars at the time, more so than by the perceived needs and priori-ties of the programme�s initiators. This was not commissioned research and therefore gaps were inevitable although the proven saliency of the 20 projects vindicated the conviction of the programme director that intellectual pre-occupation was to be the touchstone for the re-search agenda in these fluid times rather than any attempt to second-guess possible transition scenarios. One achievement of the programme was to provide key groups of scholars with launch pads for subsequent more embedded research activity in the area. It also provided the re-sources and the venues for the establishment of research networks with eastern European colleagues. David Lane96 at Cambridge and John Scott working with Polish colleagues oversaw the first research into the milestone Contract Parliament elected in 1989 while at the 94 The Legacy of State Socialism and the Future of the Transformation. 30 March-1 April 2000. Kings College Cambridge. David Lane and others. 95 Further information on the East West Programme can be obtained from its former director at [email protected]. 96 Lane D Ross C From Communism to Capitalism: Ruling Elites From Gorbachev to Yeltsin. New York St Martin�s Press 1998. J Wasilewski and W Wesolowski (eds) Poc-zatki Parlamentarnej Elity. IFiS PAN Warsaw 1992. The Pol-ish team continues to produce research into subsequent parliaments.


same time initiating a line of research into eco-nomic and political elites in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. Geoff Evans and Stephen White-field, newly in tandem, brought the intellectual powerhouse of Nuffield College into what is one of the most fruitful and stimulating series of atti-tudinal research projects dealing with political, economic and more recently social processes in the New Independent States (NIS) as well as Central and East European(CEE) countries.97 Simon Clarke at Warwick was able to begin to build his highly effective research teams in Russia thereby tracking the processes of enter-prise restructuring and more recently household adaptation strategies.98 Nigel Swain provided impressive insights into the rural transition in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary and con-tinues to research the area. More established researchers such as Waller, Lewis, Wightman and Lomax working with Pridham 99 were able not only to carry out research on the complex process of party formation but generated a vast array of publications for the broader academic community. The East-West comparison became more relevant in projects such as Ken Rob-erts100 work on young people in Poland, an ex-tension of his UK and German research whereas Bartlett and Hoggett examined the growth of small firms. Richard Rose used the programme funding to extend the scope of what was to become a prodigiously large-scale com-parative study of life in post communist socie-ties to stand alongside his New Democracies Barometer located at Strathclyde101. Excellent ethnographic studies such as those by Nick Manning and Katy and Chris Pickvance at the University of Kent working with their east Euro-pean colleagues102 on environmental and housing movements and Thirkell, Scase and Vickerstaff also at Canterbury on case studies

97 G Evans and S Whitefield �Identifying the Basis of Party Competition in Eastern Europe.� British Journal of Political Science. No 23 , 1993 This was the first of a series of highly regarded publications. 98 S Clarke (ed) The Russian Enterprise in Transition: Case Studies. Cheltenham Edward Elgar 1996 99 G Wightman (ed) Party Formation in East Central Europe. Aldershot Edward Elgar 1995 �Parties, Trade Un-ions and Society in East-Central Europe�. The Journal of Communist Studies. Special Issue. Vol 9 No 4 December 1993 100 B Jung and K Roberts (eds) Postkommunistyczne Pokolenie. KiW 1995 published in English as Poland�s First Post Communist Generation. Youth and Citizenship in Pre-sent Day Poland. Avebury 1995 101 For research produced around the time of the East West programme see R Rose W Mishler C Haerpfer De-mocracy and Its Alternatives. Understanding Post Commu-nist Societies. Polity Press 1998. 102 Katy Lang-Pickvance, Nick Manning and Chris Pick-vance (eds) Environmental and Housing Movements. Grassroots Experience in Hungary, Russia and Estonia. Avebury 1997

dealing with labour relations in 5 countries103 contributed to what was judged eventually to be a successful programme despite having to deal with a range of uncertainties not least in the former Yugoslavia. The East West Programme also benefited from parallel projects commissioned at the same time not least of which was the Social Justice project whose UK partner, Gordon Marshall of Nuffield College, provided what was a missing dimension. Primarily however the programme was able to channel the creative tension, which existed be-tween the challenge of uncertainty and the need to apply the conceptual apparatus drawn from other spheres of research. The ESRC�s commitment to area based re-search was further in evidence by what can be seen as a follow-up undertaking namely the �One Europe or Several� Programme104 launched in January 1998. Here the research agenda took on board some issues which had only been signalled in the earlier project out-comes, namely EU enlargement, security con-cerns and cross border crime (P. Rawlinson). The effect of exclusion from the NATO and EU inclusionary processes, not even considered in the early nineties projects, rightly came to be seen as a core issue. Judy Batt with her team based at CREES105 are looking at most of the �in-out� permutations in a project with a strong cross-border dimension dealing with the con-cept of �fuzzy-statehood�. Once again the cu-mulative research capital gleaned from pre-1989 research involvement made these schol-ars eminently suited to studying the fate of the excluded where stalled transition is producing hybrid processes only comprehensible in the context of the pre-existing communist systems. This project as with that associated with one of her co-workers at that time, Saul Estrin106 from the London Business School (LBS) who is now working on the economic impact of European Union (EU) and European Monetary Union (EMU) exclusion, also demonstrates the value of the continuity of research provided by such programmes. In between the two programmes, Batt and her colleagues had earlier completed a follow-on project on new post Soviet states. Stephen White�s team from Glasgow with Margot Light at the London School of Econom-ics (LSE) are also looking more closely at the �outsiders� such as Russia, Belarus, Moldova 103 J Thirkell, Richard Scase and Sarah Vickerstaff (eds) Labour Relations and Political Change in Eastern Europe. A Comparative Perspective. UCL Press 1995 104 www.one-europe.ac.uk 105 Centre of Russian and East European Studies, Univ. of Birmingham, www.bham.ac.uk/crees/ 106 S Estrin (ed) Privatization in Central and Eastern Europe. Longman 1994


and the Ukraine with a series of elite interviews, focus group studies and broader surveys in or-der to assess the policy impact of enlargement at the elite level. In another ambitious project, the combination of Essex University political scientists (Frances Millard and Sarah Birch) and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (Kieran Williams) brings the electoral process in some eight of these countries under specialist scrutiny in an examination of how electoral regulations effect political systems. Finally, regional and local governance, which had been the object of research in the East-West Programme under Hanson, Gibson and Campbell, is once again under scrutiny. James Hughes at LSE this time is looking at the rele-vance of geography to successful democratisa-tion through the transfer of traditions and best practise across borders. Of course, other ESRC programmes continued to invite and support east European oriented research where it fitted their research theme. Thus under the Transnational Communities programme Stewart and Mandel are engaged on research into citizenship and belonging, a study of the Hungarian diasporas in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia and the Kazakh and Rus-sian Jewish communities in Germany. Steven Webber at CREES is working within the ESRC Youth Citizenship and Social Change Pro-gramme on perceptions of security and citizen-ship, a qualitative study addressing attitudes to varieties of militarism in Russia, Germany and the UK. All of these projects have to acknowl-edge the additional factor of �globalisation� in the transition trajectories. Outside of formal programmes, interesting new networks have emerged especially among younger scholars working on the Ukraine (Birch, Wilson-SSEES107, Kuzio, Wolczuk-CREES). In part, this is a reflection of con-scious recruitment policies in the area and in part is attributable to the growing importance of Ukrainian studies and the intellectual dynamism of these younger researchers. It needs to be emphasised how central these programmes have been in developing genu-inely collaborative ties with eastern European colleagues without whose efforts some of the high quality survey and participative research would not have been possible. Research Centres Inevitably, perhaps the tectonic shifts in the field of east European studies have thrown up new centres of excellence whilst allowing others to consolidate or coalesce. The European Re-search Institute at Birmingham University cre-ated out of the amalgamation of CREES and the Institute of German Studies with the School 107 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Univer-sity College London.

of Social Sciences and supported by an initial £4.8 million from the Joint Infrastructure Fund is a prime example of the realignment of research organisation following the redrawing of the geo-political map. Under its auspices not only do some of its �One Europe� projects find an enlarged home but leading area scholars such as Hilary Pilkington can continue their research in youth studies and spin off projects such as that on local elites in Russia, Poland and Lithuania can find logistical support. For its part the Strathclyde Centre for the Study of Public Policy has generated a series of re-ports produced out of the large-scale compara-tive databases and the tireless research activity of Richard Rose and his co-workers. Building on a wide network of social scientists in eastern Europe, Rose has compiled reports, which are particularly attractive to policy makers given their accessibility and broad sweep. Recent re-search into social capital and poverty studies is providing an important sociological dimension to a field understandably perhaps dominated in its first post 1989 years by economics and po-litical science. Stephen White and W L Miller108 complete the picture of research into political values and voting which along with the proxi-mate Glasgow University Institute of Central and East European Studies combine to make Glasgow a focal point for political science tran-sition research in the new millennium. Warwick�s Centre for Comparative Labour Stud-ies is the home to Russian Research Pro-gramme and is now a premier centre for the so-ciological study of employment restructuring, household survival strategies and associated projects on contemporary Russia. Its 800 re-search papers many available on the web are the outcome of the several funding grants re-ceived from the ESRC, Department for Interna-tional Development (DFID) and Leverhulme. They are of enormous value to academics as well as students writing dissertations and pro-jects and retain considerable intellectual mile-age. Traditional centres such as SSEES newly merged into University College London can only benefit from the access to colleagues working in social anthropology and geography and the School of Public Policy. Indeed the newly estab-lished Centre for the Study of Democracy and Society with its lead figure Michael Stewart and bringing in colleagues from Cambridge such as Frances Pine is indicative of institutions finding new forms co-operation. SSEES is well served by a whole cohort of younger scholars such as

108 William L Miller et al Values and Political Change in Post Communist Europe. Macmillan 1998.


Alena Ledeneva109 Vesna Popovski, Gerlachus Duijzingsand110 working alongside established figures such as George Schopflin, Kieran Wil-liams and Peter Duncan. Thus, the social sci-ences at SSEES are producing their own brand of interdisciplinary innovation, combining the best of EU enlargement research with east European studies. Another interesting response to the need to marry outstanding disciplinary departments to the requirements of area studies in a time of tumultuous change was provided by Essex Uni-versity home to Millard111, Birch, Williamson and Walker as well as Peter Frank and Emil Kirchner. The Pan European Institute built around the new HEFCE112 appointments to the area (see below) combined the previous activi-ties of Russian and European Studies and drew upon the tradition of comparative studies, which had stretched across the social sciences and humanities since the university�s foundation, to bring together social scientists in teaching and research. Other universities in the UK such as Salford (Polish Studies), Keele (South East Europe Unit), Leeds with its research centre LUCRECES, Sussex and the European Insti-tute with an East central Europe in Transition research group, Nottingham, Bradford (The Bal-tic Research Unit) and Durham (The Ustinov Centre) and Wolverhampton (Russian and East European Research centre) all maintain active research activities in selected fields which has been recognised and enhanced in some cases by the allocation of new HEFCE lectureships. Centres of excellence like St Antony�s College Oxford home to outstanding scholars such as Archie Brown and Alex Pravda retain their intel-lectual gravitas and remain venues for the ex-change of ideas, However it is difficult not to no-tice that a process of research led consolidation of eastern European social sciences is under-way, driven by empirically oriented projects. Thus, the ESRC funded centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends (CREST) lodged partly at the Department of Sociology at Oxford provides access to east European elec-tion data through the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Similarly, the network based around the International Social Survey Pro-gramme (ISSP) maintains important links to scholars dealing with comparative social sci-ence issues. 109 Alena Ledeneva Russia�s Economy of favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchanges. Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post Soviet Studies. 1998. 110 Working for the Netherlands State Institute on the fall of Srebrenica. 111 Frances Millard Polish Politics and Society Routledge London 2000. 112 Higher Education Funding Council for England.

It would be remiss to overlook the role of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House who have generated much useful re-search over the years. Roy Allison heads the highly productive Russia and Eurasia pro-gramme whereas Heather Grabbe associated with the European programme under Julie Smith has been a major force in publication and conference activity on the subject of the politics of eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO. Perhaps more than was at first anticipated, the extended transition is throwing up theoretical challenges which demand close collaboration at all levels and at all stages between researchers here and in eastern Europe. There is a special need to recognise the intellectual input that the sociological and political science communities in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Rus-sia are providing in pushing forward the boun-daries of understanding in their own and neighbouring countries. The best of east Euro-pean indigenous research output needs to have a larger platform in the UK and a greater voice, with more active mediation by area based so-cial scientists whose responsibility it is to be more inclusive in setting the mutual research agenda. Research Issues Given the new found access to a whole range of additional democracies it was inevitable that the first stages of transition research appeared to be dominated by studies of elections, elites and to a lesser extent electorates. The analysis of new political classes emanating out of dissi-dent or nomenclature backgrounds called for research into political identity formation amongst both leaders as well as led. Electoral and party systems, presidential vs. parliamen-tary regimes, constitutions and courts were all grist to the mill of the newly enabled political science community in the UK. Sociology followed up and provided an under-standing of interest groups, civil society, and in-deed class formation and its impact on voting behaviour. In due course party competition and the embedding of political parties required a more complex level of analysis and in-depth ethnographic studies by area specialists have come back into favour.113 Elsewhere the con-tinuing role of clientilism and corruption in politi-cal life (W L Miller and A B Grodeland) has drawn attention to other post authoritarian tran-sitions and a renewed interest in the �Italian Road�. However, it is second-generation democratisa-tion questions, which are now being addressed. Why have the political classes seen so little new recruitment? Will the wonderful varieties of 113 The work of younger scholars such as Alex Szczerbiak (Poland) Sarah Birch and Katarzyna Wolczuk (the Ukraine) Edwin Bacon (Russia) comes to mind.


political parties encountered in eastern Europe begin to take on the pattern of western parties and is it possible that they are simply following the general direction of dis-organised political behaviour in the west? Is the search for the rep-lication of a left-right divide pointless? The imi-tative revolutions of eastern Europe are at once catching up on being pre-modern, modern and post modern where markets exist for political ideologies as much as for consumer goods. The sociological agenda which was originally shaped around the �winners vs. losers� ques-tion has gradually evolved into an examination of household survival strategies with all the res-ervations that researchers such as Simon Clarke and Nick Manning hold for that term, im-plying as it does co-ordinated decision-making rather than being the contingent outcome of in-dependent opportunities seized. Richard Rose who focused on household portfolios of different economies and was eventually led into the study of �capitals� and assets followed a similar tack. This approach of necessity involved the continuing study of the informal sector, self-help, multiple jobs and the generation of typolo-gies of individual responses to the market. Pov-erty studies and later the patterning of social exclusion through long-term unemployment im-ported many of the concepts of economic soci-ology into transition research. The sociology of time, of the body and of leisure have quickly come on to the research agenda. The final and most ambitious part of this re-search direction has come with the Evans and Whitefield project into class formation in Russia and ECE countries and especially how this is reflected in voting preferences and political par-tisanship. Their ambitious attempts to opera-tionalise Goldthorpe �s class schema within the context of post communist Russia involve mak-ing connections between economic strategies and structuring of assets at their dis-posal.114The making of the middle class as the anchor of market led reforms and foundation for a liberal civil society is equally resonant throughout such research and stands at the in-terface of politics, economics and sociology. Another part of the sociological agenda follows on from the civil society debate and concerns the emergence and reaction to �otherness�. This has provided scope for research into youth cultures, sexuality, the Roma, migration, bor-ders, and the return of �forced migrants� to Russia. Mars and Webber have studied Jewish identity in post communist Hungary and Poland whereas elsewhere discourse analysis has been deployed to understand identity formation in German and Polish cross-border families.

114 G Evans (ed) The End of Class Politics/ Class Voting in Comparative Context. Oxford University Press 1999.

A quick snapshot of the range of research funded by the ESRC provides reassurance that most social science concerns continue to be addressed by individual scholars outside of the large centres and programmes. The rich tapes-try of ESRC funded research projects points to the vibrant research imagination of the UK scholarly community. A prime example is Peg Watson who maintains her eminent research in-to mortality and morbidity most recently through a study of Polish Nowa Huta steel workers and especially the factors determining the �survi-vors� from an earlier study. Caedon Staddon�s project on the local environmental governance in Poland and Bulgaria deals with resource de-pendent communities in this case forestry. Individual country specialists such as David Turnock from Leicester continues his research on the human and social geography of Romania. Chris Corrin in the field of women�s� movements, gender and politics, Frances Pine looking at various aspects of the lives of peas-ant women in Poland and Mary Buckley on women in Russia are just a few of the examples of gender oriented research. Rosemary Cromp-ton brought Russia and the Czech Republic into a larger comparative project occupational seg-regation and the social construction of occupa-tions. Finally, Chris Hann continues his finely crafted social anthropological studies of minor-ity communities, post socialist nationalism and most recently the fate of the Greek Catholics of central Europe. Edwin Bacon is also examining religion this time in Russia and at the level of high politics whereas Neil Melvin at Leeds continues his es-tablished interests working on post-soviet local elites in Novosibirsk and Pavlodar as well as looking at the Russian diasporas in the Ukraine and Estonia.115 Finally to� Death in Russia�, both historically experienced at the collective level and individ-ual responses, trauma and mourning are all part of an intriguing project being undertaken by Catherine Merridale at Bristol. Human resources The above resume does not reflect the full depth and breadth of research activity much of it geared towards consultancy, both public and private sector, briefing activities and report writ-ing. The HEFCE Review of Former Soviet and east European Studies published in October 1995 identified a serious shortfall in provision for study of the area especially amongst the

115 The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Directory of Members 2000 used alongside the ESRC REGARD database of research grants and re-sources provides a good overview, albeit selective, of the UK research community.


non-Russian specialists.116 It recognised that a generational exchange was in train with many more mature scholars retiring from active re-search. In order to manage this process and make up some of the shortfall 33 new posts were allocated to 13 Higher Education Institu-tions in the UK chiefly in the politics and international relations of the eastern European non-Russian countries. Since the process was based upon peer review and competitive bid-ding, some disciplines such as sociology con-tinue to be under-represented. The remit for these new appointments included providing expertise to business and the world of diplomacy, something that in fact was difficult to avoid. The major recipients of the new posts were SSEES, the Universities of Essex, Bir-mingham, Nottingham, Leeds and the School of Oriental and African Studies. The single largest country beneficiary in terms of new appoint-ments was the Ukraine although recognition was given to other under-resourced areas of study such as South Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. Excluding economists, who have not been the subject of this admittedly rather personal over-view, there appear to be in the region of 200 social scientists, chiefly political scientists, and including 35 plus self declared sociologists in the UK working on eastern Europe. That num-ber is unlikely to grow in the coming years al-though this does not imply that the research ac-tivity of this group will stabilise. In all likelihood east European studies will continue to be incor-porated into mainstream comparative research and this will only serve to increase the demand for scholars who are not only familiar with the area but who are also able and willing to ad-dress broader issues. With all these resource limitations in mind, it is difficult not to conclude that the social and po-litical sciences in the UK are dynamic with a cohort of younger scholars waiting in the wings.117

RECENT PUBLICATIONS • Creuzberger, Stefan et. al.: Wohin steuert

die Osteuropaforschung? Eine Diskussion. � Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 2000.

• Gel�man, Vladimir; Golosov Grigorii V. (Eds.): Elections in Russia, 1993-1996.

116 Review of Former Soviet and East European Studies. Higher Education Funding Council for England. October 1995 p. 33. 117 See the most recent issues of Slovo published at SSEES for articles based on presentations by younger re-searchers largely from the UK.

Analyses, Documents and Data. � Berlin: edi-tion sigma, 1999, 475 p., ISBN 3-89404-198-6

• Goati, Valdimir (Ed.): Elections to the Fed-eral and Republican Parliaments of Yugo-slavia (Serbia and Montenegro) 1990-1996. Analyses, Documents and Data. � Berlin: edi-tion sigma, 1998, 397 p., ISBN 3-89404-181-1

• Klingemann, Hans-Dieter; Mochmann, Ek-kehard; Newton, Kenneth (Eds.): Elections in Central and Eastern Europe. The First Wave. � Berlin: edition sigma, 2000, 354 p., ISBN 3-89404-195-1

• Ott, Alexander: Parteien und Macht-strukturen in der Ukraine von 1991 bis 1998. � Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 160 S., ISBN 3-8046-8859-4

• Toka, Gabor; Enyedi, Zsolt (Eds).: Elections to the Hungarian National Assembly 1994. Analyses, Documents and Data. � Berlin: edi-tion sigma, 1999, 318 p., ISBN 3-89404-184-6

CONFERENCES118 See also the Conference Calendar under the URL: http://www.berlin.iz-soz.de/events/eastern-europe/tagung.htm

Announcement

Civil Society and Democracy in the New Mil-lennium - 20th World Congress of the Czecho-slovak Society of Arts and Sciences Date: 09.08.-13.08.2000 Conference site: Washington, USA Organiser: The Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) Contact: SVU President � Mila Rechcigl Tel.: 301-881-7222 Fax: 301-881-9667 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/czech.htm.

Announcement

Approaching a New Millennium: Lessons from the Past – Prospects for the Future � The 7th ISSEI Conference Date: 14.08.-18.08.2000 Conference site: Bergen, Norway 118 The printed information on conferences is an extract from the Internet conference calendar of the GESIS Branch Office. The calendar is updated every two weeks, it also contains information on events in the German-speaking area.

http://www.berlin.iz-soz.de/events/eastern-europe/tagung.htm

http://www.berlin.iz-soz.de/events/eastern-europe/tagung.htm


http://www.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/czech.htm

http://www.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/czech.htm


Organiser: International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) Topics: • The Progress of Integration � Religious and

Cultural Minorities in the New Central Euro-pean Democracies

• Democracy in the European Union � Inte-gration trough deliberation?

• The Impact of Political Culture on the De-mocratization in Eastern Europe � Theoreti-cal Remarks and Empirical Results

• State Building, Democracy in the Post So-viet States: Risks and Challenges at the Close of the 20th Century

• Theories of Democracy for Europe: Princi-ples and Preconditions

Contact: Univ. of Bergen, Centre for the Study of European Civilizations Haakon Sheteligsplass 11 N-5007 Bergen, Norway E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.uib.no/issei2000/

Announcement

Minorities in a Pluralist Society in the New Millennium Date: 01.09-03.09.2000 Conference site: Brno, Czech Republic Organiser: Masaryk University, School of Social Studies, Brno; The British Embassy, Prague Contact: Masaryk Univ., School of Social Stud-ies, Dept. of Psychology Gorkého 7 CZ-602 00 Brno, Czech Republic Tel.: ++420-5-41 61 51 26 Fax: ++420-5-41 61 51 00 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.fss.muni.cz/psych/romale/conf_2000

Announcement

Building Communication in Europe: People and Organisations � Seventh European Summer Seminar in Intercultural Studies Date: 05.09.-10.09.2000 Conference site: Krakow, Poland Organiser: Institute for International Communica-tion; Amsterdam in cooperation with Jagiel-lonian Univ. and SIETAR Europa Contact: B. van Houten, Institute for Intercultural Communication Marnixstraat 154-I NL-Amsterdam Tel.: ++31-20-624 2212 Fax: ++31-20-624 1513 E-mail: [email protected]

Announcement

Globalisation and European Integration Date: 07.09-09.09.2000 Conference site: Univ. of Barcelona, Spain Organiser: The Council of the European Associa-tion for Comparative Economic Studies (EACES) Contact: Benjamin Bastida, GATE, Univ. of Bar-celona, Dept. Política Económica Avenida Diagonal, 690 E-08034 Barcelona, Spain Tel.: ++34-93-40 21 949 Fax: ++34-93-40 24 573 E-mail: gate2000@eco

Announcement

Ethnic Borderlands in Europe: Coexistence and Conflicts Date: 09.09-10.09.2000 Conference site: Suprasl, near Bialystok, Poland Organiser: Univ. of Bialystok, Institute of Sociol-ogy Contact: Anna Borkowska, Univ. of Bialystok, Inst. Of Sociology Ul. Liniarskiego 3 PL-15420 Bialystok, Poland Tel.: ++48-85-745 71 04 E-mail: [email protected]

Announcement

The Changing Role of Borderlands and Re-gional Policy Date: 13.09.-15.09.2000 Conference site: Zgorzelec, Poland Organiser: Univ. of Lodz, Chair of Political Geog-raphy and Regional Studies; State Scientific In-stitute �Silesian Institute�, Opole; Saarland Uni-versity, Saarbrücken, Germany Topics: • European integration and regional policy • The function of borderlands in view of

European Community integration processes • Comparing Western practice to the capaci-

ties of Poland and Eastern and Central Europe

Contact: Prof. Dr. Marek Koter or Dr. Marek Sobczynski Ul. Kopcienskiego 31 Tel.: ++48-42-635 45 90 Fax: ++48-42-635 45 92 Internet: http://www.uni.lodz.pl/ulinfo/sesm23.htm


http://www.uib.no/issei2000/


http://www.fss.muni.cz/psych/romale/conf_2000


mailto:gate2000@eco


http://www.uni.lodz.pl/ulinfo/sesm23.htm


Announcement

The Anthropology of Southeast Europe – Ten Years After: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Transformation Date: 14.09-17.09.2000 Conference site: Sofia, Bulgaria Organiser: The Association for Southeast Euro-pean Anthropology (InASEA) Contact: Prof. Dr. Klaus Roth, Institut für deut-sche und vergleichende Volkskunde Ludwigstr. 25 D-80539 München Tel.: ++49-89-16 28 09 E-mail: [email protected] or: Dr. Milena Benovska, Sofia E-mail: [email protected]

Announcement

Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Eth-ics, Integrity, and Human Rights � Third Bi-ennial International Conference Date: 21.09.-23.09.2000 Conference site: Ljubljana, Slovenia Organiser: Univ. of Ljubljana, College of Police and Security Studies Contact: Milan Pagon, Univ. of L., College of Po-lice and Security Studies Kotnikova 8 SL-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Tel.: ++386-61-172 4678 Fax: ++386-61-302 687 E-mail: [email protected]

Announcement

Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism in Europe: short time and long-time perspec-tive Date: 28.09-30.09.2000 Conference site: Warsaw, Poland Organiser: German Historical Institute, Warsaw; Polish Academy of Sciences, Historical Insti-tute; Italian Cultural Institute Contact: German Historical Institute Warsaw Palac Kultury i Nauki (17th floor) Plac Defilad 1, skr. 33 PL 00-901 Warszawa Tel.: ++48-22-656-7182, -7185 Fax: ++48-22-693-7006 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.dhi.waw.pl

Announcement

Czech Political Science at the Beginning of the New Millennium � The first congress of the Czech political scientists Date: 29.09.-01.10.2000 Conference site: Brno, Czech Republic Organiser: Czech Political Science Association in co-operation with the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk Univ., Brno Contact: Ass. Prof. Dr. V. Dvoáková, Univ. of Economics, Dept. of Political Science Nám W. Churchilla 4 CZ-130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected]

Announcement

Sixth Nordic-Baltic Conference in Regional Sciences Date: 04.10-07.10.2000 Conference site: Riga, Latvia Contact: Dr. Biruta Sloka E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/arkleton/events.htm

Announcement

Europe in the 20th Century. Main directions of development (Ecology, Economy, Culture and Politics) Date: 10.10.2000 Conference site: Lodz, Poland Organiser: Univ. of Lodz, Faculty of Philosophy and History, Institute of History Contact: Prof. Dr. J. Grobis or Prof. Dr. E. Wisniewski Ul Kaminskiego 27a PL-90-219 Lodz Tel./Fax: ++48-42-678 54 88 Internet: http://www.uni.lodz.pl/ulan/sesa12.htm

Announcement

Women’s Memory: Oral Histories from Transition. Theory and Practice Date: 03.11.-05.11.00 Conference site: Budapest. Hungary Organiser: Central European University Contact: Central European University Nargiza Turgunova Nador u.9 1051 Budapest, Hungary





http://www.dhi.waw.pl/



http://www.abdn.ac.uk/arkleton/events.htm

http://www.uni.lodz.pl/ulan/sesa12.htm


Tel.: + 361-327-3296 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://wwww.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/gender2.htm

Announcement

The European Union, The Baltic States and the Northern Dimension Date: 10.11.-11.10.00 Conference site: London, Great Britain Organiser: University Association Contemporary European Studies (UACES) Contact: UACES King�s College, Strand Tel.: +44 (0)20 7240 0206 Fax: +44 (0)20 7836 2350 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.uaces.org/u-info/14.htm

Announcement

Eastern and Central Europe: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future Date: 17.11.-19.11.00 Conference site: Warsaw, Poland Organiser: The Graduate School for Social Re-search (GSRR) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sci-ences, the School for Slavonic and East Euro-pean Studies at University College London, Department of Sociology of the Central Euro-pean University Contact: GSSR E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.sns.edu.pl

Conference report

Summer School 2000 Summer School 2000 took place in Sofia, Bul-garia, from 20. till 25. June. It was organized by UNESCO-Management of Social Transforma-tions (MOST) Programme, the International So-cial Science Council (ISSC) and Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The topic of the School was Inter-national Comparative Research Programmes in the Social Sciences. The School was attended by 36 doctoral students, young researchers and university teachers below 35 years of age com-ing from 24 countries. The students came mostly from Europe but also from Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, the USA, Canada, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan and the Philippines. The tru-ly international group was selected from 146

applications. Distinguished researchers from 11 countries delivered lectures and participated in the debates. . The major results of Summer School 2000 can be summarized as follows: 1. Knowledge dissemination. The keynote lec-ture on strategies of comparative research in the social sciences was delivered by Mattei Dogan, France. The participants received first hand information about projects of the Man-agement of Social Transformation Programme - ETHNO-NET Africa (Paul Nkwi, Cameroon), RISK (Nikolai Genov, Bulgaria), MOST�s Clear-ing House (Petra Van Vucht Tijssen, the Nether-lands). The Comparative Research on Poverty Programme of the ISSC was presented by Blandine Destremau (France-Yemen). Jill Jae-ger (Austria-Germany) analysed achievements and problems of the IHDP Programme of ICSU-ISSC. Wolfgang Glatzer (Germany) introduced to the students the long-term international pro-ject on Comparative Charting of Social Change. Kjell Nilsson (Sweden) explained the back-ground, the content and the logistical concept of the project for developing a MA course on Internet on European transformations in a com-parative perspective. Christian Giordano (Swit-zerland) drew some parallels between social processes in Eastern Europe and in East Asia. Iannis Kinnas (Greece) and Hisayoshi Mitsuda (Japan) discussed comparative aspects of envi-ronmental studies in the social sciences. A Round Table discussion on the processes in South-Eastern Europe fostered the understand-ing of regional processes in the global context. 2. Networking. In the course of the intensive debates during the sessions of the School and in various less formal meetings, intensive inter-actions facilitated the exchange of experience and the mutual understanding. The inter-generational exchange of scientific and every-day life experience came about in the most natural way. The discussions among young col-leagues paved the way to future scientific co-operation. Joint research projects were dis-cussed already during the Summer School. There is no doubt that the communication be-tween the participants will continue. There will be various follow-ups of the School. 3. Capacity building. The knowledge acquired during the Summer School opened new vistas for professional development and realization of the participants. More specifically, they learned about new approaches to their research subject field, which are truly comparative, interdiscipli-nary as a rule and practically oriented in most cases. An important part of capacity building was the development of skills for participation in international debates and in international scien-tific networking. Young colleagues were espe-cially encouraged to chair sessions of the


http://wwww.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/gender2.htm

http://wwww.utoronto.ca/crees/conferences/gender2.htm


http://www.uaces.org/u-info/14.htm


http://www.sns.edu.pl/


School thus taking the role of leaders in de-bates and in networking. The positive reactions to Summer School 2000 by the participants are overwhelming. This is a clear signal that there is a genuine need of this type of professional frameworks fostering knowledge dissemination, networking and ca-pacity building. It is the major responsibility of international organizations to actively initiate and support them. Thus, the accumulated ex-perience urges to institutionalise an Interna-tional Summer School on Comparative Re-search in the Social Sciences.

Prof. Nikolai Genov Local organiser, Institute of Sociology

Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

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