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Focus
Political Sciences in The EU Candidate Countries
by Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Ewa Kulesza, Annette Legutke,
The paper draws on a report on the state of the art in East European political science based on country reports. It serves as a source for those interested in the degree of development and sophistication of the political science in EU accession countries, but stands also as a scientific contribution in its own right. The authors found a correlation between the degree of democratization and the degree of political science’s institutionalization in a given country. Candidate countries improved the political science teaching and research, but dealing with the communist legacy proved a cumbersome task still needing decades for completion. There is considerable variation within the pool of countries surveyed. Those which had the opportunity to develop even a minor political science nucleus in the communist regime are doing far better presently. The solutions suggested to bridge the gap between the two Europes are the mobility of academics and students, higher autonomy of the Universities and the wider use of new communication technologies.
published in Vol 3 - No 1 - 2003 // Reinventing Social Sciences
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ABSTRACT
The Political Science production after 1989 is, not surprisingly, quite poor. Only five authors published books abroad, though many more chapters in edited books and journals by Western publishers were authored by Romanians. Nuclei of empirical research started to develop in Cluj and Bucharest. New centers, as Iasi and Timisoara, have stepped in more recently.... »
FOCUS
Prior to 1945 Romania had a well-developed sociological school, well related to Western Europe and enjoying a good reputation in Romania. Among the many endeavors of this school the four-volumes Romanian Encyclopedia commissioned by the Royal Foundation remains the main source of data for pre-Communist Romania. During early Communist years sociologists had to choose between... »
The quantity and quality of Romanian historians work improved seriously after the fall of communism. Altough the new generation of historians, historians that borrowed the know-how from the West, have to face many obstacles, the battle is not lost already. The battle between those who want to revive the “grand-narrative” from communism and those who... »
Neagu Djuvara is a professional diplomate, a historian of South-Eastern Europe and an opinion leader. He left Romania shortly before the advent of Communism, and returned after 1989 as a senior scholar, who spent most of his career years in the West. His intervention in this symposium is rooted in his own experience. Djuvara claims... »
Due to the subservience to the previous regime, many professional historians were considered untrustworthy and discredited as interpreters of past and present in the former eastern communist countries. Their evolution after glasnost and perestroika contained some important steps. First, they challenged the communist political taboos under glasnost’ and deconstructed the communist political myths and historical... »
The paper draws on a report on the state of the art in East European political science based on country reports. It serves as a source for those interested in the degree of development and sophistication of the political science in EU accession countries, but stands also as a scientific contribution in its own right.... »
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