This essay reflects the personal experiences and views of someone who has passed through the first stages of a university career in Germany. A few months ago, a new federal university framework law was passed which will change the system profoundly. The present generation of postdoctoral researchers, however, are the products of the old system, which will continue in force until the new one is fully implemented. In what follows, I describe both systems from a young scholar's point of view. While the old system suffered from serious defects, with adverse consequences for young academics in particular, the new order is likely to be even worse.

This article examines organisational transformation within higher education in Britain. In the process, it highlights the focus upon the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of organisational existence that guides these changes. Drawing on recent experiences of auditing of subject provision within universities, it is argued that the new discourse of managerialism that is reflected in the drive for ‘quality assurance’ constitutes the triumph of method over purpose. Internal to the thinking motivating these transformations is an uncritical attachment to putatively universal forms of market-oriented practice. This, in turn, involves a process of historical forgetting vis-à-vis the academy's longer-standing practices that have been rooted in bodies of organisational knowledge developed out of a distinct ethos. The resulting sense of an ‘eternal present’ constructs points of difference from newly dominant discourses of organisational practice as merely ‘old-fashioned’ customs to be overcome.

A denial of the possibility of difference with regard to local practices and forms of knowledge has particular consequences for the possibility of mounting any form of critique. It is assumed that ideas of ‘best practice’ are generic and transcend specific forms of organisational knowledge evolved at the front line of educational service delivery. Knowledge developed through practice (phronesis) is sidelined in favour of the imposition of a supposed technically neutral knowledge, assisted by the growing army of those now charged with ‘quality assurance’. Little space is then left for the practically reasonable decision-making that must always be a matter of judgement, learned in contexts that are subject to change. It is on this basis that we examine the idea of the ‘eternal present’ that now characterises the ascendancy of method over purpose in British higher education institutions.

Drawing up the balance sheet of political science research in Eastern Europe in the last twelve to twenty years, do we discover ‘more or less brilliant errors’, as Leo Strauss suggested in another context, or do we discover brilliant ideas? Probably both. Below, I give my personal view of what has happened in our discipline in the last twenty years, suggesting them mottos, genres, and questions that have characterised our work. It race the trajectory of our discipline between 1980 and 2002, from what I call ‘The Age of Expectations’ to our present ‘Age of Perplexity’ from an age of plans and proposals to an age of questions and questions.

The mottos of this period might be ‘The squaring of the circle’. Why? Because we social scientists who lived and worked in those years tried to solve something that could not be solved. We tried to transform state socialism into democracy and the market economy without the Soviet Union or our own aparatchiks noticing.

Over the past ten or twelve years, research on political parties has developed in all Central and East European (CEE) countries. Because the prerequisite for this research is the formation and existence of competing political entities, research on political parties did not come into being until after 1989. In this brief article, I focus on the development of political parties research in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. I provide a discussion of the main topics of research, and a brief description of the institutions and researchers in each country.

In the beginning, most empirical research was conducted by sociologists. Though not as advanced as their West European counterparts, they were methodologically better prepared. There were few, if any, people with degrees in political science, and deparments and research institutes had yet to be established.

The task of reviewing public policy research in Eastern Europe borders on the impossible. For one thing, public policy is an extremely broad field, and analysis might cover anything from the memos of government advisors to the manifestos of NGOs. Second, there is the problem of language. There are ten working languages for the ten candidate countries alone. Third, because members of the policy analyst ‘elite ‘ often work as consultants, the best East European public policy research usually comes out of projects run by assistance organisations, including the World Bank and the OECD. As such, their work tends to be contaminated (not necessarily in a bad sense) by the latest ideas and methodologies propounded by these organisations, and it becomes difficult to distinguish what is purely ‘Eastern’ from what is ‘Western’. The widespread complaint that the East was ‘intellectually colonised’ by the West after the fall of the Wall is clearly well founded in the case of public policy research.

The trends prevailing in Central and East European (CEE) social science research at the time of the collapse of communism were markedly different from those in the West. First of all, social science disciplines in the former Soviet bloc were dominated, to varying degrees, by Marxist-Leninist ideology. By definition there was almost no work at all done on ‘capitalist’ integration. Prior to the collapse of the communist regimes, only a very few studies, mainly in economics, had addressed (Western) European integration. Political science in general was underdeveloped, and ‘European integration’ and/or ‘European studies’ were truly terra incognita. Since the, an ongoing dialogue between several groups of scholars has led to numerous research projects investigating European integration. This article aims to provide an overview of the research in this area in Eastern Europe.

Identifying CEE research on European integration is no easy task. First of all, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches prevail, and it is very difficult to draw clear boundaries between political science and the other social sciences.

Several attempts have already been made to evaluate International Relations (IR) studies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (Drulák and Druláková, 2000; Sergounin, 2000), where it is still a fledgling discipline compared to its mature cousins in the US and Western Europe. In this article, we examine IR studies in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania. By looking at the most prominent scholarly journal published in each country, as well as each country's more important research institutions and think tanks, we attempt to illustrate several of the common features of IR research. Following our discussion of the national-level features, we present some observations on regional level developments. Here, we focus on three IR institutions that may be seen to represent the CEE region as a whole. Hopefully, this study will shed light on the construction of national and regional disciplines, especially in terms of their strengths, research topics, and principle actors. We also hope to have a better understanding of the external and extra regional influences on the discipline.

Elite theory enjoyed a remarkable revival in East Central Europe, and also in international social science research, during the 1990s. Many researchers, belonging to a variety of schools of thought, turned to the analysis of rapid political and social change and ended up doing elite-centred research. In East Central Europe, during the decades of dictatorship, official sociology advocated a simplified version of Marxist class theory. Official sociologists talked about ‘Old Class’ theories, while dissident sociologists used ‘New Class’ theories to discredit the former approach and to criticise the then existing statesocialist regime.

The revival of elite theory in the late 1980s came as a surprise. Scholars stopped using the heavily ideologised discourse in the social sciences because it was regarded as the language of the old regime. Since transition and elite transformation seemed to be parallel processes, it was understandable that the sociologists and political scientists of the region started to use elite theory.

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) was born out of the activities of the original Manifesto Research Group (MRG). This group is not to be confused with the more recently formed MRG, the ECPR Standing Group on Party Manifestos, concerned with the computerised analysis of political texts, founded by Paul Pennings of the Vrije University in Amsterdam a couple of years back. The first MRG began its activities under the aegis of the ECPR at the Florence Joint Sessions in 1980, and continued throughout the 1980s to collect, code, and analyse party manifestos (election programmes) for nineteen countries from 1945 to 1983. The democracies covered were mainly in Europe but also included the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Sri Lanka and Japan. The basic idea at first was to see what cleavages divided the parties, how many cleavages there were, and whether parties had converged or diverged along them during the post-war period.

This paper seeks to start a debate about how political scientists in Europe might continue to help each other develop, and how the discipline might begin to tackle the challenges posed by the Sorbonne and Bologna agreements. We believe it is important that political science and political scientists face these challenges, because otherwise it is likely that the answers will be provided for us by others less familiar with the needs and demands of the discipline itself.

Higher education today is confronted by a number of challenges. The ICT revolution is one such major challenge, in that it has revolutionised the way in which knowledge can be transmitted - no lecturer worth his salt is now unfamiliar with PowerPoint as an aid to presenting material, whilst most students regularly trawl the Net in search of information for essays and seminars, if not for the essays themselves.

As is widely known, the Bologna Declaration - signed by thirty-two European ministers in charge of higher education - constitutes a joint commitment to the establishment of a European Higher Education Area by 2010. There are six important objectives underlying the Europeanisation of higher education. These are, the adoption of a system of readable and comparable degrees; the establishment of a system of credits; the promotion of mobility; the promotion of European co-operation in the field of quality assurance; the promotion of a European perspective in higher education; the adoption of a system essentially based on two main cycles, undergraduate and post-graduate. The achievement of the first five undoubtedly depends upon the implementation of the sixth. A degree structure based on two main cycles (bachelor's/master's) is the corner stone of the entire, ambitious programme.

In this article, I discuss some of the thoughts and experiences I have had over the past decade both through my work at the ZA-EUROLAB and as a former Erasmus free mover student. The first idea I introduce concerns the necessary prerequisite for the enhancement of mobility in Europe: the harmonisation of qualifications. With the imminent entrance of the East European states into the EU this seems an increasingly pressing issue. Second, I address the need for interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. Third, I discuss the importance of interational vertical and horizontal networks. Finally, I highlight the role that institutions such as the ZA-EUROLAB have in addressing some of these issues. However, before turning to these topics, I would like briefly to discuss why research mobility in the early stages of one's career is so important for later mobility.