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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 11/03
The Social Sciences in Transition: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe
Elzbieta Matynia
2002
Abstract
The biggest challenge in trying to make sense of the social sciences in Central and Eastern Europe today is that the very condition of the societies in question is "transitional." From the moment the Poles negotiated the beginning of their own transition in April have been dealing with a part of the world in which all aspects of social, political and economic life are in constant motion. Some elements of the reports we commissioned on the status of the social sciences in various countries of the region are already obsolete; by the time the overview presented in this volume goes to press, it too will have become a case study in what Timothy Garton Ash calls the "history of the present."
The post-communist countries of the region are often treated - and not without good reason - as a fairly uniform bloc. And indeed, when one looks at the educational and research structures these societies inherited from their previous regimes, which were to approximate the Soviet model, one can see the obvious similarities. At the same time, one cannot underestimate either the influence of pre-communist scholarly traditions or the varied effects of governments' educational policies since 1989 on the reconfiguration of the social sciences throughout the region.
