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.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, it is worth considering the impact of the events for our understanding of politics and international relations theory. The attacks have sparked a slew of analyses from a bewildering range of perspectives across the humanities and social sciences that call for a broad range of policy responses. A complete discussion of all the implications and perspectives would clearly be impossible, so this article will focus primarily on the ramifications for international politics.

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.

During the year 2000, the furore following two apparently unconnected decisions revealed that Greece was undergoing a crisis of redefinition of national identity. In May, an independent administrative agency ruled that the inclusion of religious affiliation on the identity cards carried by all adult citizens violated the law on the protection of personal data. In October, the teachers at a secondary school chose the student with the best grades to carry the flag in the national holiday parade, although he was not a Greek citizen.

The Danish general election of 20 November 2001, held at the same time as the municipal and county elections, marked a turning point in Danish electoral history.

Staunchly supportive of the welfare state, the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, have traditionally supported the Social Democrats - the largest party in all three countries since the 1920s. The election in Denmark broke this tradition. A massive swing to the main bourgeois party, Venstre (the Liberals), allowed the latter to overtake the Social Democrats and to secure a majority for the rightist parties for the first time since 1929 (Table 1).

What roles did the communications media play in undermining support for the authoritarian Franco regime, and in facilitating the transition to, and the consolidation of, democracy in Spain? A recent study of the political roles and impact of the media in Spain over the past six decades (Gunther, Montero & Ignacio, 2000) reveals that the media are just that - a medium through which political elites disseminate messages to the general public. Accordingly, the roles of the media changed over time in accord with political circumstances and with the manipulative intent of governments. In the end, through a variety of processes, the media contributed significantly to the success of the democratisation process.

Under Franco, the media were strictly controlled under policies featuring censorship and the issuing of ‘directives’ not greatly unlike those found in totalitarian systems. But there were some differences, reflective of the differences between authoritarian and totalitarian political systems.

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.

In my book Media beyond Socialism (1994), I have challenged the idea that burial of the authoritarian practices of the former socialist countries would automatically bring about the rise of democratic political and media systems. My doubt that the series of structural changes that had taken place was genuine democratisation was largely provoked by the fact that the East-Central European (ECE) countries were caught up in hasty imitation of Western European economic and political practices rather than striving for a radical departure from the previous non-democratic practices of the socialist regimes. As Jürgen Habermas (1990) argued, the peculiar characteristic of the democratic ‘revolutions of recuperation’ in the ECE countries was a ‘total lack of ideas that are either innovative or orientated towards the future'. And it seems that these doubts were, unfortunately, justified.

The changes in the media systems of these countries suffered from the absence of both popular participation and theoretical foundations.

The one thing no one questions is that the disciplined study of politics is in influx. Political scientists, politologues, Politischewissenschaftler, politólogas and politologi seem, even more than their brethren in the other social sciences, to have to deal with a major crisis in their discipline and, hence, to be ‘condemned to live in interesting times’ - as the Chinese proverb puts it. I can sympathise with those who find their pet paradigms in ruins or their a rea of specialisation virtually eliminated in a burst of ‘creative destruction,’ but I am confident that in the long run this turbulence will improve the discipline.

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 early weeks of 2001 witnessed I an outburst of mass protest in the Czech Republic. The conflict was triggered by journalists employed by the public television company ČT (Čská Televize), yet quickly escalated to become a major political crisis. This 'Television War’ had begun in late December 2000, with journalists voicing their oppOSition to the appointment of ČT's new director, Jiři Hoda. In an attempt to force Hoda's dismissal, the staff went on strike, occupied the newsroom and even started broadcasting unauthorised news programmes. At the height of a conflict lasting almost six weeks, all newsrelated ČT programmes were suspended. The citizens of Prague supported the strike by providing the journalists with food. Hundreds of thousands of people eventually took to the streets against the new ČT management and the politicians who had appointed them.

What was this TeleviSion War all about? At first glance, the journalists were simply opposing the staffing policies of the Supervisory Board for Radio and Television Broadcasting, a body consisting of nine members of Parliament.

Recently Philippe C. Schmitter and John G. Gunnell took issue with the New Handbook of Political Science (Goodin and Klingemann, 1998). Schmitter (see previous article) characterised the Handbook as representing an ‘American’ science of politics. In his opinion this is at the expense of ‘…those who want to practise a political science that is critical of established power, sensitive to the distinctive nature of its subject matter and capable of explaining the complexities of political life to real people’.

One of the oldest chairs in government in Europe was established in 1622 at the University of Uppsala. Although it was only in the late nineteenth century that political studies in their more modern form began to take shape, there is no doubt that the Johan Skytte chair in eloquence and government owes much of its prestige to this heritage. Johan Skytte has also given his name to the Johan Skytte Prize (also known as the ‘Nobel Prize in Political Science’) awarded annually since 1995, the 2001 recipient being Brian Barry.

Successful consolidation of new democracies involves not only implementation of a new constitution and democratic procedures of decision making. Rather, the viability of democracy is equally dependent on the emergence of a civic culture that is supportive of the new political order. Without active citizens the majority of whom believe that democracy is the best way to govern the country, the survival of new democracies is seriously at risk (Linz & Stepan 1996). These democratic orientations have many roots, among which the mass media are perhaps of particular importance.

In modern societies the media are the main sources from which citizens learn about the political world. However, during the formative period of the development of political culture in a new democracy the role of the media can be assumed to be even more essential. Since civil society and the organised sector of political intermediation are notoriously weak, the media become the principal agents of political socialisation.