Between Westernization and Traditionalism: Central and Eastern European Academia during the Transformation in the 1990s

Abstract

2021 saw the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there is a growing interest in the historicization of the past 30 years of transformation. Taking this anniversary as a point of departure, we want to look into a specific area that has markedly changed in the last three decades – the scholarly community. The interest of analysing the academia in a period of transformation is not new, and the 1990s are amply covered by the literature scrutinising changes and forging plans for the future development, but we intend to enrich this discussion with approaches coming from the history of science and of scholarship. By looking at changes that happened in the decade following the end of the Socialist utopia, we propose to look into mechanisms of organizational and intellectual innovation and place them in the context of European and global integration. As we argue, looking at the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe can help us to understand how scholarly systems change by oscillating between tradition and innovation, and we propose the notions of a selective Westernisation and an equally selective traditionalism for our case study.

Modernisation of the Country in the Context of Social Environmental Sustainability: Example of Lithuania

“…Another aspect that emphasizes the importance of travel infrastructure in the modernisation of the country is the flow of ideas and the cultural background. Infrastructure enables people to travel and bring Western thinking patterns [78]. It is even argued that this type of cultural diffusion serves the modernisation of the country even more than the adoption of European legal norms and practices [79][80].…”

Modernisation of a Country in the Context of Social Environmental Sustainability: Example of Lithuania

“…Another aspect that emphasizes the importance of travel infrastructure in the modernisation of the country is the flow of ideas and the cultural background. Infrastructure enables people to travel and bring Western thinking patterns [85]. This type of cultural diffusion is even argued to serve the modernisation of the country even more than the adoption of European legal norms and practices [86,87].…”

“…The main novelty of our research is the proposition of a framework for the assessment of socio-environmental sustainability from the eyes of its citizens. It allows for supplementing the widely accepted 'hard' indicators of social environmental indicators [85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102] with 'soft' indicators reflecting the perceptions of citizens.…”