Challenges to Change - Middle and Eastern European Countries in Transition

After drastic changes (wars, revolutions, etc.) a social system is considered by sociologists as politically stable, if the first government in the new era had been re-elected after having spent some years in opposition. Somewhat like this, the return to the starting point, is true for EDS too: in 2005 the fifth meeting of the European Doctoral Seminar had been held, and this was the second EDS conference organized in Budapest. Therefore using the sociological approach the European Doctoral Seminar has been proved as stable event for Ph D students from different countries, from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, Hungary, and in 2005 also from Italy.
The background of EDS was and is the unification process in Europe, the basic idea was and is to bring young people together to discuss parts of their Ph D theses. Often it could experienced that the problems investigated by participants were more or less the same, but the concrete approaches for the analysis of inflation, unemployment, economic development, capital markets, etc. were of course influenced by history, traditions, the cultural circumstances of these economies, and by the economic actors' behavior in these countries. From this point of view it was easy to understand what about the presentation had been prepared, but at the same time it was also surprising to experience the differences between economies located in Middle and Middle East Europe.