It was somewhere in the dark corridors of Franz Kafka's Castle that all concerned came to understand that the transition from planning to markets would necessitate the thorough reshuffling not only of the structures of ownership and leadership, not only of credits and credentials, but also of street names and bills of fare, of research or concert programs. All this just by the way, as incidental pieces of administrative business to be expedited in the course of German Unification, itself effected lickety-split in the good old spirit of Bismarckian efficiency. Thus it is that the local choir, orchestra and organist giving the magnificent performances of Bach Cantatas and Passions at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig now do so under a conductor and a director newly arrived from the West.
The reorganization of the East German academic institutes, as Hans-Georg Wolf relates (pp. 829-52), followed the same pattern: the Academy itself prepared the agenda, but no action was taken until the material was reviewed and approved by the West-German Scientific Council. The fact that the Western actors absorbed the inevitable costs speeded up the whole scramble tremendously. He who pays the piper calls the tune.... And, as the treaty of unification made crystal clear, this time too, as in Bismarck's days, unification meant falling in step behind the winner.
Deciding the fate of 130 research institutes, however, tested the mettle even of a Scientific Council composed of distinguished scientists and seasoned politicians, so much so that a number of foreign experts - and even a few scholars from the East - were called in to help work out a proposal. The final decision, taken in camera, was announced in the summer of 1991. Ten percent of the academic institutes were completely dissolved, 47 percent were disintegrated, 9 percent integrated with other institutions, and 35 percent were "converted" (p. 833) - the rounded figures add up to a grand total of 101 percent. Reorganization meant cutting the staff by more than half (and there have been further cuts since). All social science institutes were dissolved - unification in their case took the form of nullification - with fewer than 20 percent of their erstwhile research staff being kept on the Academy's payroll. But institutes in the humanities, mathematics (!), and chemistry (!) did not fare much better. Those involved in research of benefit to Western companies received preferential treatment, but the Council showed little interest in programs specifically addressing the local problems of the East. In the effort to ward off the wholesale massacre, more than half of the institutes tried to curry favor with the Council by ousting their directors, but to no avail. It is, Wolf tells us, "too early" (p. 848) to say just what improvements have been achieved by all this carnage; one thing one can definitely say in its favor is that it is over and done with.
[...]
The introductory overview focuses on Central Europe. It does not address the situation in the West, where the absence of party instructions is by no means tantamount to the absence of red tape. The new étatiste and oligopolistic structures might even aggravate the region's troubles. For the proper, free and fair organization of scientific research, its proper and fair funding, is something that no society has solved as yet.
Any comparison with Western standards is necessarily prejudiced at the outset by the differences in statistical usage. In the West, it is strictly the cost of research as such that figures in the data. In the East, the cost of the entire institutional setup is chalked up to Research and Development, though research workers generally comprise less than half the staff, and their salaries less than half of the salaries paid out by any given research establishment. The institutions have always had to carry an oversize and ever-mounting administrative burden, staff who report on every detail and facet of the research workers' activities, their opinions and their doings. They are there not to help but to keep a watchful eye, and, if necessary, to sabotage the researchers' still fundamentally suspect pursuits.
Accordingly, even if, in the '80s, these countries - as has been alleged - spent the same percentage of their GDP on R&D as the leading Western nations, even this meant that they were about 50 percent behind. The cutbacks of the '90s (which, incidentally, have imposed new administrative strictures, making even more unfavorable the balance between research and its administrative costs) may easily widen the East-West gap into an unbridgeable abyss.
[...]
Of the many interesting papers (of uneven quality) reviewing the sad plight of science in the diverse countries of Central Europe, I propose a detailed look at Judit Mosoni-Fried's analysis of the contemporary history of Hungarian engineering research. After a somewhat glowing introduction ("Freedom of research has become a right laid down in the country's Constitution; the universities and the research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have become autonomous institutions" (p. 777) and so on - claims that have a familiar ring to those who have read analogous claims under the previous regime - she turns to inspect the situation more closely.4 It emerges that funding (from central contributions and from business enterprises) was cut back by more than 70 percent from 1988 to 1993 (and 1993 was not yet rock bottom). Foreign companies rely on their research bases abroad; local companies are either unable to pay for research, or are simply not interested.
There were about 40 research institutes in Hungary built up since the '50s at considerable cost. This "research network", which could boast a sizeable turnover up to 1988, has practically been demolished by now. Most of its assets have been allocated to the Zoltán Bay Foundation, which proposes to cooperate with the universities. The allocation, effected by the Council for Technological Development, was in clear contravention of the 1992 government regulation to the effect that the institutes be transformed into private companies with limited liability, in which the state holds shares amounting to 25 percent plus one vote (!).5 In all the confusion, the ministry of trade and industry managed to get its hands on twelve of the institutes, which, after a murky consolidation, simply disappeared from sight.
[...]
There's no way to get away from the question: Why? Why indeed did the parliaments and the administrators decide as they did? As Balázs tells it, none of the plans, blueprints, motives, arguments or explanations have ever been made public. One wonders if they were ever formulated at all. The bureaucrats and the politicians, it seems, were instinctively acting out their secret antipathies. But how is it that everywhere they acted to the same effect: the severe mutilation of the intelligentsia, the country's brains? The financial argument does not hold water; that was window-dressing. The costs involved in the additional supervision, administration and severance payments easilyexceeded the salaries "saved". With the bulk of the extant equipment wasted in the shuffle, the exercise did not husband resources, but only consumed them.
[...]
The restoration of the bourgeoisie in an age whose technological possibilities are slowly rendering once progressive bourgeois ideas obsolete makes for a society that is conservative and retrograde, and is preoccupied with defending itself - though with a bad conscience - against all further change. This is particularly evident in Central Europe, where the middle classes were never strong enough to eradicate or transform the archaic, feudal, almost caste-like social divisions. The restoration has exacerbated all the latent social tensions that had lain dormant under the seemingly smooth surface of these "socialist" societies. It is only natural that any direct and unsentimental exploration of these ossified relations should be considered an unmitigated annoyance by the current elite.
History has shown that attempts to hamper the social sciences in their rights to free inquiry tend to backfire. At most, such concerted measures to withhold information postpone the moment when the sordid facts of political wrongdoing, misappropriation and mismanagement come to light; but they do so at the cost of fanning the anger and resistance of those affected. Nothing makes for receptivity to new knowledge and new schools of thought like being in opposition. And as a guru of the opposition, a social scientist can come to partake of the aura of the revolutionary.