European peripheries

This volume has a long history. In 2004, the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence, University of Tampere applied, together with the respective units of the University of Tallinn, the University of Pécs, the University of Cantabria, the University of Joensuu and the National School of Political Science and Public Administration of Bucharest for resources from the Erasmus Intensive Programme in order to organize three summer schools on European peripheries. The underlying idea was to provide opportunity for PhD students, especially from the participating universities to attend both as discussants of and paper presenters at one or more than one such session of which the key lectures were to deliver by professors in an open and multidisciplinary atmosphere. Resources were provided in principle for all the three summer schools, but in fact only two of them received support from the EU. The first summer school was held in Tampere in 2005, the second one in Santander in 2006 and the third in Pécs in 2007. This last summer school was financed by the University of Tampere and the University of Pécs. The project included, from the very beginning, the idea to produce a publication of papers selected from the contributions which were presented at the three summer school sessions. At the same time, the Summer School intended to provide an opportunity for all the participants to publish their contributions in the form of CD publications. Accordingly, the contributions to the Tampere Summer School and the Santander Summer School were published in this way. Such a CD publication was not prepared after the Pécs Summer School; instead, all the effort concerning publication was devoted to the final printed volume. However, it is never an easy task to bring either teachers or students to rewrite their former contributions and to select papers for a publication which ought to comprise a coherent volume. Therefore, the realization of the publication was postponed from time to time and was finally given up in its original form. Nevertheless, the idea survived: some teachers and PhD students got together at a Symposium on European Peripheries in Pécs in the summer of 2011 with a view to present contributions for the planned publication. Basically all the teachers and PhD students who participated in the Symposium also participated in one summer school at least. The Symposium gave a chance to finalize texts which were already presented at the previous summer schools or to present something new and to integrate the texts for a more coherent volume. This publication is thus a result of the summer schools and of the Symposium held in 2011.