| This
map shows the national origin of persons who attended any of the ECER/
VETNET conferences in the period 1998 to 2003. Altogether, they come from
25 European countries. The variation in numbers of persons from individual
countries, which has already been observed (see figure
2), is clearly indicated: UK participants outnumber the rest, followed
by Germany and two much smaller countries: the Netherlands and Finland.
The Finnish representation is particularly remarkable, in view both of
the small-sized population and the country's fairly recent involvement
in the EU (1995).
Particular
attention is paid to two groups of countries with relatively low participation:
-
first,
marked violet, the group of South-West European countries sharing romanic
languages (ES, FR, IT and PT);
-
second,
marked yellow/ olive, the Central and Eastern European countries, considered
eligible for joining the EU; seven of these (CZ, EE, HU, LT, RO, SI, TR)
have been represented at ECER/ VETNET conferences, four (BG, LV, PL, SK)
have been missing as yet.
It should
be added that country representation has not played a part in the programme
management of ECER/ VETNET conferences, except for expecting multinational
participation in symposia. There are two sides to this approach: on the
one hand, unlimited opportunities for submitting proposals from any country
(as against the criteria of eligibility observed by EU project programmes,
which have also indirectly influenced the composition of project related
networks like FORUM and CEDRA); on the other hand, missing stimuli for
involving participants from new or badly represented countries (as against
the more active policy of integrating eligible countries in EU project
programmes). |
