Student Mobility in the EU – Recent Case Law, Reflections and Recommendations
Now more than ever, it appears that both societal and political factors are supporting and stimulating student mobility in all its shapes and forms, most notably through various initiatives on the European level. The Bologna Process, the European Qualifications Framework and the Lisbon Recognition Convention are all examples of this commitment undertaken by the Member States of the EU as well as other European nations. However, upon taking a closer look at the practical reality, we see that many obstacles remain to exist. As EU law currently stands after the Forster and Morgan and Bucher judgments, mobile students do not have a right to maintenance grants, neither from their host state or their home state. Furthermore, the European Court of Justice has – albeit reluctantly – allowed an exception to the principle of equal treatment on grounds of nationality with regards to access to higher education in the Bressol case. Although the recent, somewhat more restrictive attitude of the European Court can be defended and perhaps even welcomed, it does illustrate the need for a discussion and potential action on the European level by the political institutions. This contribution includes a discussion of the recent ECJ case law on student mobility and some reflections on the desirability, feasibility and potential form and content of such future action.
Higher education in Europe : europeanisation, ideas and functions
Despite the fact that European states hold formal regulatory competences in higher education, the coordination of reforms increasingly takes place on the international and transnational platforms/processes. A growing number of European level policy and political initiatives (in particular the Bologna Process and EU institutions) are sources of political action, where it is possible to trace the discourses and ideas about the present and future of higher education in Europe. This research project is outlining the ideations of higher education within the European political and policy arena, thereby opening an insight into the Europeanization of higher education from the ideational perspective and eventually shedding light on the meaning attributed to higher education in contemporary Europe. 
In terms of analytical approaches, complementing the Discursive Institutionalism (a branch of new institutionalism) with the historicist and critical theory represents an innovative blend and thereby a new contribution to the scholarship on Europeanisation of higher education. The analysis is based on a particular set of ideational rules and discursive regularities that emerge in the context of Europeanisation of higher education and follow a particular logic of communication. The institutions are viewed both as structures – a context that constrains, or enables, the agents, and as constructs that are contingent to agents’ thoughts, words and action. The ideational dynamism was contextualised in the change and continuity of the historical structures and thereby the study accounted for the larger picture of the social world and the spirit of the time. 
The interpretation of the field data suggests that to a certain extent Europe continues to adhere to roles and purposes attributed to higher education in the liberal humanist spirit of the time and the welfare-state programmatic hegemony. These ideas remain embedded in the historical structure. In the analysed policy arenas they act as guardians against radical and rapid interventions into the higher education sector. However, the historical-structural background has changed over past decades and triggered dynamism in the ideation of higher education. The discursive interaction in European policy arenas clearly indicates the emergence of new and powerful ideations of higher education. Higher education has departed from serving the grand projects of the emancipation of humanity, the idealistic unity of knowledge and empowerment of economically disadvantaged social groups. It is now set on the path to becoming increasingly ideated as a public investment that is supposed to yield to the economic competitiveness and immediate use of individuals and groups. Moreover, on a more fundamental level, one can discern the silhouette of the idea of higher education as a commodity that is valued in terms of exchange and its income generating potential on the global market of services. The identified ideatios meet, match and clash within the European policy arenas. Accordingly, this research has brought us to the conclusion about the streams of ideating higher education, the relationship between them and interpretation of the overall direction of the institutional change.
The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 . By Geoffrey Wawro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1966. Pp. 313. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-56059-4.
This expanded and reworked Yale dissertation ventures into a topic done spellbindingly two decades ago by one of the grand masters of German military affairs, Gordon Craig, whose Battle of Koeniggraetz (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), was published in a series commissioned by Hanson W. Baldwin. NewYork Times military affairs editor. Wawro does not approach the literary brilliance of Craig, but his work goes beyond it in several important respects. First, although Craig dealt with a good deal of the preliminary background and also the aftermath, his book focused squarely on the major battle which decided the war, whereas the book at hand deals with the entire war, which included several other battles, notably Langensalza, between Prussia and the Hanoverians in north-central Germany and Custoza between Austria and Italy in northern Italy. Secondly, whereas Craig knew the German sources as well as anyone, Wawro here uses not only German, but Austrian, French, British, and Italian ones. Of the last two, the former are important for the diplomatic background, the latter for the southern campaign area as well as for the problematic PrussianItalian relations. Thirdly,Wawro has dug deeper than Craig into primary source archives. Especially for the central emphasis of the book, the Austrians and Italians, he has mined the archives in Vienna, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice. For example, he uses a number of war diaries which officers from captain to field marshal kept and later deposited in military archives. Interestingly, both authors use Hans Delbriick andTheodor Fontane. Delbriick wrote half a dozen essays on the war and after his death in 1929 two of his colleagues published a fifth volume of his classic Art of War in the Framework of Political History which dealt substantially with 1866, partly on the basis of Delbriick's Berlin University lecture notes. Fontane covered the war as a newspaper correspondent and published more than a thousand pages from his eyewitness experiences, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, 2 vols, (Berlin, 1871-72).