Central European Political Science Association: a brief history
by Jerzy J. Wiatr
 
New form of cooperation between political science associations of Central Europe began in early 1990s at the initiative of the Austrian association beginning in contacts with the Slovenian and Hungarian associations gradually expanded to other associations. It took the form of regularly held regional conferences. The third such conference (and the first which I attended) was held in Bled, October 22-24, 1996. Until 2000 there was no formal structure uniting the national associations from Central Europe. The idea of organizing the regional association within the IPSA was first suggested at the fifth regional conference held in Bratislava (January 22-23, 1999). It was then agreed that the ruling organs of national associations would make their decision by the time of the next conference, which was held in Popowo (Poland) April 17-18, 2000. At the Popowo conference (counted as the sixth regional conference) the founding associations (Austrian, Croat, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak and Slovenian) decided to form the regional association within the IPSA, adopted the constitution and elected the Executive Committee with Jerzy Wiatr (Poland) as president, Joseph Bayer (Hungary) as vice-president and Drago Zajc (Slovenia) as secretary general. In 2001 the Lithuanian association was admitted to CEPSA as its eights member. Following the establishment of CEPSA its annual conferences were held regularly in Vienna (2001), Plzen (2002, Vilnius (2003), Budapest (2004), Vienna (2005), Bratislava (2006), Portorož (2007), Opatija (2008), Warsaw (2009), Budapest (2010), Vienna (2011), Budapest (2012), Plzen (2013), Praha (2014), Vilnius (2015), Ljubljana (2016), Wroclaw (2017) and Banska Bistrica (2018). Elections to the Executive committees were held every third year: 2003 (President Attila Agh), 2006 (President Sylvia Mihalikova), 2009 (President Karin Liebhart), 2012 (President Ladislav Cabada), 2015 (President Ladislav Cabada – reelected), 2018 (President Miro Haček). Since 2009 CEPSA have organized joint sessions with the IPSA Research Committee 47 (“Global-Local Relations”) at the world congresses of political science (Santiago 2009, Madrid 2012, Montreal 2014, Poznań 2016 and Brisbane 2018).