At the end of November 1755, news of the Lisbon earthquake spread rapidly to all capital cities of Europe. Horrific reports gave rise to a wealth of sensational journalism. As Samuel Johnson and others attest, this was particularly marked in Great Britain. The catastrophe remained a popular subject of flysheets, newspapers, and engravings for months on end. The event was magnified many times over in the eyes and minds by the popular press, which led to forms of public distress. For the first time in the western world, the press, on the occasion of the Lisbon earthquake, helped create the illusion of proximity and unity between the peoples of different nations in Europe. As Voltaire said, ‘L'Europe ressemblait à une grande famille réunie après ses différences’.

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.

The Olympic Games are an invention of the ancient Greeks. They were held in Olympia in a quadrennial rhythm, without interruption for ca. 1200 years. Compared with the modern Olympics, the ancient programme was small: running events (over several distances), the pentathlon, and the so-called ‘heavy’ events: wrestling, boxing and pankration. Various equestrian events (with and without chariots) completed the programme. This programme is discussed with the athletes, their social background and ideology. Although in ancient Olympia a wreath of olive-leaves – a forerunner of our modern gold medal – was the first and only prize, there was no amateurism in Greek athletics. Olympic athletes happily participated in highly rewarding money games both before and after the Olympics. Money was not despised; abuse of money, in the form of Wine, Women and Song was criticized, but some athletes, then as now, were unable to resist the temptations of life.

This article focuses on the relationship between political parties and interest groups in contemporary democracies. Although this is a key topic for assessing the evolution of representative political systems and the quality of democracies, the theoretical and empirical studies have not developed a cumulative body of knowledge. As well as the lack of an integrated perspective, we argue that the literature on this topic has remained conceptually fuzzy and has failed to elaborate a common approach to examine how parties and interest organisations interact. Although some researchers point to a weakening of relations between parties and interest groups, the most current data point not to disappearance but to a change in the way both political actors interact. This article contributes to updating the research on the topic and also sheds light on why the literature has remained segmented. The study shows that the variety of conceptualisations, approaches and typologies has led to incongruent – and often non-comparable – results. The final section identifies a number of research gaps and suggest new topics and approaches that can unify this object of study in the near future.

The article argues that Poland’s mainstream national historical narrative, at least as far as the last two centuries of history of the country is concerned, is full of ‘traumatic’ motives which are regularly used and developed in diverse current political and intellectual contexts. Polish history is imagined to a large extent as an endless chain of 200 years of suffering, caused, among other things, by occupations, wars and exploitation, which are usually seen as not fully recognized in other countries, in particular in the West. The article attempts first of all to explain this specific nature of Poland’s historical identity by the privileged role of the intelligentsia, understood as a specific type of elite based on possession and control of cultural capital. It reconstructs the historical rise of the intelligentsia and its impact on the mainstream narrative in question, pointing to a selective choice of potential ‘traumas’ which are assigned a national status. They may be seen as tools to build positions in what can be called the Polish ‘field of power’, to use the notion coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The particular configuration and recent history of the field of power in Poland is reconstructed in order to explain different strategies of what can be called the social and political construction of historical traumas in Poland.

Turkish migrants constitute the largest migrant community as well as the largest migrant entrepreneurial group in many European countries. Recent studies state that today 1 in 10 Turkish families is self-employed and the number of Turkish entrepreneurs operating all over EU member states has exceeded 100,000. Projections suggest that 190,000 Turkish entrepreneurs will be living in the EU member states in 2020 while employing over 1 million people. An increasing involvement of second-generation migrants in entrepreneurial activities, as well as the new orientations from traditional to non-traditional sectors and transnational activities, has led to a transformation from ‘Migrant Entrepreneurship’ towards the ‘New European Entrepreneurship’.

The 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which aimed to excise the spatial remnants of Francoism from the Spanish landscape, and to recognise Republican victimhood, was blatantly inadequate, and left victims in the same legal position as before.1 In the immediate aftermath of the law, the Spanish state institutionally divorced itself from the recuperation of Republican memory by closing down the Office for Victims of the War and Dictatorship,2 and reducing the funding devoted to historical memory from 6.5 to 2.5 million in 2011. This article will examine the subsequent transnationalisation of Republican memory, in the form of its Argentinisation, and economic protest movements’ appropriation of the memory of the Second Republic. Relatedly, it seeks to answer overarching questions concerning the reach and scope of global memory edicts in national memory debates.

Although the representation of women in science and research has improved significantly over the past few years, women are still far from enjoying the same presence and visibility as their male colleagues. This article depicts the current situation by providing recent data, and it explains why more efforts are still needed. It introduces key concepts that are important for a better understanding of the situation of women in science. Some special attention is given to the particular state of affairs of female scientists in the former communist countries. Finally, the article introduces networking activities as a key tool for strengthening women’s position in the world of science and research. It presents the main findings of a recent study on women’s engagement in international research networks, which proved to have tangible positive career implications for the researchers involved. Thus, the article calls for further efforts to encourage female scientists, both senior and junior, to actively engage in research networking activities in order to shape their profiles, strengthen their position and contribute their expertise to international research.

Coubertin's contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games and the widespread opinion that the modern Games were ‘a French invention’ should be placed in their broad historical context. There are several arguments for and against the assumption that he was the founder, or ‘father’, of the modern Olympics and the Olympic movement. The historical development of the Olympic ideas since the time of Humanism will be discussed, along with the Renaissance and the various attempts to organize Olympic Games before 1896, with a further emphasis on the importance of Neo-Humanism and classical scholarship in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, in order better to understand ancient Greek athletics. Finally Pierre de Coubertin's concept of the Olympic Games and the contributions of the young Greek nation for the rebirth of the famous ancient games after the War of Independence will be analysed.

Among Bosnian and Herzegovinian ethno-confessional nations there exist three parallel and conflicted historical memories. The dominance of patriarchal social forms without democratic tradition is the most profoundly rooted cause of this condition of mutual alienation and forms a major obstacle on the path towards the creation of a democratic political culture. The Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (henceforth BiH) in 1995, also contributes to this situation by cementing the status of ethnic divisions in the country, thus leading to its disintegration.

About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean basin was the location of one of the most extraordinary events in the recent geological history of the Earth: the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Restriction of the seawater exchange between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean led to excess evaporation and deposition on the bottom of the deep Mediterranean basins of a 1.5 km-thick salt layer. Research on this event initiated a long-term scientific controversy. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Networks were identified as the most appropriate tools to address and solve the controversy using a highly cross-disciplinary approach.

In the past 30 years, teaching Chinese as a foreign/second language (TCSL/TCFL) has made great achievements in Mainland China. However, TCSL/TCFL is at a crucial point at present, and its global development in the 21st century presents us with new questions and challenges. There are many issues involved as TCSL/TCFL adapts to this rapid change from a largely domestic context to a global one. This article attempts to address such issues as the significance, challenges and strategies of TCSL/TCFL in mainland China by outlining its brief history and development since the 1950s, and calls for the establishment of an international ‘framework of reference’ for Chinese language teaching.

Translation has probably become the dominant means of communication between European literatures and, in consequence, may be considered a privileged object of study for Comparative Literature. Yet the complex nature of translation has hardly been recognized as an interlingual as well as an intralingual and intersemiotic operation. Translation between literatures covers two possible directions and should be labelled accordingly as either ‘intranslation’ or ‘extranslation’. In order to understand the complex roles all these translation forms have played during the history of European literatures and of European interliterary contacts, an explanatory model is needed that links the study of literatures and of interliterary relations: according to systems theory, literatures are to be understood as complex networks of relations that regulate both their internal structure and relations with other systems. Examples of translation figures and of translation flows help to show how translations contribute to the establishment of macro-European literary networks.

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common view that holds the self-identified political community as prior and independent of constitutional designing, it is claimed that democracy rather operates through the identification of popular subjectness. The demos is signified and recognised as distinct and internally coherent through democratic practice. In the empirical part, it is tested out to what extent public debates on EU-constitution-making were linked to the identification of the popular subject of democracy. By drawing on a comparative media survey of constitutional debates from 2002–2007, the article distinguishes different markers of collective identities (national, European or multiple) that were used for representing and signifying democratic subjects in the EU.

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

At the end of the Darwin bicentenary year it may be thought that there is little more left to say on the subject of evolution, but there are some aspects that still deserve further elaboration. There are several, largely non-overlapping, sets of evolutionary scientists – for example, the palaeontologists who are particularly interested in fossils and in the evolution of structure; the biochemists and molecular biologists who are interested in the molecular aspects of evolution; and the sociobiologists who include cultural evolution in their field of interest. The Darwin celebrations, reflecting his own scientific interests, have been dominated by the palaeontological approach and other approaches may have been somewhat neglected.

Comparison of the molecular structure of genetic material from living species reveals evolutionary relationships, and estimates of dates when pairs of species last shared a common ancestor. The resulting evolutionary trees, which are accumulating rapidly in the literature to complement those trees produced from fossil records, can be used to reveal hitherto unsuspected patterns in the evolutionary record. In particular, the trees can be analysed to show when rates of speciation and extinction were abnormally high or low. Together with estimates of ancestral character states and environments, these data throw new light on the reasons for speciation and extinction. This article describes how statistical methods are being developed and used to analyse molecular phylogenies.

Symmetry is a relevant concept in sociological theories of exchange. It is rooted in the evolutionary old norm of social reciprocity and is particularly important in social contracts. Symmetry breaking through violation of the norm of reciprocity generates strain in micro-social systems and, above all, in victims of non-symmetric exchange. In this contribution, adverse healthconsequences of symmetry breaking in contractual social exchange are analysed, with a main focus on the employment contract. Scientific evidence is derived from prospective epidemiological studies testing the model of effort-reward imbalance at work. Overall, a twofold elevated risk of incident disease is observed in employed men and women who are exposed to non-symmetric exchange. Health risks include coronary heart disease, depression and alcohol dependence, among others. Preliminary results suggest similar effects on health produced by symmetry breaking in other types of social relationships (e.g. partnership, parental roles). These findings underline the importance of symmetry in contractual social exchange for health and well-being.

The whole field of historical writing concerned with imperialism and the expansion of Europe has always been suffused with moral judgement. Many earlier historians of empire extolled European intervention in other societies as a force for moral, political or intellectual improvement. Yet, from the beginning, radicals castigated empires as immoral, bringers of racism, genocide and underdevelopment. Asian and African intellectuals, in turn, constructed historical narratives that made the liberated nation the bearer of moral progress in history. This paper argues that historians cannot, and should not refrain from moral judgement on particular issues, such as the excesses of slave trade or the official neglect that allowed the famine in British Bengal in 1943 to kill three million people. They should, however, avoid creating grand historical narratives that describe long-term changes, such as the growth of European empires, as moral or immoral, as progressive or wholly pernicious. This approach merely reduces complex developments to simple formulae and can sometimes be misused by contemporary politicians and ideologues.

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization, one of its pillars, the TRIPs Agreement, has been exposed to strong criticism. The main objection being that TRIPs works against the interest of the developing world. This criticism will be examined against the empirical data showing the actual economic development in developing countries, with a special focus on China and India. As those data reveal, the developing countries are to be viewed as beneficiaries of the new world economic order, of which TRIPs is an instrumental and integral part. To avoid frictions in international trade, it is, however, essential that all WTO Members strictly comply with all of their obligations, be it under TRIPs, GATT 1994, or other WTO instruments. Weakening of intellectual property rights is counterproductive.