Italy is a critical point of reference for studying the strengths and limits of strategies of reconciliation in divided European societies, one that demonstrates the validity of Iván Zoltán Dénes’ introductory comment that the presence of ‘divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seems to be the rule in Europe’.

I am not a prophet, nor can I look into the future – not even at the end of this productive conference on essential changes in the higher education system. When the work situation of the academic profession, its diversification and academic freedom are at issue, the university as a whole is called into question, at least the university as we have known and appreciated it for a long time. Will that university have a future? This is not clear at all, especially when we consider the managerial university and the ever increasing marketisation of all aspects of university life. In the following, I present a few remarks about the continuously fading theory of the university, centred on the keywords education, university, universality, and quality.

China as a concept had not been put under much scrutiny and challenge until the recent postmodern and postcolonial theoretical discourse on nation and nationhood, and the radical scepticism about tradition and homogeneity. Some scholars have questioned whether China could have been a nation state before there was any nation state in Europe, and others have challenged the very notions of China and Chineseness. How do the Chinese themselves respond to such scepticism and challenge? How does one re-conceptualize China at the present time? By drawing on recent debates on such important issues, this essay tries to find some answers and offers some views from a Chinese perspective, while fully engaging Western theoretical discourses, to attempt an international dialogue and meaningful exchange.

Urban history, at least in Germany, has mainly concentrated on the Medieval and Reformation cities on the one hand and Industrial and Contemporary cities on the other. However, recent debates among Early Modernists have produced the view that ‘confessionalization’, that is the formation of three or four modern church systems based on specific confessions of faith, was one of the most influential factors in producing the fundamental changes that occurred between 1550 and 1650 in Europe. This had a huge effect on the cities of Europe and their inhabitants. This paper compares Catholic and Protestant cities in Europe around 1600 with regard to their specific architecture and their religious and civic rituals. Rites and other religious functions or institutions have always been an important part of urban life. Lewis Mumford refers to religious funeral rites in his magisterial analysis of urban life in a universal perspective: ‘The city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city.’ In Europe, the relationship between the Church and the towns or cities was especially close and, in a sense, fundamental because of the medieval history of the European towns and the structure and profile of pre-modern European societies in general. We start with a brief overview of these preconditions for urban life during Europe's confessional period, and then go on to take a closer look at the confessional city itself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had considerable influence on the ‘modern’ world but did not consider himself part of it. His search for a way of thinking, to give a deeper understanding than the science of his day, has considerable analogies with that of Goethe. He was less sanguine than Goethe about the possibility of a renewal of culture in his own day but his philosophical work, in its stress on restraint and concreteness, is permeated by the ethical ideals that he attempted to realize in his life and that of his friends. He also shows some kinship with Goethe's non-theistic mysticism. His philosophical work is a guide that, perhaps rightly, requires readers to find the answer for themselves.

We will illustrate the universality of strongly coupled plasmas by discussing two new forms of these plasmas, which have only recently become possible to create and observe in the laboratory. They exhibit a wealth of intriguing complex behavior, which can be studied experimentally, in many cases for the first time. Plasmas, gases of charged particles, are universal in the sense that certain properties of complex behavior only depend on ratios of characteristic parameters of the plasma, not on the parameters themselves. Therefore, it is of fundamental and far-reaching consequence, to be able to create and observe a strongly coupled plasma since its behavior is paradigmatic for an entire class of plasmas.

‘No taxation without representation!’ It was the British Crown's attempt to tax tea that laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in the 18th century and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence. This was neither the first nor the last example in history, but perhaps the most famous one to demonstrate the close connection between tax sovereignty and the civil nation state. Today, sovereignty in matters of taxation is still regarded as one of the core functions of the nation state. But is it still the nation state's own domain? This essay argues that, at least with respect to the European Union, the answer is no. It shows that the EU tax regime influences national policies in important ways, and imposes significant constraints on national tax sovereignty. It will also show that the lost sovereignty at the national level can be found again at the European level. Is it time to advocate a European Declaration of Dependence?

Yeltsin’s oligarchy1 was 15, or even 20 or even 50, very rich people who featured all the time in the mass media. They were very ambitious. They were prepared to go openly i1nto the government or Duma, or to finance a political party. They were well known because they were popular. However, it would be difficult to argue that they controlled any part of the real economy.

Cultures may be viewed as systems of elements constituted through the selection, interpretation and internalization of traditions by individuals and groups. Group identities may be viewed as cores of living tradition systems based on a limited number of key symbols and tales of identity. The cultural identities of Finno-Ugrian minorities in present-day Russia are at risk and uncertainty prevails concerning the strategies to be adopted in their defence. What are the cultural resources for ethnic survival and what principles may be discerned in a basic strategy that should be flexible enough to be modified according to thousands of different minority situations?

This article presents two different perspectives on the relation between university governance and creativity. It argues that although perceptions of the relation between European university governance and creativity differ and vary over time, the space for creativity also seems to have been shaped by some common factors: fragmented authority structures, support and protection by centres of economic and political power, and values emphasizing openness and tolerance for new ideas. The importance and interplay between these factors have varied over time. This is illustrated by contrasting two examples of the development of the European university: Perkin’s historical perspective on universities in Medieval Europe and the modern university – as it has developed from about 1800 until today.

Our experiences, through day and night, are not as clear-cut as might seem on first thought. Considerable aspects of life comprise illusory phenomena, some of which are realised, while others are not. Moreover, the boundaries between illusion and hallucination can be very blurred. This essay considers specific situations exemplary of these aberrations – the phantom limb phenomenon, the effects of migraine and temporal lobe epilepsy, sleep disturbances, out-of-body and near-death experiences, conjuring, and the technique of pick-pocketing. Life is never as certain or as sure as we think.

The lecture outlines a conceptual framework for the analysis of changes in those countries going through the transformation from a socialist economy to a market economy. It takes a positive predictive approach. It describes seven tendencies which are very likely to apply.

(1) Marketization replacing the command economy.

(2) The evolution of the private sector—a broad new middle class will develop.

(3) Reproduction of macrodisequilibria. The inherited imbalance, namely chronic and intensive shortage will be eliminated, but inflation, budget deficit, unemployment and foreign indebtedness will remain in various configurations.

(4) Development of a constitutional state.

(5) Development of democratic institutions.

(6) The redefinition of a national community—which tendency might be accompanied by severe tensions and conflicts.

(7) Unequal increase of welfare.

Finally the paper discusses the role of academics in the process of transformation.

Core–periphery analysis is vital to an understanding of the European Union (EU) and regional development. The European Economic Community (EEC), which would eventually become the EU, was formed in 1957 in order to promote progressive economic integration. Recognizing that there were depressed regions within both peripheral and core nation-states, the EC adopted a programme with the goal of bringing those regions into convergence. Its programme is essentially a liberal centre–periphery model similar to the one proposed by Friedman. Many of the nation-states within the EC also have their own regional policies and programmes regarding intervention within their own spatial boundaries. To present an approach for comparison this article will focus on two examples of regional policy: Britain's attitude toward regional development in the North and the German programme for integrating East Germany.

The analysis of the moral questions involved in the exercise of power by Machiavelli never seems to lose its topicality. It remains as immediate and penetrating as when it was first conceived.

The basic theory is presented through a parable, showing that immigrants do not lower the incomes of natives, on balance. The main empirical issues are also discussed: contrary to popular belief, immigrants into the U.S. and Canada, and almost surely into Europe as well, pay more in taxes than they receive in welfare transfers, thereby enriching natives. Also, an extensive body of recent research finds that immigration does not increase native unemployment.

As governments grapple with increased risks associated with more frequent and impactful disasters, climate change, social inequity, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, questions about resilience take on greater urgency. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strive for science to be beneficial to society. In 2012, the National Academies released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps the United States could take towards building disaster resilience. A new program, the Resilient America Program, was created as an outgrowth of that report. Its core mission is to partner with communities across the nation to help decision-makers identify key priorities for their community; tie those priorities to relevant risks; and identify actions that build resilience to those risks. The Resilient America Program is a novel program of the National Academies; it employs a hands-on approach to bring science into decision-making by working directly with decision-makers to test approaches for communicating and managing risk, measuring resilience, building community partnerships, and sharing relevant resilience information.

The purpose of this paper is to revise essentialist conceptions of the European Union citizenship and European identity, and make a case for a ‘politics of affinity’. This politics is founded on flexible notion of Union citizenship that accommodates multiple identities. The ‘politics of affinity’ avoids homogenizing assumptions and unitary conceptions of European, national, regional and other identities. It promotes diversity, otherness and fluid character of the postmodern European citizenship. It also advocates a more fluid idea of boundaries. The politics of affinity grounds European politics and citizenship discourse on affinity (not identity). The following lines will reflect on the institutional mechanisms, reforms and policies needed for the implementation of the politics of affinity. This paper will focus on the Treaty of Lisbon, the 2004/38 Citizenship Directive, the 2003 Directive on Long-term Residence Third Country Nationals and some ECJ's rulings in the new millennium.

Two men, as different in personality as it is possible to be, Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, each played a part in forming Pergamon Press, one of today's leading scientific publishers. This article outlines the tale.

Primary education for all seems on the way to being achieved throughout the world within a couple of decades, despite the deep inequalities and lack of resources that remain. Science education at an elementary level, during the first years of school, should now be considered as essential to the cultural, civic, ethical, economic and technical development of humans and societies, in a context of globalization, as the triad ‘reading–writing–arithmetic’ has been during the two last centuries. Yet current education practice – which often characterizes science lessons in developed countries as well as in developing ones, when they exist at all – is quite unsatisfactory, as it is more concerned with transferring knowledge of facts than with scientific literacy, and misses the goal of capacity building. New developments in the last decade, based on inquiry pedagogy and often proposed or led by science Academies, have demonstrated another way to communicate science, and to involve and train teachers. In France, the United States and Sweden, but also in China, Brazil and Egypt, the results of this new approach have led to great hopes for transformation, fully supported by science academies. In Europe, a recently implemented EU programme aims at similar goals, in the spirit of the Lisbon objectives toward a society of knowledge.