The decolonization of Indonesia is far from being a peripheral issue for Dutch national identity. Since the 1970s, but especially in 1995, public debate has erupted in an attempt to come to terms with this part of national history. The protestant ethic is still so strong that discussions revolve in particular around morality and a final verdict. Opinion leaders and historians have, however, not been able to solve the issue, so that the way in which the Netherlands lost their Southeast-Asian colony continues to trouble the Dutch self-image.

However valuable as a term defining – by a shared language – a grouping of nations, ‘la Francophonie’ proves imprecise and divisive on closer analysis. In the field of literature, ‘Francophone’, despite its etymology (and the consequent absurdity of the phrase ‘Francophone literature’), has paradoxically come to exclude white writers from metropolitan France. At a time when the population of France is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic, any exclusion tainted with racism is particularly inappropriate. The centralizing mentality of France, politically motivated in the seventeenth century and entrenched over the years, is at odds with the ambition of universality except in terms of an assumed superiority through conquest or paternalism. The ‘mission civilisatrice’ has become the more insinuating ‘présence française’. For the literary scholar alert both to postcolonial discourses and to the heretofore marginalized texts of French literature dealing with blacks as well as to the dynamic contribution by black writers to literature in French, a new term is proposed: ‘la Francographie’. To replace the binary polarisation of French and Francophone, which fosters oppositional stances, comes a new model appropriate for our computer age: the net.

The article gives, first of all, a general presentation of the European Space Agency (ESA), followed by a more detailed outline of the ESA's Science Programme, its content, resources, organization, advisory structure and decision procedures. The various types of missions and the place they occupy in the programme are described. From a scientific point of view, these missions fit into four main themes of research, which are also potential ‘roadmaps’ for international collaboration. In the second part of the article, an outline is given of most of the projects that have been already undertaken, are in process or are being planned at the present time.

This paper explores the Polish opinion about German colonialism in Africa in connection with the perception of Prussian rule ‘at home’. In late Imperial Germany, Prussian Poles tended to look at the German ventures in Africa with a very critical eye. Their interest in Cameroonian issues was due to the fact that both Poles and Cameroonians were facing the same difficulties at the same time, namely German attempts to eliminate local languages in schools and to take control of the lands. By establishing a link between Polish and Cameroonian suffering, Polish patriots wanted to make Poles aware of their political, economic and cultural subjection within a global context. In a certain way, this counter-hegemonic narration was supposed to deprovincialise the ‘Polish issue’ and make it part of the broader struggle against German imperial power. The Poles, however, did not support independence for Cameroon. They used the Cameroonian issues mainly polemically in order to advance their own cause in imperial Germany.

Using the theoretical tools provided by the conceptualisations of resilience and interconnectedness, this article carries out a comprehensive analysis of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2008). The starting hypothesis explored in this article is that Happiness represents the transformational process of suffering and/or psychological wounds through the reparative agency of interconnectedness among humans as well as between humans and animals. Accordingly, this article will first demonstrate how the novel represents the possibility of healing one’s psychological wounds through the stories of Attila and Jean, the two protagonists falling in love after a chance encounter. It will then explore how the novel presents the necessity of establishing relationality between the self and the other in coping with adversities. Finally, it will elaborate on the indispensable coexistence between humans and animals in the novel, which provides the characters with the possibility for achieving the ecological self. In doing so, this article will demonstrate that Happiness succeeds in representing the need for an interdependent world and the impossibility of a sovereign self in order to achieve happiness in the contemporary age.

The aim of this article is to analyse the TV series Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans (Senke nad Balkanom, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić), understood as a reflection of the ways in which diverse imperial legacies, persisting differences and contrasting pasts shaped the (ambivalent) post-imperial traumatic history of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The burden of imperial legacy – mostly manifested in ethnic, political, cultural and economic tensions among diverse nations in the new multi-ethnic state – kept brewing under the surface and came to represent a constant threat of balkanization i.e. further fragmentation of the multicultural kingdom. In this article I claim that the same danger of balkanization – traced back to the years after the Great War – continued to haunt all successor states of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and Yugoslavias ensuing from 1943 until 1992) eventually resulting in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992. The irreconcilable differences and competing ambitions of different national, social and geopolitical identities define the structure, characters and their relations in the TV narrative, and are also reflected in the cityscape of Belgrade – the capital of the Kingdom and paradigmatic Balkan metropolis – in the late 1920s. The series is read against the theories of Dominique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotions (2010) and La géopolitique des séries/Geopolitics of TV Series (2016), and his assertion that TV series have become crucial in understanding our world in its many aspects – from domestic politics to geopolitics. The story of Belgrade between the two World Wars reveals the traumatic imperial legacy as determining the emergence of a ‘culture of fear, hope and humiliation’, tensions of balkanization and search for identity in the city suspended between an Ottoman casaba and a European metropolis. On the other side – in terms of narrative, genre, and visual style – the series itself is seen as the acculturated version of both the novel Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007) and the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017), illustrating the rise of cultural imperialism in post-imperial times.

The concept of moral space is presented here, in the arguments of classical authors who treated the decay of moral space as an inevitable cost of modernity. Three areas are identified where the decay of moral space is manifested in our period of ‘late modernity’. They are: violent crime, distrust and cynicism, and the vanishing of social capital. Paradoxically, however, opportunities to overcome the current moral void are discovered in the very traits of modernity: reflexiveness and globalization. They allow the process of moral healing through the reconstitution of primordial communities, ethnic, national, religious, in an open, tolerant and ecumenical manner, as well as the constitution of new communities of universalist and global reach.

The various meanings of the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ are traced; in various European languages these mean different things. Postmodernist discussion in the various arts is not synchronous. Postmodernism can be seen as the cultural expression of the times we supposedly live in, but are the achievements of modernity gone for ever?

Leaving and returning are two basic themes that permeate the Portuguese symbolic imagination. I will try to follow this movement in one of António Lobo Antunes' novels, The Return of the Caravels, published in 1988. If there is a contemporary Portuguese novelist for whom the unrest and anxiety of identity and belonging are at the very core of their literary project, this novelist is certainly Lobo Antunes, in all 17 novels he has published since 1979. In each, ‘Portugal’ is much more than just the name of the place where characters live: it is a name for an anxiety about place; of course, this is not exclusive to Portugal, but it is given a distinctively Portuguese tinge through a deep reflection on the meaning of belonging. This can sometimes be quite meaningless, which is just another way of thinking about how man experiences his relationship to the earth and land. This is done, in The Return of the Caravels, by way of questioning the past and present connections of the Discoveries. How the present may endure and live up to the glorious experiences of history is at the heart of the story unfolded here, and will also be at the centre of this paper.

The studies of human behaviour that foreground the explanatory role of exogenously given incentives and constraints give short shrift to the role of agency, or the behaviour(s) of actors, in attempting to shed light on both policy and behaviour. This article reverses the emphasis – with the example of ethnic politics in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia with respect to the preservation and/or erection of German-language and Slovenian-language inscriptions – by arguing that the behavioural strategies of vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, such as national minorities, can carry significant political consequences – and thus are worthy of study. Specifically, the article looks into a politics of consensus and a politics of (political) realism, as the latter are advocated by Carinthian Slovenes in Austria. The findings serve as a wake-up call for West European states in particular, which, arguably, have grown complacent about their own minority rights records.

This article paper aims to investigate the EU’s strategic partners using both theoretical and empirical analysis. Applying the technique of cluster analysis has allowed us, first, to demonstrate that not all of the EU’s ‘special ten’ are strategically sound for the EU; second, to investigate which regional organizations represent the best interest of the EU from a strategic standpoint; third, to find out the true potential of the EU’s strategic partners; and, finally, to prove empirically that the EU’s strategic partners are so heterogeneous as to represent a collective response to multilateralism and that a bilateral approach should be applied instead, taking into consideration the specific character of every strategic partner.

Approaching the 21st century, humankind faces a paradox: the ocean covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface and has a core role in providing living and non-living resources for the world's population, but it is much less understood than the terrestrial part of our planet.

The rejection of the symbolically rather than institutionally innovative Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands as well as the show of disunity in the European Council of mid June 2005 signal the end of a long cycle, culminating in the 1990s, in which the transformation of the European Union into a full-fledged political actor seemed to be possible. For decades ahead there will be no European polity capable of powerfully co-determining the governance of globalization. This was made possible by the rarely debated democratic deficit that makes one people or government decide on issues of general European interest and uncritically glorifies direct democracy, thus opening the door to populism.

The comedy of errors which saw a majority of French citizens voting for domestic motivations, instead of focusing on the actual European issues go back to underlying troubles in contemporary democracy, but also to the contradiction inherent to the attempt to give the functional-bureaucratic EU of ‘Brussels’ a broad democratic legitimization. Rather than the now dead Constitution, it is the experience of the Europeans with common high-political acts of economic and security policy that may in the future foster their political identity in the framework of cultural diversity.

It is a highly advocated view that a competition law with sanctions targeting individuals would achieve a greater deterrent impact than one that does not. Having introduced individual sanctions does not, however, guarantee that a market would have less anticompetitive conduct, because these sanctions are effective only insofar as they are severely implemented on wrongdoing individuals. UK competition law is one example of this issue because cases where individuals have been targeted and punished are significantly fewer than the authorities expected, in spite of it being more than 15 years since individual sanctions were introduced amidst high expectations. This article examines the individual sanctions of competition law in the UK and Turkey. It argues that Turkey is on the right path by departing from the way in which EU law enforces the rules of competition law, and is moving closer to UK law. However, it is argued that further steps should be cautiously considered to avoid the same issues which UK competition law is currently experiencing, as there are serious doubts that the latter has achieved the desired deterrent effect.

To Darío Villanueva

In this essay I take a closer look at the international dimension of the arrière-garde. I will deal exclusively with the issue of whether being arrière-garde may play a significant role in the international canonization of a writer. My case study is based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), a Spanish writer with a world – that is to say, an international – literary career who nevertheless has been excluded from the Spanish national canon precisely because of being ‘arrière-gardiste’. Blasco Ibáñez's world literary career and his exclusion from the national canon are assessed from a generational viewpoint. Because of the limitations inherent to the generation method, though, I will also explore a prosopographical approach by investigating a field shared by a collective biography of writers. Notwithstanding the provisional nature of the data, the approach may contribute to a better understanding of both the arrière-garde as an international phenomenon and world literary careers.

A preoccupation with hybridity is natural in a period like ours marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters. Globalization encourages hybridization. However we react to it, the globalizing trend is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu or ‘Bollywood’ films. The process is particularly obvious in the domain of music, in the case of such hybrid forms and genres as jazz, reggae, salsa or, more recently, Afro-Celtic rock. New technology (including, appropriately enough, the ‘mixer’), has obviously facilitated this kind of hybridization.

It is no wonder then that a group of theorists of hybridity have made their appearance, themselves often of double or mixed cultural identity. Homi Bhabha for instance, is an Indian who has taught in England and is now in the USA. Stuart Hall, who was born in Jamaica of mixed parentage, has lived most of his life in England and describes himself as ‘a mongrel culturally, the absolute cultural hybrid’. Ien Ang describes herself as ‘an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who now lives and works in Australia’. The late Edward Said was a Palestinian who grew up in Egypt, taught in the USA and described himself as ‘out of place’ wherever he was located.

The work of these and other theorists has attracted growing interest in a number of disciplines, from anthropology to literature, from geography to art history, and from musicology to religious studies. In this issue, the contributions discuss Africa, Japan and the Americas as well as Europe and range from the 16th century to the 21st, from religion to architecture and from clothing to the cinema.

New Technology may have unintended and even negative impacts. This article explores some new approaches in policy analysis of socio-technical networks aimed at improving foresight for technological advances.

We examine whether a fundamental change in the core dimension of modern 20th century statehood, the welfare state, has become evident in response to changed exogenous and endogenous challenges. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches we take stock of social policy development in four advanced welfare states – Austria, Denmark, New Zealand and Switzerland – over the last 30 years. Neither spending patterns nor structural changes support a ‘race to the bottom thesis’, according to which the changed environment of welfare state policies has led to a downward spiral in benefit provision. On the contrary, we show that social spending levels have risen, mainly due to a catch-up of former welfare state laggards. In structural terms, a blurring of welfare regimes can be observed. This twofold process can be described as dual convergence.

This paper’s argument is that in the case of Ibero-America, the literary or cultural insertion of elements from other places is not only or predominantly determined by the meaning that the element had in its supposed place of origin, but, rather, by the specific context where this element is subsequently placed. It is the study of this context that can generate better explanations not only about the reasons for this (and not another) element having been ‘imported’ but also about the meaning that it will have in the new context, in connection with the other elements that are also present there. After giving some answers from a selected number of scholars to the question of how does a given literary or cultural element, with an assumed origin in a given context, insert itself in another context, this paper will present, as a case study, the supposed ‘importation’ by Machado de Assis of the ideas of Théodule-Armand Ribot, demonstrating that the Brazilian author did not reproduce ‘imported’ elements, maintaining them in the terms in which they were articulated in the work of the French writer in their original context, but rather transformed them into something else.