Globalization challenges all social systems in all nations – how then could it spare the sciences? A question however is: what is new about this? Has not this happened throughout history? And a further question is: what is special for the sciences in all this? Although globalization may not be a new thing, with a population of over 6 billion people its impact becomes all-pervasive and its consequences are severe. It is not only that science enters into all cultures, whether advanced or less developed. Humans also come to depend on it more and more, and this for better or for worse. Science is literally vital to human beings in that they have come to rely upon it for food, potable water, energy, and security in their environment, or in old age. All people, in ever-increasing numbers, therefore have to be instructed in science so that they become aware of how dependent they are from the continuing progress in science, and to what extent innovation and advantages in economic competition depend upon their abilities to make the best use of science. In fact, science has become so powerful an influence on all ways of life that it can no longer be left to the scientists alone. Their power has to be constrained by morals and by laws, and it becomes inevitable that economists and lawyers, and above all politicians intrude upon what the scientists often regard as their exclusive turf. This may in time be the biggest challenge of the globalization of science.

Unmanned spacecraft have visited the other planets of our Solar System (and some of their moons), beaming back pictures of varied and distinctive worlds – but none propitious for life. However, prospects are far more interesting when we extend our gaze to other stars. Most stars are orbited by retinues of planets. Our home Galaxy contains a billion planets like the Earth. Do some of these have biospheres? Moreover, our Galaxy is one of billions visible with a large telescope – all the aftermath of a cosmic ‘big bang’ 13.8 billion years ago. More astonishing still, ‘our’ big bang may not have been the only one. The remarkable advances in recent decades are primarily owed to new engineering and technology. Armchair theory alone doesn’t get us far.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, and recent European enlargement have brought about new waves of intra-European migration. Whilst millions of people from Central and Eastern European countries have trodden the well-worn path to the West in search of better paid jobs, their migration trajectories have differed from traditional patterns. They very often work in host countries and simultaneously maintain close social links with their countries of origin, thus earning the label ‘pendulum migrants’. These pendulum movements can be perceived as agents that stimulate processes of social integration at the micro level. Contrary to popular discourse, which represents migration as a phenomenon endangering social cohesion, this article investigates how personal contacts between hosts and guests may contribute to the building of mutual trust between European citizens.

Medieval sagas of Icelanders are considered one of the most significant ‘contributions made by Nordic culture’,1 among ‘the great marvels of world literature […] so timelessly up-to-date’ and characterised by ‘a supreme, undistorted sense of actuality’.2 ‘We will never comprehend’, the famous novelist Milan Kundera said, ‘the significance of the fact that the first grand, enormous body of prose composed in a European national language sprang from the genius of a very small nation, perhaps the smallest in Europe … the glory of the sagas is indisputable’.1,2 What follows is an attempt to make comprehensible some of the aesthetic mechanisms through which the sagas attain their remarkable representational complexity. This is not in order to diminish the glory of the genius that Kundera refers to – the genius of the people and the many geniuses from among the people – but rather to appreciate it even more, as usually results from a deeper understanding of the workings of things.

The crisis in academic publishing has reached a point where young scholars in many fields of the humanities may no longer be able to communicate their research in the time-honoured manner – that is, in the form of a traditional codex printed by a university press. Sooner or later, most monographs will probably have to be published on the Internet. What form will they take? Atentative answer to that question is provided by a sketch for an electronic book about publishing and the book trade in 18th-century France.

In our quest of a new paradigm for cultural or cross-cultural understanding, we must first take a look at the very concept of a paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn expounded in his celebrated book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the related concepts of incommensurability and untranslatability. Kuhn’s concepts have a significant influence on social sciences and the humanities, and they put an overemphasis on the difference and the impossibility of communication among different groups and cultures. Such a tendency has led to the fragmentization of the social fabric and the resurgence of a most tenacious tribalism. This essay launches a critique of such concepts and argues for the possibility and validity of cross-cultural understanding, and proposes world literature as an opportunity to embrace cross-cultural translatability as the first step towards a new paradigm in the study of different cultures in our globalized world today.

The 20th century saw the establishment of the first quantitative theory seeking to describe the behaviour of the Universe as a whole – the Big Bang. This sets up a framework within which there has been great success in interpreting a wide range of observations, including the abundances of light chemical elements, the existence and spectrum of the cosmic microwave radiation, and the formation and evolution of galaxies. At the end of the 20th century, the surprising conclusion of the Big Bang theory is that 95% of the Universe is made of two different unknown types of material whose nature remains unclear: dark matter and dark energy. Needless to say, this is a major challenge for science. At the beginning of the 21st century, cosmology appears poised to enter a high-precision era, where the key quantities of cosmology will be determined to two or more significant figures. If cosmologists are on the right track, this will confirm the existence of dark matter and dark energy; if not, it will force us to revise our current picture of the Universe. Either way, the prospect is for exciting years ahead in cosmology.

The special value of radio astronomy lies in the probing of extreme conditions in the universe, including the highest energies and the lowest temperatures. Radio waves can penetrate clouds of gas and dust to reveal objects in the universe and, in particular, in our Galaxy that cannot be seen by visible light. To achieve the highest resolution, radio telescopes in widely separate parts of our globe combine their reception to produce a synthesized image. This is a splendid example of international collaboration. Among the images visualized are pulsars, derived from the remnants of supernovae explosions, and quasar sources powered by black holes.

EU law has known coordination since its beginnings. A careful study of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (in the following: Treaty or TFEU; see Official Journal No C 326 from 26 October 2012, pp. 0001– 0390) and numerous secondary law acts results in a variety of Member States’ obligations in connection with coordination. Through the years, relevant secondary legislation has been issued. In recent years, EU legislature has established new rules in sensitive – from Member States’ point of view – areas of national budget law. The coordination of budgetary policies constitutes both a new and a crucial instrument. Over the years, first the Contracting States and then EU legislature established tens of obligations to consult EU institutions on national draft laws. These mechanisms assume increasing importance. This very remarkable and at the same time under-discussed category deserves its own legal terms and definitions. The current article reviews legal uncertainties resulting from the application of procedural rules, suggests solutions, and coins new terms such as hybrid legislative procedures (Section 2) and effet utile du contrôle préventif (Section 3) that are crucial for a new dogmatic approach regarding the obligations to consult. Because national and EU legislative procedures overlap in the case of obligations to consult, many mistakes may occur at any stage. Current research tries to determine the consequences of violations of obligations to consult EU institutions on national legislative procedures (Section 4). In this respect, it deals with the settled case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter: Court or CJEU). The current article argues that the control of EU institutions over national law drafts is preventive and that the violation of a procedural obligation to consult can thus have only an indicative effect with regard to internal market disruption. New barriers to the internal market should not arise with the coming into force of a new law. This article introduces a new dogmatic approach towards obligations to consult, with the aim of avoiding legal uncertainty for national legislatures and practitioners.

Drawing on the traditions and perspectives of the author's own family and relatives, which included George Francis Fitzgerald, the society in which this notable physicist lived and worked in the late nineteenth century is sketched.

The implosion of the Soviet empire undermined most theories concerning International Relations. Only a few political scientists have conceded afterwards the weakness of their theories, which were mostly ahistorical, based on the deformation of politics with history omitted. The question asked in this article is what kind of International Relations as a discipline may be more reliable and helpful in the future.

Post-war German historiography is an interesting example of changing norms and the problem of satisfying a balance between explanation and (moral) judgement. Whereas national historians of Imperial Germany could feel in harmony with History, defeat and the peace of Versailles destroyed the belief in historical justice, so the bulk of the craft sympathized with Hitler's policy, although not always with his methods. The fall of the Third Reich and the revelation of its crimes caused a deep crisis of historical consciousness and attempts to deny or belittle personal responsibility and cooperation. After the 1960s however, a generation took over who could internalize the democratic norms and, through that, closed the gap between German and Western historiography. With the next generation after the reunification, critical revisionism of the national past even increased in so far as it included the first wave of post-war historiography with its apologetic tendencies. Historiography so became a striking example of a thorough national metamorphosis.

This article explores the absence of a consistent longer historical narrative about gender relations in European history, as the latter is presented in the recently opened House of European History in Brussels and, to some extent, in the European Parliament’s visitor centre, Parlamentarium. It is argued that gender equality is presented as part of a modern European identity, but that it is a phenomenon that isn’t given such a problematic history as many other phenomena – gender inequality is not construed as a part of European history in the way that, for example, totalitarianism and colonialism are. Gender inequality isn’t seen and constructed as a previous challenge to European unification and integration, and therefore gender equality can’t be perceived as a solution to a relevant problem in the narratives at hand.

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities’ rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory.

In the pre-globalization era, when communication between nations was difficult and infrequent, and direct (experiential) or indirect (textual-descriptive) knowledge was scant, images of ‘foreign countries’ were frequently constructions based on inadequate information. As a result, fictional descriptions and images were the primary source for people to gain some knowledge of other nations. However, beginning with the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we began to step into an age of globalization, which generated the diversification of ‘source texts’ in this regard. Today, the emergence of new media has accelerated and proliferated such diversity. These new media texts now play a dominant role in forming the image of other countries, to some degree replacing traditional fictional texts. The basic presuppositions of comparative literature imagology have changed accordingly. Starting from the core concept of ‘images’, this paper discusses why it is necessary to integrate imagology, with ‘semiotic images’ as core concept, and ‘communications research’.

This article looks at publication strategies from two perspectives. First, the author describes her own publication strategy. She shows how it evolved over time and explains why she adopted a balanced strategy mixing books and papers, English and French, collective and individual authorship. She then builds on her experience as co-editor of two journals, one French and one international, analyses the consequences of the passage of the first to a big commercial publisher and compares the decision-making processes in the two cases. She finishes by pleading for decision-making procedures that allow more discussions and collegial work than the current systems of editors soliciting reviewers.

During 19th century there was a migration of angels from their usual places in religion, art, and literature into the field of natural sciences. In works of Carus, Fechner and Exner, angels became objects of physiology, comparative anatomy, and astronomy. Although traditionally angels are considered as images or materialisations of pure mind, respectively of metaphysical/transcendental elements, such empirical methods of dealing with heavenly creatures have several precursors in history. This article discusses the traces of angels within the history of knowledge and arts as a specific dialectic of secularisation, focusing on the metamorphosis of heavenly creatures into representatives of the miraculous in 18th century aesthetics. Concerning the issue of representation, the article analyses the disappearance of materiality of painting through techniques of reproduction as prerequisites to transform the angels into objects of experimental research in 19th century sciences. As a result, the angels may be interpreted as symptoms of the problem of visualisation within a context where sciences have to address the boundaries of positivistic methods, for instance as a historical example for the epistemological problems of brain imaging.

This article discusses John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the contemporary film Ex Machina as a coherent group concerning the boundaries of knowledge and the perils of scientific Prometheanism. The development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) should be delimited and contained, if not curtailed or banned, and scientists ought to proceed in a responsible and cautious manner. An obsessive or excessive pursuit of knowledge, aiming to equal God and create humanoid beings, constitutes the essential feature of scientific Prometheanism, which can end in catastrophic destruction. Both Frankenstein and Ex Machina stringently critique scientific Prometheanism as one aspect of modernity, and expose the real dangers that AIs pose to the very existence of humanity and civilization. In Paradise Lost, Milton provides the epistemological framework for Frankenstein and Ex Machina. The article concludes that the union of science and arts in science fiction (films) can be very productive.

‘Morality and slavery’ argues that, as much as detachment and dispassion govern standard historical practice, historians cannot escape making moral judgments. Precisely because slavery is a morally charged subject, its history has been especially prone to changing points of view, traceable, for example, in recent histories of the slave trade and the controversy over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace. Various polar extremes – the structural coerciveness of slavery versus the agency of slaves; the persistence of African ethnicities versus rapid creolization; the spread of slavery versus the rapid growth of anti-slavery in the early republic – are evident in historical interpretations, which necessarily involve complicated value judgments and serious moral ramifications. The essay concludes by suggesting that a measure of balance and fairness has been possible in the study of slavery. Through empathy, historians have been able to recover, in part at least, the hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, notions of right and wrong among both slaves and masters in previous epochs.