Linguistic obstacles to common European Union action are overcome by a system of official languages (currently 11) for translation of official texts and interpretation at meetings. In practice, flexibility in language use is frequently required. Here, political tensions arise because of the onward march of English as a language of European Union dialogue; some Member States feel the status of their language is being threatened. In this context, education, culture and other programmes having language provisions can have a compensatory role: their multilingual approach reinforces the cohesion of the Union. Their significance will be even greater if enlargement brings 11 further languages into the Union.

The relevance of the term ‘postmodernism’ to a discussion of the music of this century is examined. Postmodernism in music does not have any precise meaning but can be used to evaluate a number of aspects of contemporary music.

The Nobel Foundation and the Nobel Prize-Awarding Institutions plan to celebrate the centenary of the first Nobel Prizes in 2001 by expanding the Nobel Website (http://www.nobel.se) on Internet into an Electronic Nobel Museum (ENM) of science and culture. A special version will be designed for local networks (intranets) within museums. The ENM focuses on the achievements of the Nobel Laureates in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace, but will also include the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Laureates are presented by portraits and their autobiographies. Other sections will be devoted to Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Institutions, Nobel Essays, a Library, and Virtual Exhibitions. A Young Scholars section will use animated and interactive documents to interest students in the Prize areas.

The decline in confidence in the traditional parties in Western Europe has manifested itself through the emergence of the Green parties on the Left and populist parties on the Right. Despite successes in some countries, these parties have remained small, although they have been able, respectively, to play on the growth of ‘post-materialist’ values on the Left, and of anti-immigrant sentiments on the Right. The prospects for these parties are not very good, in particular for the right-wing populist parties, which are highly dependent on the popularity of their leaders, and even for the Green parties, although these can exploit the internal divisions within Socialist parties between supporters of the ‘traditional’ Left and supporters of the ‘New’ Left.

The past half-century has been perhaps the European university's greatest age, even compared with the earlier flourishing in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and during the industrial revolution of the 19th century. More universities have been founded; student numbers have increased at an unprecedented rate; and the scholarly and scientific productivity of the universities has been unparalleled. But the university has become for the first time a truly global institution, cut off from its roots in Europe and Europe's colonial empires and open to other, non-European and non-élite, knowledge traditions. At the same time the tight relationship between the university and modernity, or ‘movement’, has been increasingly questioned. For more than a century that relationship has been axiomatic, relegating the university's other role as an agent of continuity and tradition into second place. But the dynamism of socio-economic and technological change in the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ is now so great that the university's role as a force for stabilization may become more important. As a result the centrality of the university in the European experience could be diminished.

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.

An analysis of the motivations behind the present revival of referendum ballots in liberal democracies shows that referendums launched by governments, often politically motivated, and those launched by popular initiatives are linked to a demand for new legislation, and both illustrate the crisis of representative governments that is currently affecting these democracies. The pursuit of the increase of referendums will depend however on whether popular initiatives will or will not be introduced in the Constitutions of countries, since the great majority do not provide for it. In spite of similarities between the present political situation in Western Europe and the contexts in which popular initiatives were introduced in some countries, there is no serious ground to predict that such institutional reforms will take place in the near future. The directness of democracy is maybe more likely to increase under the effect not of referendums, but of other factors like the growing interference of polls, or the decline of intermediaries, especially parties, in the daily practice of government.

Generalizing between postmodernity and postmodernism is of doubtful value. The shift from communism to postcommunism has led to a decline, or different significance, of postmodernism in Eastern Europe.

With the Meiji Restoration the first steps were taken in the third quarter of the 19th century to set up a national system of education in Japan. European educational theories were influential. Samuel Smiles became a reference for moral principles and Western heroes from Socrates to Florence Nightingale were exemplars. The articles explores the complex relationship of Western ideas with indigenous Japanese culture.

Science as part of an open society cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists. The problem of scientific rhetoric, however, is that scientific knowledge cannot be everybody's knowledge in volume or in the concepts used and that therefore a loss of information content occurs when scientific knowledge is projected onto the screen of everyday knowledge: science then appears only as a silhouette. Even so silhouettes can convey an important message in relation to a special context under discussion. The particular silhouette selected then becomes a question of truthfulness in scientific rhetoric.

Party ‘federations’ have begun to exist in the European Union, but these are not ‘parties’ in the true sense of the word. They are beginning to exercise some influence, not just in the European Parliament but, to an extent at least, on the European Commission and on the European Council as well. However, it does remain the case that the structure of the European Union is not conducive to the setting up of real parties: elections to the European Parliament have been regarded as being, to an extent, ‘second-order’ compared with national elections, and the system as a whole is also typically regarded as suffering from a ‘democratic deficit’. What is needed is to design an institutional mechanism to facilitate competitive party government in the European Union.

The creation of a Scottish parliament in 1999 will crystallize a cultural crisis for Scottish higher education. Scottish universities retained their autonomy after the 18th-century union between Scotland and England because the union was about high politics rather than the affairs of civil society and culture. Unlike in England, the universities developed in close relationship with Scottish agencies of the state during the 19th century, and these agencies also built up a system of non-university higher education colleges. In the 20th century, the universities (and later some of the colleges) sought to detach themselves from Scottish culture and politics, favouring instead a common British academic network. So the new constitutional settlement faces Scottish higher education institutions with an enforced allegiance to the Scottish nation that will sharply disrupt their 80-year interlude as outposts of the British polity.

For many years, different patterns of the higher education system existed in various European countries. The patterns were not stable in each country, because pressures for upgrading of the ‘less noble’ sector tended to be strong. Altogether, it was justified, however, to characterize the situation in Europe as a ‘persistence of variety’. Many theories helped to explain a coexistence of inclinations for common approaches or specific options of individual countries. Most recently, though, pressures for convergence seem to have grown in Europe. Although the European Union advocates a respect for variety, some countries tend to adapt themselves to anticipated trends. In addition, efforts are undertaken in various European countries to adapt the programmes and institutions to an Anglo-Saxon model in order to preserve or strengthen their position in the wake of internationalization and globalization.

Scientific research, a common heritage that laid the foundations of the modern world, stands as a unifying principle of Europe and is, among other values, a binding bridge to all nations. Being an inalienable part of humanity, the striving after knowledge embodied in scientific research is a necessary precondition if mankind is to handle successfully the consequences of globalized economies, a still growing world population with increasing life expectancies and the need for sustainable development. The European Science Foundation, with its flexible structure for promoting European cooperation in research can play an active part in supporting national governments and the European Union in formulating research policies and educational standards and in intensifying exchange and cooperation with the non-European countries.

The absence or near-absence of liberal traditions in Central and Eastern Europe had led to the fear that pluralistic party systems might not emerge in post-communist countries; moreover, the fact that the countries of the area had to reconstruct their political system as well as their economy and their society, rendered the challenge particularly difficult to meet. Yet viable party arrangements are now found in a number of these countries, although most parties, except on the whole the ex-Communist parties, are relatively poorly organized and have tended to lack strong and able leadership. The future remains uncertain, however, given the continuing internal problems of the parties themselves, as well as the institutional and cultural handicaps under which post-communist societies have to operate.

This paper considers the operation of representative democracy, with an emphasis on Germany. It analyses the implications of direct democracy (i.e. the regular use of referenda in reaching decisions on matters of public policy) for the operation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary democratic systems. The existing role of direct democracy in a number of societies is also considered.

In this paper I will illustrate the heuristic value of studying human rights as social representations. Results of cross-national studies are reported after a short presentation of social representation theory. Shared meanings in the field of human rights exist within and between cultural and national groups. Other findings concern dimensions on which individuals differ in their positioning toward human rights, related to respondents' beliefs about their own efficacy and the efficacy of institutions. These beliefs are anchored in national group membership, in value priorities and in experiences of social conflict. Studies in Geneva suggest there is a distinction between a large-scale principled agreement and much more restricted attitudes toward the application of human rights principles in specific situations.

It is doubtful as to whether the countries of the Third World are likely to move to the kind of liberal democracy that is regarded as characteristic of the West. In particular, parties are often remaining ‘parties of the State’ and not organizations truly competing with each other. This is in part a consequence of economic globalization, as the requirements of global economic liberalization do not fit with the requirements of democracy. In such a context, clientelism around the State may be inevitable and it contributes to ensuring that the main party in the country, and indeed all parties become ‘parties of the State’, as is the case in Mexico or Malaysia and perhaps in the Ukraine and South Africa. Thus, globalization does not mean the end of the State, but possibly the end of liberal democracy.

The main beliefs, strategies and problems marking the road of higher educational change in the Central–Eastern European countries are analysed and distinction is made between three main actors: government, clients and the academic community. At governmental level the focus is on the handicapping effects of conflict between short and long-term reform and the internal nature of the government-higher education relationship. Government initiated reforms should offer transitory and contextual solutions rather than permanent and substantive ones. The traditional lack of distinction between higher education as public versus private good and the problems and consequences of expanding higher education is examined. The political power of the academic community can hamper the effectiveness of reforms and external accountability. Reforms should separate the merged functions of supervision, allocation and professional accreditation. At the institutional level, executive leadership should be separated from the traditional academic hierarchies. Institutional leaders need to be given more independence and need to improve their skills of financial management, institutional planning and self-evaluation. As for academic control, new institutional patterns of cooperation should be assisted at the expense of the traditional hierarchies of higher knowledge.

There are many ideas of what that medieval institution, the university, should be in the age of the mass university. It should be an institution combining teaching and research and should aim to produce a mature, cultured individual. Attempts to make it into an institution simply for giving technical training aimed at the contemporary labour market are misguided.