In 1831, a French administrative official of the name Alexis de Tocqueville went to the United States to study the American prison system as a model for the planned penitentiary reform in France. He came back with a book that brought him fame and lasting position as a classic of political science and sociology: La democratie en Amerique (1835–1840). America at that time was seen as far ahead of Europe in the development of its institutions and quintessential principles of Western modernity: democratic government, capitalist market and free thought. Tocqueville became fascinated with America, but did not limit his story to the description of American institutions and ways of life. He dug deeper, toward hidden axiological, mental and cultural premises which he labelled ‘habits of the heart’, and which later came to be known as the ‘American Dream’. This he believed to be the secret of American success and the emerging American hegemony in the world. His view was vindicated by the history of the 20th century. But times change.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the American social critic Jeremy Rifkin came to Europe to serve as an adviser to the head of European Commission, Romano Prodi. And he came back with a book that may easily become a bestseller, if not necessary a classic, entitled The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York 2004: Penguin Group, USA). This comes as a follow up to a series of books in which American writers indulge in self-flagellation, drawing doomsday scenarios of the ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘collapse’ of American greatness, with Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival (New York 2003: Henry Holt) as a prime example. This climate settled in earlier than the excesses of Bush administration, and has only been spreading wider in the intellectual community as a reaction to current policies. At a recent convention of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in San Francisco in August 2004, I was absolutely amazed by the intensiveness of anti-American feelings among my American colleagues. Presenting a paper provocatively titled ‘American Hegemony as Seen from Eastern Europe: Twenty Reasons why we Still Admire America’, I was feeling a complete deviant, evoking paternalistic reprimands for my short-sightedness and naivety, which can only be excused by an outsider's perspective. Well, I believe that self-criticism, or what sociologists now call ‘reflexiveness’ is a great asset in every society, but American intellectuals seem to me to go a bit too far.

During the first half of the 20th century, it was quite common among philosophers – ranging from the logical empiricists to existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger – to regard ethics as beyond rational justification. These tendencies are found even today, mostly among scientists who have not followed the developments in philosophy, but also among postmodernists and some other philosophers who seem to be unaware of what is going on in philosophy today. This paper outlines how the picture has changed from the early part of the century to now. Central figures in this development have been Nelson Goodman, Israel Scheffler and John Rawls. However, many of their ideas were interestingly anticipated by earlier philosophers, notably Edmund Husserl. This essay focuses on the issues rather than on the people. Its aim is to give a fairly accurate picture of the present situation with regard to justification in ethics.

Putting the big bang in its historical perspective makes it appear as the result of a succession of random thinking, animated by new observations – although constrained by their reference frame – and that of concepts often frozen. It appeared first as the only solution able to account for the existing observations; with newer observations, it appears now just like the old Ptolemaïc system, to which Aristotelians, Platonians or Pythagorean of the Renaissance worked hard to add epicycles, and again new epicycles, against all the principles of simplicity claimed in their beginnings, in order to save the basic principles of the model.

As a scientist whose primary passion is art and graphics I have, for as long as I can remember, sought to find a satisfactory bridge between Art and Science. I have invariably found the attempts that I have come across are, at best, unsatisfactory and, at worst, specious. Books purporting to find ‘Art’ in the ‘Sciences’, or vice versa, usually consist of collections of photographs that reveal some previously hidden worlds (often taken by electron microscopes) or elegant images, which are some sort of visual representation of some theoretical/mathematical results. Modern computer-graphics packages have resulted in a plethora of elegant images. But are they art? Maybe, maybe not, perhaps it is just semantics and, anyway, perhaps it does not matter in general. I would have the board from a computer and other elegant flotsam dropped overboard from our technologically advanced world, which produces so much unusable obsolete technology. It is as elegant as a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bridget Riley Op Art creation, but is it art? As always in these cases, I seek not the answer but to understand the question.

The artist Allen Jones contacted me last year about an imaginative idea for the 2004 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in London. The idea that he and David Hockney had come up with, was to organize an exhibition of drawings that people who were not practising artists produced and used during their work. This was not be an exhibition of art by people who paint or draw as a sideline or hobby, but an exhibition of ‘artwork’ – in particular, drawings that had played a crucial role in their work. In the case of scientists, their drawings made by hand rather than by computer, and which had formed part of the research process. In response to this initiative, I collected together some drawings made during the period 1985 to 1987 when the field of Fullerene Science was born.

Much of the rich urban culture of Central and Eastern Europe was abruptly interrupted in the course of the 20th century, leaving towns and cities literally disconnected from the international urban network. Many cities also became border cities in a metaphorical sense, because their geographic position and the prestige of their institutions as well as their cityscape made them a focus of both affinity and resistance against national and supra-national political power systems. Successive wars and the ensuing changes on the political map of Central and Eastern Europe led to cities being systematically devastated for political-military and ideological reasons. However, they have demonstrated a striking capacity for recovery and revival.

There are cities that lie on a border, and others that accommodate borders and are formed by these. Political events have robbed these cities of a part of their reality, such as their hinterland, their tight bond with the rest of the national territory. History has torn deep gashes in their fabric and made a world stage of their everyday life, turning them into a theatre of the absurd. In these cities, one experiences, in an extraordinary manner, the duality of the border and its positive and negative effects in accordance with whether the borders are open or closed, rigid or flexible, anachronistic, protective or destructive.

In his The City Builder, a novel completed in 1973, the Hungarian author György Konrád focuses on the intellectual rifts of the planners who, in the era of the communist regime, were commissioned to transform Budapest into a modern-socialist city in line with the Stalinist model. The political changes in Central Europe, the de-Stalinization and the consequences of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956 are the backdrop to an intriguing story about the changing mentalities of the planners assigned to the reconstruction of Budapest as a socialist city.

Budapest is not a border city in the strictest sense of the term. The geographical dividing lines between successive political-economic regimes seldom traversed or even brushed the city. Nevertheless, Budapest has all the characteristic features of a border city. More than any other city, the border city literally finds itself in a position that bears the inherent risk of waking up and suddenly finding itself on the other side of the border. And if that happens, the city will inevitably be confronted with the attempts of the new regime to leave its imprint wherever it can. The new authorities will take possession of the public buildings, decorate the public realm with monuments, slogans, and symbols, and remove the paraphernalia of its predecessors. The city is always, and in all circumstances, the billboard of the regime.

In the late 1940s, Budapest was integrated in the socialist empire. The city that had evolved as one of the prime examples of Western European architecture and town planning was forced to adopt new models: the bourgeois capitalist metropolis now had to express the hopes and dreams of the new communist society. On the road to socialism, however, the authorities regularly changed course. The death of Stalin, the Russian departure from Austria in 1955 (restoring Budapest's traditional position as a border capital), and especially the Hungarian uprising in 1956 that was partly triggered by these events, marked fundamental changes in the regime's policies. This is directly reflected in the ideas and attitudes of those invested with the task to transform the capital and make it fit for socialism.

After the collapse of the communist power block in 1989, capital cities such as Budapest, Prague and Warsaw had the best starting positions for the development of their own distinctive post-socialist variant of the international market economy. Since then, however, smaller cities, such as Wrocław – the fourth largest city in Poland in terms of population – have been more creative in devising economic and cultural initiatives and strategies to position the city in both and Eastern and the Western European landscape in a recognizable fashion. One of the themes by means of which Wrocław presents itself is that of a European multicultural border city. The issue concerns the extent to which the myth of a richly stratified multicultural history does justice to the reality of the city's recent turbulent and violent past.

Since the end of the 19th century, social scientists, such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber in particular, have been engaged in developing theoretical concepts aimed at providing insight into the economic and socio-cultural significance of the (European) city. These concepts gained in prominence at the end of the 20th century, with the notion of the European city coming under pressure mainly due to the influence of the globalization of economic processes. The viability of the accepted model of the European city is now at stake.

The devastation of the historical cities of the former Yugoslavia, perpetrated by the contending parties in the civil war, was regarded in Western Europe as an act of destruction against European cities. However, the cultural rhetoric of the European identity of cities, such as Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Vukovar displays a stark contrast with the European Union's lack of political engagement with the future of Bosnia and Croatia. This rhetoric is also diametrically opposed to the collective politics of exclusion of Bosnian and Croatian migrants from a United Europe. These ambiguous approaches to the notion of ‘Europe’ prompt an analytical focus on the concrete, localized and at times contradictory urban sites where Europeanization is taking place.

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.

We aim to describe the evolution of the representation of space in the Caribbean novel of the 1950s through to the 1990s. Initially, the rural space of the ‘Habitation’ is seen as a token of indigenous identity, mimetically referring to a regionalist and naturalistic model of space. As Zobel, the first author we discuss, hardly questions the relation between the Creole and the French language, he confirms the nationalist model as it was developed by the European romantics, following the triadic structure of language, nation and territory. The second author, Chamoiseau, interprets urban space as a token of hybrid identity. On the one hand, the new city Texaco, refers to urban models as developed in European and Western cultural geography, and thus seems to replace the model of the ‘Habitation’. On the other hand, the new urban space is understood as a displacement of the centre, since it becomes the meeting place of intersecting cultures. Finally, the role of literature as a constructing force of cultural models will be stressed.

The painful, unrepresentable event of the holocaust is one of the most salient and defining features of the history and identity of Europe. Its suitability for artistic representation has been the focus of intense debate, largely conducted within Europe (Adorno, Steiner, Ricoeur, Kertész), and fictions about the holocaust were, until recently, the domain of European (and Israeli) authors. In his novel on identity, The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips –a British author originating from the Caribbean island St. Kitts, and currently living in the USA, appears to defy this tradition and claims the holocaust as a natural subject for his seemingly disparate narratives that are also concerned with the first ghetto in Europe, the character of Othello, and Zionism in Israel. This unlikely mixture is not a mere postcolonial appropriation of metropolitan history, and cannot be explained by the mechanism of ‘the empire writing back’ that characterizes so much postcolonial fictions of the 1970–1990s. Rather, it explores some of the ideas developed in Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masque blancs, which in its rhetorical linking of the holocaust with racism and imperialist repression is in turn indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre.

The paper sets out to analyse the mechanisms and functions of the national landscape as a cultural invention through literature, underscoring how literature, more than other media, most clearly articulates its conflictual complexity, being both descriptions of and reflections on identities. The national landscape is part of a more general story of how place and identity are interconnected. Through analyses of texts by Nadine Gordimer, John Michael Coetzee, André Brink and the Danish romanticist and scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, it is suggested how the European reflection on national identity in relation to landscape and language from the period of nation-building in the 19th century is both repeated and criticized in the emerging new nations of the post-colonial era. On the one hand, the parallel between European and non-European reflections helps us to deconstruct the naturalized homogeneity of national identity in Europe and invites us to criticize the attempts to reduplicate this simplicity in the conception of identity in post-colonial conditions.