In December 2000, the political leaders of the EU met in Lisbon and announced that by the year 2010 the EU will be the most competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based economy. My first reaction was: ‘They don't know what they are talking about’. It sounded to me like the pep talk of a coach of a soccer team before a match he knows his team cannot win. It is difficult to promote good science. Patience is needed: at first the results are few and only after several years of consistent policy can the trickle grow into a stream. Patience is not one of the usual qualities of success-driven politicians. Recently (and wisely) our beloved leaders lowered their ambitions and adopted a new target: by 2010 all EU members will spend 3% of their GNP on research and development. This is promising, if the money is spent wisely. To do research at the highest level money is certainly needed, but brains and organisation are needed as well. In this paper I address the question: how does European research in astronomy compare with that in the USA?

There is very much more to Daniel Defoe's inspired piece of ‘faction’ about Robinson Crusoe than seeing it just as a boy's adventure story. Its influence was widespread, judging by the great scale of new editions and reprintings, both internationally and through many translations. It can be read as a sophisticated myth of the ascent of man, of economic growth by dint of the work ethic, of the imperative of ‘improvement’ and the determination to master nature. It has implications for natural rights theory, the Lockeian justification of private property and the role of the ‘civilised’ European facing a hostile, alien habitat.

During the 20th century, Economic History grew into one of the main sub-disciplines of the Historical and Economic Sciences. Its roots can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries: mercantilists as well as classical economists, and later the German and English Historical Schools, they all were already using economic-historical data to support their reflections and theories. During the inter-war period, quantification was added as an analytical tool. Immediately after the Second World War, research focused mainly on macro-economic problems, with some American scholars during this period introducing a ‘New Economic History’, Cliometrics. From the mid-1970s onwards, the interest shifted increasingly to micro-economic questions, to be interpreted as a positive movement. The shift, indeed, creates a potential for a future combination of macro- and micro-approaches in Economic History. Such a combination would stimulate the integration of the three main variables of economic life and development (structure, hazard and freedom) into a more meaningful explanatory synthesis.

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization, one of its pillars, the TRIPs Agreement, has been exposed to strong criticism. The main objection being that TRIPs works against the interest of the developing world. This criticism will be examined against the empirical data showing the actual economic development in developing countries, with a special focus on China and India. As those data reveal, the developing countries are to be viewed as beneficiaries of the new world economic order, of which TRIPs is an instrumental and integral part. To avoid frictions in international trade, it is, however, essential that all WTO Members strictly comply with all of their obligations, be it under TRIPs, GATT 1994, or other WTO instruments. Weakening of intellectual property rights is counterproductive.

At the time of writing, more than 20 novels have been written that deal directly or indirectly with the events of 9/11. In broad outlines, they fall under four categories: the novel of recuperation, the novel of first-hand witnessing, the great New York novel, and the novel of the outsider. It is the last category of novels – written by non-Americans – that demonstrates the extent to which 11 September has penetrated deep into the European psyche and thus has become a European event. What is surprising is that the gap between the continents seems smaller in fiction than in politics. Even Luc Lang's onze septembre mon amour, a strident anti-American screed, is characterized by a sense of solidarity for the victims and for an alternative America, antithetical to the official one. In Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (a French novel with an English title), Europe and the US remain united in the overarching concept of the West, sharing a common destiny. In Ian McEwan's Saturday, finally, the events in the US have become part and parcel of the protagonist's existence, even though he lives thousands of miles away in the posh part of London.

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.

Translation has probably become the dominant means of communication between European literatures and, in consequence, may be considered a privileged object of study for Comparative Literature. Yet the complex nature of translation has hardly been recognized as an interlingual as well as an intralingual and intersemiotic operation. Translation between literatures covers two possible directions and should be labelled accordingly as either ‘intranslation’ or ‘extranslation’. In order to understand the complex roles all these translation forms have played during the history of European literatures and of European interliterary contacts, an explanatory model is needed that links the study of literatures and of interliterary relations: according to systems theory, literatures are to be understood as complex networks of relations that regulate both their internal structure and relations with other systems. Examples of translation figures and of translation flows help to show how translations contribute to the establishment of macro-European literary networks.

In a survey of the writing of literary histories in Europe, it is first pointed out that, in classical Antiquity and in the early Christian period from the fourth to the 12th centuries, such histories were transnational. After the Middle Ages, in which we find only catalogues of particular libraries, the rise of the European nation states in early modern times motivated the writing of national literary histories. With a concentration on the development in Britain, it is then shown that this development reached its peak in the 19th century, yet is still very strong today. In comparison, some examples of histories of European literature show that such transnational histories may also be informed primarily by the principle of prodesse in presenting either written culture or only what seems favourable for the understanding of national literary history; they may, however, also give more attention to literature and the imagination than to nations or culture and in that way foster delectare.

Travelogues on expeditions in the 1760s to Tahiti and Yemen among other places are part of the early reshaping of Europe. They display the features of a historical threshold or ‘Sattelzeit’ between the classical and the modern world. But these travelogues also demonstrate another paradigmatic shift with important impact on the conditions for thinking of Europe in present day literary history. Some travelogues inaugurate in their rhetorical practice and anthropological content a problematic cultural relativism and aestheticism in relation to the world outside Europe. Other texts express doubts and contradictions, hesitating without being relativistic, focusing on cultural processes and concrete specifics rather than on essences, and adopting a pluridimensional perspective on the customs the traveller is confronted with. While the former track leads to the dead-end of reductive schematism of 19th century Orientalism, the latter may serve as a relevant model for rethinking Europe as part of a globalised world today. In what follows, the travel writing on Tahiti by James Cook, Bougainville and Diderot, Carsten Niebuhr's travelogue from his expedition to Yemen, Flaubert's Voyage en É:gypte, and Gauguin's NoaNoa, are analysed.

This article explores the concept of ‘Europe’ by using it as a synecdoche for ‘modernity’. The point of departure is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's postulate that one can distinguish two Europes and two modernities. Modernity is, on the one hand, the historical tendency towards totalization and exclusion, and, on the other hand, the opposite penchant for fragmentation and anarchic ‘liberative’ thinking. On the basis of this duality, one can talk of a syndrome of modernity, a cultural condition that is determined by the coincidence of two views on sovereignty (self-coercion and self-determination). The article relates the theory of ‘two Europes’ to three historical forms of cultural identity and in particular to the ideals of normality which are involved in them.

As the discipline of Comparative Literature expands beyond its traditional concentration on the literatures of a few European great powers, our expanded range of vision involves rethinking Europe itself as well as the larger global production of literature. Already in the 19th century, comparatists were deeply engaged in sorting out relations between major powers and minor literatures, as can be seen in the ambitious early journal Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, edited in the 1870s by the Transylvanian comparatist Hugo Meltzl. This article discusses Meltzl's journal and its struggles against the great-power cosmopolitanism represented by Meltzl's rival, the German comparatist Max Koch. As an illustration of the importance of trans-national perspectives in understanding European identity, the article concludes with a discussion of the recording of pagan myth in medieval Iceland.