Against the background of over a hundred years, during which national farming lobbies became ever more resilient, this article examines the processes leading to the creation of the European Union's common agricultural policy. It demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the agricultural issue acquired an international dimension. It argues further, that this coincided with an increasing penetration of governments by the farming lobby. Finally, it describes the protectionist factors that determined the form of the Rome Treaty's articles on agriculture and the forces that ensured their implementation.

The present state of the study of philosophy in China cannot be understood if the introduction of Western philosophy, including Marxism, in the early decades of the 20th century is ignored. During the first half of the past century, philosophy flourished at Peking University with a heavy emphasis on social and political theory, as well as at Tsinghua University, which focused more on professionalization of the discipline, logic, epistemology and the history of philosophy. From 1957 to 1979, philosophical studies suffered severely under an increasingly unfavourable political climate. It is only recently that departments of philosophy have been reconstructed, not only in Beijing but also in all major universities. Like their colleagues in other disciplines, many philosophers are nowadays struggling with the dichotomy between the old and the new, the Chinese and the Western tradition, and resisting an uncritical absorption of Western ideas. Finally, some observations are made on the lectures that Jürgen Habermas gave in China in 2001.

We are beginning to understand how the brain is organized and works, how it evolved in the remote past and how it continually forms during the embryonic development of individual organisms. The study of the brain and its activity has recently advanced at an accelerating pace thanks to the convergence of a number of research strategies. At least three research lines occupy a particular position among these strategies: genetics and the molecular biology of neural cells and the central nervous system; cognitive science; and brain imaging. If the brain is the subject of biological studies at the cellular, intercellular and circuitry levels, the approach to the study of mind should be more subtle. Nonetheless, science has progressed a long way in this direction. Some recent advances in this field are briefly reviewed here, with particular emphasis on brain evolution and development, the role of sensory organs, coding and the processing of sensorial information, memory, rationality, meaning and consciousness.

Crime fiction is currently one of the most globalized, most popular, and biggest-selling of commercial genres, but there has been almost no attempt to study it in relation to other kinds of post-colonial literature. There is no bibliography of crime writers as ‘post-colonial’, and no attempt to generalize about a body of fiction. This paper is a brief extract from work in progress, based on the books of over fifty Anglophone or Francophone authors who might be categorized as ‘post-colonial’ by birth or residence. I test post-colonial theory against crime fiction, to argue that strong generic conventions call into question some of that theory's received ideas. I consider two linked problems: first, so-called ‘colonial mimicry’ and its obverse, ‘ventriloquism’, because it seems to me a wrong turning in 20th-century criticism; and, second, the demand for new literatures which would create ‘national identities’. I argue that ‘mimicry’ makes no sense in the context of a strong popular genre, and that accusations of ‘colonial mimicry’ reinscribe the asymmetries of judgement they appear to attack. The possibility of imagined geopolitical units as identity-forming, especially in genres which are informed by social criticism, calls into question the demand for literature as a source of national identity.

The EU plays a high-profile role in the international arena, and yet this role still evades accurate conceptualization. Since the EU is not a state, it is commonly accepted as sui generis; a normative power influencing the world order mostly by means of direct and intermediary persuasion. Despite this position, in practice when championing the global normative agenda, the EU does not always demonstrate high efficiency as a leader. This article studies the EU’s efforts to push through regional and global versions of a financial transaction tax, meant to promote the common good through the positive externalities it generates for the economy. The aim of the article is to arrive at an adequate explanation for the (in)ability of the EU to act as an agent of global governance in this case. The focus of attention is the inner organizational limitations on the EU’s behaviour as a global actor.

The processes of research proposals and evaluation have become ever more elaborate, but the system remains primitive. This paper argues for a fresh look at existing practices, with a view to developing less onerous and more efficient systems.

Two developments in recent decades – the rising attention to children’s rights, and the growing importance of the digital environment – seem on a collision course, with children’s rights arguably more infringed than benefited by the digital world, and with efforts to promote children’s rights in a digital world seen by some as threatening the freedom of expression that digital networks enable. Here, I set out the case for realizing children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, and then examine the difficulties that arise. Most recently, the status of the child online is shifting from one of invisibility to one of hypervisibility in an increasingly datafied world, and the child’s right to privacy has rapidly become the most contested of all the rights. With challenges ranging from that of identifying who is a child online to reining in the economic power of the major digital platforms, states seem to be facing an impasse when it comes to taking effective action. The result is a series of stark policy choices which leave all stakeholders dissatisfied. I conclude by proposing a series of interventions focused less on the actions regarding particular child rights and more on the legal and institutional processes and standards by which all rights could be better realized in a digital world.

In many countries, we have seen an increase in economic inequality over the past 20 to 25 years. The populations might therefore have changed their attitude about how and how much different countries should intervene to reduce the extent of economic inequality. A question is whether there is any connection between changes in redistribution preferences and trends in economic inequality in the prosperous Nordic welfare states. This article contributes by examining whether there are differences in redistribution attitude and changes herein based upon socio-economic criteria, which might include self-interest arguments. Nordic countries are interesting because there have been differences in development, and even strong growth in economic inequality, especially in Sweden and Denmark, although these countries in the literature have been seen as highly equal societies. The analysis shows that support for redistribution is relatively stable over time in each country, but also that there are major differences between countries, with support being much higher in Finland compared with Denmark. Females, discriminated groups and the unemployed generally support redistribution to a higher degree. Ageing generally increases redistributional support, while more education reduces support for government redistribution in Finland. In all four countries, the highest income groups are less supportive of redistribution of income.

Africa is a European invention. When the Romans finally defeated Carthage, they turned the place into a province and called it Africa. Originally this referred only to a small part of Tunisia and Algeria, but it later became the name of the entire continent. The same happened to Asia, another province of the Roman Empire, in what is now called the Near East. The names of the two other continents demonstrate even more obviously their European origins: America was named after an Italian traveller – and not even Columbus! – and the term Australia comes from the fact that European voyagers who had some vague idea about the existence of this continent but knew nothing about it, called it ‘The Unknown Southland’, Terra australis incognita.

In this article, we develop a framework for a comparative analysis of policy-making in the EU pre- and post-accession CEE countries (CEECs) in order to create generalized knowledge in some particular areas, such as quality infrastructure (QI). In order to find how public policy-makers perceive QI, we employ a triangulation methodology. The results show that policy-makers are not fully familiar with national QI concepts and seldom rely on experts’ opinion. Moreover, QI legislation is uncritically transferred from the EU.

The importance of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been queried in recent years and this paper attempts to show why the notion is still essential to a proper understanding of the twin advance in scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the sixteenth century and led through such figures as Galileo to the new world view of Isaac Newton. The significance of the scholastic tradition, hermeticism and alchemy is not denied, but the major breakthrough that catapulted Europe into the modern age was the outcome of new conceptual tools and a fresh outlook on nature.

The concept of symmetry is omnipresent, although originally, in Greek antiquity, distinctly different from the modern logical notion. In logic a binary relation R is called symmetric if xRy implies yRx. In Greek, ‘being symmetric’ in general usage is synonymous with ‘being harmonious’, and in technical usage, as in Euclid's Elements, it is synonymous with ‘commensurable’. Due to the second meaning, which is close to the etymology of συ´μμετρoς, ‘with measure’ has likewise to be read as ‘being [in] rational [ratios]’ and displays the origin of the concept of rationality of establishing a proportion. Heraclitus can be read as a master of such connections. Exercising rationality is a case of simultaneously finding and inventing symmetries. On that basis a proposal is made of how to relate the modern logical notion of symmetry, a second-order concept, on the one hand with modern first-order usages of the term symmetric in geometry and other fields, and on the other hand with the notion of balance that derives from the ancient usage of symmetric. It is argued that symmetries as states of balance exist only in theory, in practice they function as norms vis-à-vis broken symmetries.

Students are often ill-prepared for the leap in expectations within disciplines when they make the transition from secondary to university-level instruction. Moreover, another equally large challenge exacerbates these vertical disciplinary gaps. At all levels, instruction takes place largely in disciplinary silos – in language and literature, history, mathematics, science, and so on. Learning goals in these silos are often phrased in very different language, e.g. ‘becoming a reader’ (or writer) in language arts, ‘inquiry’ in science, and ‘problem solving’ in mathematics. Such horizontal gaps result in instruction being far less coherent from the student’s perspective than it might be. The Teaching for Robust Understanding framework, known as TRU, may provide a means of addressing both kinds of gap. TRU focuses on the nature of learning environments that support the development of students as powerful learners. Through the lens of the TRU framework one can see commonalities across disciplines and across grade levels, and shape instructional practices accordingly. Within any particular discipline, treating students as active sense makers and arranging learning environments to provide opportunities for active sense making may help to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education.

This article pursues a comparative approach to honour, a choice determined not only by the fact that anthropology, with regard to other disciplines, has striven to build its specificity on comparative analysis ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. A further reason is to steer clear of methodological nationalism,1 i.e. to sidestep forms of Orientalism.2 The point, therefore, is to avoid the pitfall by which issues of honour and its more violent forms, such as honour killings or blood feuds, are downscaled to a ‘Turkish’ or ‘Albanian problem’ or to a phenomenon specific solely to Middle Eastern societies.

This article argues that European vernaculars were in closer contact with one another and with languages spoken outside Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries than they had been in the Middle Ages, when Latin dominated written communication. Increased contact led to borrowing, mixing and hybridization, some of it highly self-conscious (as in the case of ‘macaronic’ poetry and drama). Mixing in turn led to a ‘purist’ reaction, first in the case of Latin and then in the case of vernaculars such as Italian, French, German, Dutch and even – to a lesser extent – English.

The process of European integration, the complexity of the problems involved and even the resistance it raises, astonishes observers in other parts of the world, especially in large states that have a long history of centralized government behind them. Is there really so little unity in Europe? If so, how can this be explained? Has European diversity generated only problems or has it, in fact, created new and unique opportunities? Is there a chance that growing concerns at EU-level about the cultural dimensions of European citizenship could, in fact, consolidate a sense of community? And, finally, how can historians contribute to the creation of a common European identity, if this is so weakly developed?

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.

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.