One of the most frequently described cultural borders in European public discourse is that between Europe and Islam. Further to which, there are many concerns as to whether Islam can be integrated into Europe. This article argues that it is impossible to understand the real and imagined problems addressed in the ‘integration of Islam in Europe’ debate using the categories ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’. The question of categories is addressed through Bourdieu’s critique of journalism’s influence on research, leading to questions about suitable criteria of demarcation and meaningful terminologies. The route goes via classical theorists of science, such as Carnap, Popper and Kuhn, to Ricoeur, Said and Connolly. Some segments of the modern genealogy of the category of Islam in European studies are also touched upon. The article ends with a call for unpopular categories as an escape from the popular and political frames of debate.

Using water for body treatments has an especially long tradition in many cultures and, is deeply intertwined with Roman and Ottoman culture. However, it is clear that today it is not possible to attribute bathing – not even a specific type of bathing, such as the hammam steam bath – to one particular culture (ignoring the obvious problems associated with trying to delineate clearly between such blurred constructs as a specific culture or as a discrete entity). Thus, the ‘Turkish bath’ is a widely used term introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century or applied to various different manifestations. The term reflects the European perception of Turkish bathing culture, primarily connected with bathing within a hammam complex or – as the Turkish term goes – a hammami. Bathing in the hammam-style is rather a Roman cultural practice, an element adapted and integrated in Ottoman culture and readapted thereafter into modern Western culture. It is often believed that these practices are rooted in the cultural history of the present state of Turkey (although ancient ‘Turkish bath’ architecture famously exists in Greece or Albania, too1). Furthermore, the geographical or architectural nexus between mosques and hammams and, also, the temporal order of Islamic culture (in which visiting a hammam before various ritual occasions is required) have often suggested seeing the Turkish bath as a religious custom.

Science provides the best way of understanding the world. Public understanding of science is limited: science goes against common sense, the earth moves round the sun. Paranormal beliefs are all too common and they go completely against science, there is a mystical element in our brains. Unlike religion, science is universal and is almost entirely independent of the particular culture in which it is performed. It had is origin in ancient Greece. Whenever a new technology is introduced it is not for the scientists to take an ethical decision about how it should be used, but they must make public the implications.

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

This article presents a personal perspective on why it is interesting and important to test all kinds of fundamental laws and search for as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions using laboratory-based non-accelerator techniques. Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits.

My study draws on the construction of a pro-European identity in modern Romania, a process set in motion by two main engines: a political one (the export around 1848 of the Great French Revolution, in a ‘tamed’ version, to Eastern Europe) and a cultural one (the emergence of Paris as the capital-city of European modernism). Born at the periphery of the continent, the Romanian identity project puts on display a series of insightful dimensions: a logic of homogenization, a centripetal pull towards centralization, linguistic standardization and unity, against any centrifugal forces of cultural difference, a top-down dynamics and, finally, an imaginary self-colonizing drive. As illustrated by the Romanian case, the paradigm of European nationalism opened up new ways of linking nation-building to the needs of modern societies and the interests of professional elites.

This study examines the short-run response of daily stock prices in the Spanish market to the announcements of inflation news at a sector level at the moments when the Spanish authorities announced the IPC (consumer price index) during the period 1995–2004. The study also incorporates two novel explanatory variables: core inflation and ‘non-core’ inflation rate components on the one hand, and the spread between the Spanish and European inflation rates (harmonized) on the other hand. It is concluded that the ‘non-core’ component of the inflation rate, which is more volatile, has negative effects on some sector returns; additionally, in drawing too far apart from the European inflation rate, the Spanish inflation rate negatively affects sector returns, such as in the ‘Consumer Goods’ sector, which is subject to strong foreign competition. In the long-term analysis, the lagged core inflation (structural component) negatively affects sector returns.

The involvement of Western citizens in jihadist activities bears important epistemological consequences: presented as a clash of civilizations, Islamic terrorism brings to the fore the issue of civil war. This article, after underlining that both terrorism and holy wars have a long pedigree in Western history, traces the interplay of religious and political tropes and semantics in the origin of terrorism, in the West in general and in Spain in particular. Highlighting the overlap of traditional faithful/unfaithful cleavages into modern friend/enemy political dichotomies, it summarizes the history of modern Spain as a sequence of civil wars in which political and meta-political discourses and practices of exclusion evolved towards extermination solutions in the twentieth century. This account allows for a reflection on the crisis of the regime of memory established after Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.

European Union (EU) coexistence policy is based on the principle of subsidiarity, which implies a multilevel governance framework. Different legislative approaches have been developed in EU Member States. These legal rules are oriented to both preventing on-farm adventitious admixture (ex-ante regulations) and reducing potential economic consequences (ex-post liability). So coexistence deals with a subject of negative externalities involving an issue of property-right allocation between farmers. Considering the impacts that coexistence policy has on GM (genetically modified) crop adoption rates and the generation of trade distortions, potential effects of the EU coexistence framework are reviewed from a theoretical property-right allocation view. Derived from the analysis, property-right allocation is focused on non-GM farmers according to EU regulation enforcement, which tends to rigid coexistence measures. Nonetheless, the multilevel EU framework has led Member States to pursue their aims: trade interests and social legitimation.

The Council of Europe (CoE) is an essential building block of the European integration process. However, the organisation is confronted with fundamental challenges relating to the erosion of its core principles, the overload of the ECHR system and the expansion of the European Union. These developments put the CoE's future in jeopardy. Yet, there are three reasons why the organisation should have a future: the CoE has the potential to become the key forum for dialogue between Europe and Russia, it could make further contributions to a European stability policy, and it could continue to build a pan-European legal space.

This article contends that the category of civil war is not suitable for studying the massacres of civilians during the Spanish 1936–1039 war and its aftermath. In trying to build an alternative narrative for the understanding of the destruction of the democratic republic of 1931 founded on the human rights paradigm, an analytical framework is devised based on the deficit in deliberation processes allowing for the re-classification of social constituencies as ontological enemies. By showing that the repression by Franco's followers supplemented institutional logics and rationalities from colonial warfare and religious wars, the article also provides insights for a qualitative differentiation in repression between the two contending sides.

The environment has many of the properties that economists associate with the concept of a public good. It has long been realized that, if left to itself, the market economy is likely to lead to an undersupply of public goods and, in the environmental area, to an insufficient use of resources to preserve environmental quality. Economics research in this area has concentrated on three central issues. First, exactly why is it that a market economy fails to allocate resources efficiently in the presence of environmental public goods or externalities? Second, how can one assess the economic value of environmental goods? Third, what kinds of policy are best suited for the protection of the environment, e.g. should one rely on tax and price incentives or on quantitative regulations? This article discusses these questions and also describes the evolution of the economic perspective on the environment, from a concern with local problems to focus on international and global issues of environmental pollution.

Alcohol is an important part of European culture and Europe currently has the world’s heaviest alcohol consumption. There is some evidence for harmonisation of drinking habits across Europe, particularly in the total per capita consumption, types of beverage and frequency of teenage drunkenness. As part of this pattern, increasing consumption and deleterious health effects have been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and deaths from cirrhosis in these countries now exceed EU averages. This is a difficult area for Governments where the tension between regulation and personal choice is conspicuous and widely debated. In the UK, regulation has been weak but there are signs that the appetite for tackling the twin drivers of price and availability may be increasing.

The obesity epidemic is now widely recognized as a major threat to health in many different countries. Some surgical therapies for obesity are efficacious and indicate that signals from the gastrointestinal tract are capable of exerting beneficial long-term effects on food intake and body weight. The development of non-surgical therapies targeting this system depends on understanding how food, and the absence of food, in the gastrointestinal tract signals to those parts of the brain that regulate feeding behaviour. What can be called gastrointestinal surveillance systems include both nervous pathways linking the gut and brain, and some gut hormones. Nutrient sensing mechanisms within the gastrointestinal tract determine the release of satiety hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK), or appetite stimulating hormones such as ghrelin, and offer potential therapeutic targets. It seems that CCK and ghrelin both act on the vagus nerve that links the gut to the brain. Examples of interactions between different factors regulating this pathway are discussed. It is argued that sufficient is now known to indicate that this signalling system can provide new targets for the treatment of obesity.

After considering the evolution of thoughts about the origin of the Universe since antiquity, the evolution of scientific methods is described. The current view on the origin of the universe is considered in the light of these methods

Innovation has become a leading slogan for world economies, politicians and science policy-makers alike. It is the driving force of Western consumer societies, which have come to expect the new to be replaced by the newest. However, in contrast to mere fads and fashions, the consequences of relentless innovation are real. They manifest themselves in changes in lifestyle, in the ways societies function and in profound changes in outlook and perception. This paper will ask how innovation became so central and which mechanisms sustain it in science and technology, art and individual life. One consequence to be further explored is the relative loss in importance of the individual creative act, with implications on how we view creativity, knowledge production and even the concept of the individual. Another question to be raised is that of the multiplicity of the new: despite the seeming diversity and multiplicity of option, is there also convergence or a process of synchronization at work?

On the rare occasions when Japan's relations with Europe are examined, they tend to be fixed within a trilateral structure at whose apex is the United States. This triangular framework was established in the aftermath of World War II, as a result of direct American involvement in the socio-economic reconstruction of Japan and the major countries of Western Europe. The current article examines how the very nature of the triangular relationship has changed over time, with the result that the trilateralism of the 1990s – in contrast to its earlier form – has served to facilitate the development of bilateral relations between Japan and the European Union and its member states.

This article confronts two films about the request for a European passport by a Latin American citizen: Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport, 2001) and El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2003). Both films deal with memory of the Jewish-Latin American migration that took place within the context of the Holocaust, and both gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary, stories of displacement. It is argued that this multidirectional quality operates in two ways in relation to the concept of nationality: whereas one film puts it to work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation (centrifugal logic), the other uses it to opposite effect: to reaffirm and rebuild it (centripetal logic).