We examine whether a fundamental change in the core dimension of modern 20th century statehood, the welfare state, has become evident in response to changed exogenous and endogenous challenges. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches we take stock of social policy development in four advanced welfare states – Austria, Denmark, New Zealand and Switzerland – over the last 30 years. Neither spending patterns nor structural changes support a ‘race to the bottom thesis’, according to which the changed environment of welfare state policies has led to a downward spiral in benefit provision. On the contrary, we show that social spending levels have risen, mainly due to a catch-up of former welfare state laggards. In structural terms, a blurring of welfare regimes can be observed. This twofold process can be described as dual convergence.

Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re-emerged at different historical junctures. On their way down, European empires have produced what could be labelled a post-imperial stress syndrome, very much like a PTSD, producing certain defensive ideological configurations of parochialism, xenophobia and nostalgic illusions, binding them to a past they have left, but are still chained to, mentally and ideologically. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process, which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens. Such frictions anticipating a future reality can only be caught by imagination. This article will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fact is generally recognized, both concerning the dissolution of the British Empire. It can be argued that, with Brexit, Britain is still trying to come to terms with its post-imperial reality. One such prefiguration will be seen through the eyes of the centre, J.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), the other from the periphery, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).

In the most recent two decades, the political campaigns conducted by the Social Democratic Party in Romania targeted specific groups of voters, with little intention to attract new voters. The reason behind their strategy is that they could secure a relatively constant support of roughly one third of the electorate and so win the popular vote in every election since 2000. However, the 2016 parliamentary elections marked a turning point in this approach and the party used almost exclusively online marketing to organize, streamline and channel its messages. This article seeks to understand why this change occurred although it did not seem to be necessary. This change is more surprising in a context in which the main political competitors were weak and disorganized. Our qualitative analysis aims to identify and explain the main elements that determined this change. It accounts for three main variables: experiential learning, the role of a new party leader and the use of new opportunities.

To Darío Villanueva

In this essay I take a closer look at the international dimension of the arrière-garde. I will deal exclusively with the issue of whether being arrière-garde may play a significant role in the international canonization of a writer. My case study is based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), a Spanish writer with a world – that is to say, an international – literary career who nevertheless has been excluded from the Spanish national canon precisely because of being ‘arrière-gardiste’. Blasco Ibáñez's world literary career and his exclusion from the national canon are assessed from a generational viewpoint. Because of the limitations inherent to the generation method, though, I will also explore a prosopographical approach by investigating a field shared by a collective biography of writers. Notwithstanding the provisional nature of the data, the approach may contribute to a better understanding of both the arrière-garde as an international phenomenon and world literary careers.

This article examines the violation of longstanding scientific norms, in particular universalism, objectivity, and truth orientation by new identity policies such as the principle of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI). The imposition of this principle by public opinion, administration, and mass media, particularly in the United States but also in other countries, contradicts the principle of equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, nationality, and class, by putting the emphasis of assessment on group identities. The implementation of this principle has begun to damage careers, threaten scientists and lower standards in academia. In order to provide a historical perspective, I review how the violation of scientific norms has impacted scientific success in past authoritarian countries, in particular the USSR under Stalin, and Nazi Germany. The comparison with past authoritarian countries does not aim at equating situations from then and now, but can help understand social and political mechanisms of current events. It also highlights in a drastic way consequences that a violation of scientific norms may have for science today.

This article discusses how Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, has become a target of right-wing populist discourse, locating her at the centre of the landscape of hate. The features of the affective landscape of hate are discussed from the phenomenological and constructivist perspective. The author argues that the landscape of hate constitutes an important part of right-wing populism based on the narrative of national emergency and the language of war and exclusion (othering).

The fact that dystopian literature has a great potential for envisioning alternative futures is elaborated in this article in relation to the Finnish/British author Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2013). Itäranta’s gloomy low-fi novel is read alongside contemporary ecocritical theory with a focus on issues of vernacular cultures and knowledges versus ideas of cosmopolitan planetary citizenship. Reflections are made about the profound nature of the concept of borders: cultural, temporal, informational, geographical, political, in the event of massive catastrophes. The article investigates how Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ are played out in a novel, and how the novel in turn poses important questions for ecocritical theory. Thus, the interplay between ecocritical literary theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other, is highlighted. What can dystopia make visible in contemporary theory?

The world-renowned physicist Andrei D. Sakharov (1921–1989) was ‘the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb’ and, as such, an architect of the Soviet superpower. He developed into a fierce fighter for human rights, distinguished by the Nobel Peace Prize. In his words, ‘my fate was larger than what would have followed from my personality. I was merely trying to be worthy of my fate.’1 His life and career provide thought-provoking lessons and is worthy of review on the eve of his centennial.

Complex dynamic behaviour in terms of chaotic motion, catastrophic events or other seemingly irregular and unexpected features of and in theoretical economic models – aimed at describing real-world phenomena – are nowadays known as a common property of many nonlinear approaches to an understanding of the motion of actual time series, such as inflation rates, unemployment figures, and many other – mainly macroeconomic – economic variables. Since most existing models in economic dynamics are constructed in the tradition of classical mechanics, this result does not appear as a real surprise. However, the real ‘complexity challenge’ for economic theory still persists in identifying the complex structure of economic reality, which cannot be satisfactorily represented by simple deterministic laws of motion, although such ‘laws’ might possess the possibility of very complicated dynamic motion.

Based on a close study of the Sino-Japanese collaboration in Kunqu Opera The Peony Pavilion (2008), this article proposes a different conception of interculturalism onstage in East Asia in comparison with the prevailing East–West paradigm of intercultural performance and theatre. Some of the interesting questions that are raised and discussed in this paper are: How does the Japanese actor Bando Tamasaburo impersonate a young lady Du Liniang in the Chinese classical play without speaking the Chinese language? In what ways does the Sino-Japanese co-production connect and interweave Kunqu Opera and Kabuki? How has the intercultural performance been mediatized, received as well as perceived in China, Japan and elsewhere? The Sino-Japanese co-production features such important notions of interculturalism as connecting instead of othering, sharing instead of influencing, and complementing instead of exploiting.

In Nietzsche, ‘European nihilism’ has at its core valuelessness, meaninglessness and senselessness. This article argues that Nietzsche is not replacing God with the nothing, but rather that he regards ‘European nihilism’ as an ‘in-between state’ that is necessary for getting beyond Christian morality. An important characteristic of a Nietzschean philosopher is his ‘will to responsibility’. One of his responsibilities consists of the creation of the values and the concepts that are needed in order to overcome the intermediate state of nihilism. For prevailing over nihilism in science, Nietzsche suggests drawing on philosophy for the creation of values and drawing on art in order to create beautiful surfaces that are based on these values. He regards science as a cultural system that rests on contingent grounds. Therefore, his work is concerned with the responsible construction of the narratives of science in such a way that they enhance agency and promote a life-affirming future.

The popular acclaim for Alan Sokal's ‘Intellectual Impostures’ suggests a deep-seated suspicion about the value of much theoretical work in the humanities. But if the heroic age of scholarship is past, what are the humanities for? To teach us how to lead better lives?

This paper is intended as an invitation to continue reflecting on and discussing the concepts of learning and teaching, including the concept of educational environment and the conditions for knowledge construction in that environment. The key concept is communication, which I link to different environments, including face-to-face (f2f) environments, net-mediated environments and various mixtures of these types of communication environments. Furthermore, I implicate learning resources in the concept of the educational environment. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to contribute to developing our approach to the nexus between teaching and learning, including the concept of environment and the conditions for knowledge construction. I present a case study, which I analyse using a systems theoretical analytical framework, in order to discuss the relation between learning and the environment, including the idea of the possibility of knowledge transfer and knowledge dissemination. The specific focus is on learning resources in specific programs-on-demand (podcasts) and video-on-demand (vodcasts, from now just podcast) – and the students’ approaches to these learning resources and the environment offered. My point of departure is to contribute to scholarly discussion of learning resources and, in particular, of the use of podcasts and students’ approaches to these learning resources in concrete educational contexts. Finally, I suggest that we take the opportunity to reflect on the challenging task: how can we organize teaching and environments for learning, including the choice of learning resources, in order to provide each student with the possibility of developing the concrete educational qualifications that are required?

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.

Presentation summary by Monika Ewa Kaminska

I believe that Europe can do without immigration. We do not need it to solve our problems. It does not help our national income. We should not push for immigration.

While demographers have long been concerned with population increases, recent significant declines in fertility also warrant concern. So far, however, most researchers have focused on the causes of lower fertility rather than its consequences. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a new conceptual framework, which suggests that growing up with fewer siblings is associated with more participation in voluntary associations. Using General Social Survey (GSS) from the US, the relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations is empirically tested. It is found that there is a negative relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations among American adults who have at least four siblings. These findings have implications for researchers who seek a better understanding of the consequences of declining sibship size, not only in the US but also in Europe. Specifically, these results have implications for several countries in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, regions that have experienced ‘the lowest-low fertility’ in the last two decades.

This Focus is the outcome of a Symposium planned in 2004 by Theo D'haen and Karl Fuchs and held in association with the Annual Meeting of the Academia Europaea in September 2005 in Potsdam, 250 years after the Great Earthquake of 1755.

That ‘Great Event’ was not only recorded as a physical disaster, but it had a profound effect on life in Europe not directly concerned with the local devastation. In the Focus you will find recorded the impression it made on Voltaire and the influence it had on the development of Kant's thinking, on Wesley's sermons and even on poetry in distant Holland.

What could not be foreseen was how timely this Focus would be, since 2004–5 was a period of great disasters due to tsunamis in Sumatra and Mumbai, a major earthquake in Kashmir-Pakistan, and the hurricane flooding in New Orleans and other parts of the American Gulf coast.

The accusations of incompetence of local authorities, central government and politicians follow the same pattern as 250 years ago! What is rather different is the perceived role of the Almighty; but, after all, the 1755 episode occurred on All Saints Day, a Sunday when the many who were in church at the time of the eruption, were among the most prominent casualties.

What is quite different is the realization due to the insight of Alfred Wegener, that the earth's crust is not continuous, but split into plates, some twelve in number, that are unstable where their edges are in contact – the areas of earthquakes.

The importance of recent scientific discoveries concerning genetics has a perturbing effect on the legal relations governing society. There is a case for the definition of a special status concerning genetic information – an adaptation of the rules concerning medical information, a proper framework for the activity of bio-banks and a strict definition of the conditions of access to genetic information that allows for identification of a person for non-medical reasons. It would be useful to formulate some proposals of principle to initiate a discussion that must involve the scientific community.