The cities of Western Europe are profoundly affected by major global forces, which affect both the competitive advantage of different cities and the location of activities between cities and suburbs. These forces will impinge differentially on the main levels of the urban hierarchy; it is useful to distinguish between global cities, regional cities, older industrial cities and county-level cities.

Manipulations with isolated plant cells represent a powerful technology for the genetic engineering of plants.

Scientific research, a common heritage that laid the foundations of the modern world, stands as a unifying principle of Europe and is, among other values, a binding bridge to all nations. Being an inalienable part of humanity, the striving after knowledge embodied in scientific research is a necessary precondition if mankind is to handle successfully the consequences of globalized economies, a still growing world population with increasing life expectancies and the need for sustainable development. The European Science Foundation, with its flexible structure for promoting European cooperation in research can play an active part in supporting national governments and the European Union in formulating research policies and educational standards and in intensifying exchange and cooperation with the non-European countries.

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?

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.

To almost everyone the label ‘NATO and Science’ must mean science in the service of weapons and war. And it is true that NATO members do cooperate on a wide range of defence-related aspects of science and technology. But ‘NATO and Science’ also means something very different. Unknown to many, NATO has a third dimension in addition to the military and political ones, and that is the NATO Science Programme. I represented Norway on the NATO Science Committee from 1992 to 2004. Here, I give an account of the programme, how it came about, how it has been implemented, how it changed after the end of the Cold War, and how it is still changing post 9/11. The NATO Science Programme operates in a very specific political context, and I shall try to highlight some aspects of the complex interplay between science and politics in my account.

The haunting image of Nietzsche as a pre-fascist ideologist does not fit the early impression of him in Japan and Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, he stimulated young intellectuals to liberate themselves from the culture of the bourgeois. This was replaced by a Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche given in the Nazi-period, which influenced conservative circles both in Germany and Japan after World War II. There is now emerging a new interpretation of Nietzsche from the perspective of the cultural left. Considering the impressions of Nietzsche in the two cultures, the author comes to the conclusion that we must forget the old-fashioned dichotomy between East and West and speak instead of the ‘entangled modernity’.

Philosophers have described several approaches for scientific research, including causal inference and induction, the hypothetico-deductive method, inference of the best explanation, Bayesianism or causal network analysis. Prescriptive truth is dependent upon the values that one brings into scientific inquiry. One may oppose the writings of Bertrand Russell and Helen Longino. The former argues that values may negatively impact inquiry, while Longino argues that value-free research does not exist, and we must cope with it. However, Longino proposes a very stringent value-system which does not allow certain research to be conducted. The problem arises when prescriptive truth becomes hypertrophic, self-righteous, rigid, and unconnected to reality, which is the transformation into ideology. Ideological intrusion into science and medicine, such as with Social Justice Ideology (SJI), is indeed a problem in Western democracies. It derived from scholarship originating in the humanities (law, social sciences, branches of philosophy, etc.) and then transferred to Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM). The STEMM field was thought to be immune to SJI because of its rigorous methodology, but the hyper-specialization and absence of training in the humanities made it vulnerable to SJI. These intrusions into STEMM and the amplification in the last 2–3 years are potentially due to ‘concept creep,’ psychogenic contamination, herd behaviour and, for activists, strategical equivocation (motte-and-bailey fallacy).

The article discusses the proposed enlargement of the European Union by the inclusion of the five Central European Countries, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia in terms of their history. In the past, they have been part of the West at times, but their recent economic history has not been encouraging. What will their prospects be when joining the European Union?

Playing cards were introduced into Europe from the Islamic world in the second half of the 14th century, forming packs with essentially the same structure as now, but with different suit-signs and court figures. Trick-taking games were certainly among those games which were introduced with the cards used to play them; but trumps and bidding were later European inventions. The former of these ideas derives from the games played with the Tarot pack (which was not associated with fortune-telling or the occult until the late 18th century); the latter from the Spanish game of Ombre, once fashionable all over Europe.

The necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to both research and education can today hardly be debated, especially when one thinks of the complexity and dynamics of changes in the human brain and behaviour related to digitalisation and informatisation. Real interdisciplinarity, however, has to be born within the individual, representing a kind of a particular state of mind. To achieve such a goal, reforms of both science and the educational system are needed, broadening the fundamentals of our knowledge. To support and elaborate this thesis, various ideas will be analysed related to one successful example of interdisciplinarity, represented, in the author’s opinion, in the history of development of bioethics.

‘Progress is shaped by the ability to question, to criticize and to enquire. Ensuring progress is one of the responsibilities of Academia’. Could there be any future for non-conformist, heterodox, non-marketable knowledge, next to transforming truth value into the market truth value of knowledge, as was the tendency over the last decades? And what will be its impact upon criteria of excellence? The enjoyment of academic freedom requires the autonomy of the university. European countries have witnessed exciting developments in achieving a common space of convergence in higher education and research. But to encourage creativity there is definitely a need for more differentiation among universities, rather than uniformity. Autonomy is that degree of self-governance necessary for effective decision-making by universities in relation to their academic profile, work and standards. However, self-governance must be consistent with systems of public accountability. Universities must show that they are responding to the needs of society and they must perform according to standards of excellence and creativity in teaching and research. However, the balance, if there is any, has to be questioned. Should a shift of the role of the State be envisaged and should different types of governance be developed in order to counter the statement that academic freedom of higher education staff has decreased? Does a new relationship between government and university require the establishment of a modest set of ‘principles of good governance’ to reduce the overdetailed university regulations? And how to ensure that the search for creativity will also strengthen academic integrity? These questions are decisive for the future mission of the University.

The new nationalism emerging across much of Europe is ready to forgo and forget lessons of history that had successfully domesticated and democratized the nations of the EU over the last 70 years. If the nation, however, is an important resource for integration, and integration is seen as a common project for both its citizens and its migrants, how can it be reimaged and supported to live up to this difficult and important task? This article will analyse these problems in the light of new and older concepts.

The murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for many the ‘founder of archaeology’, in 1768 in a Trieste inn, did not mean the end for his work, which could be said to have been the key to understanding ancient Greece, which Europe was re-discovering at the time. In the late Enlightenment, Neoclassicism, followed by Romanticism, elevated classical, Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, and archaeological research, to the centre of academic quests, while the inclusion of archaeological sites in the era’s Grand Tours fed into a belief in the ‘Regeneration’/‘Wiedergeburt’ of Greece. The Modern Greek Enlightenment flourished during this same period, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a concomitant classicizing turn. Ancient Greek texts were republished by Greek scholars, especially in the European centres of the Greek diaspora. An admiration for antiquity was intertwined into the Neohellenic national identity, and the first rulers of the free Greek State undertook to take care of the nation’s archaeological monuments. In 1837, under ‘Bavarian rule’, the first Greek University and the ‘Archaeological Society of Greece in Athens’ were set up. Archaeologists flocked to Greece and those parts of the ancient Greek world that were still part of the Ottoman Empire. The showcasing of classical monuments, at the expense of the Byzantine past, would remain the rule until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Modern Greek national identity was primarily underpinned by admiration for antiquity, which was viewed as a source of modern Hellenism, and for ‘enlightened, savant, good-governed Europe’. Today, the ‘new archaeology’ is striving to call these foundations into question.

The ravages of two world wars and a desire to develop a politically and economically united Europe led to the establishment of the Eurozone in January 1999. The European Monetary Union was a grand experiment that brought 11 European nations under a single currency, the euro. Complexities associated with the implementation of effective fiscal, budgetary and banking coordination left the bloc vulnerable to asymmetries in the productivity and factor markets of its members. This article analyses how adoption of the euro, which prevented nominal exchange rate adjustments, impacted on the competitiveness and real economies of member states, thereby undermining the European Union’s key priority of creating balanced economic growth and productivity.

Any consideration of English in the context of a literature for Europe prompts the question of whether English can be contained within the paradigm of Europe, whether it could or should ever be restrained from overflowing its edges and boundaries. While English was created from the crucible of European languages, its filiations have long since stretched far beyond the borders of the continent. Close observation of the dynamics of English, and of English Literature, it could be argued, illustrates one reason why contemporary Britain finds it difficult to limit itself to an exclusively European dimension.

In 1868, Japan embarked on its unique journey to become a modern country that was deemed successful and advanced by Western standards. But what characterized Japanese civilization at the outset of this quest and how did the makers of modern Japan conceptualize their goals? To answer this question, we will look at the long tradition of the Mito School, with special attention for the works of the Later Mito School, and to the thinkers and practitioners of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods. This shall enable us to determine the aim, the nature and the success of Japan’s quest for its own path to modernization. The dissemination of the paradigm of modernization thereby attained to Korea and China shall be followed through and evaluated.

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

Data from the Human Genome Programme has clearly established that the human race is unique. Attempts to identify separately Black, Caucasian and Asian, did not establish a biological basis, which is an interesting socioeconomic point. Evolutionary medicine takes the view that many contemporary diseases are likely to result from the incompatibility between a contemporary lifestyle and dietary habits and the conditions under which the evolutionary pressure had modified our genetic inheritance. The search for gene variants or mutations, which could be associated with arterial hypertension, atherosclerosis and/or cancer, should be directed towards such metabolic genes.

Last year, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration announced the first detection of a gravitational wave. A century after the fundamental predictions of Einstein, the first direct observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole was made. The observations provide unique access to the properties of spacetime at extreme curvatures: the strong-field and high-velocity regime. It allows unprecedented tests of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes. LIGO and Virgo realized a global interferometer network, and more detections were made, including a signal from a binary neutron star merger. The scientific impact of the various detections will be explained. In addition, key technological aspects will be addressed, such as the interferometric detection principle, optics, as well as sensors and actuators. Attention is paid to Advanced Virgo, the European detector near Pisa, which came online in 2017. We end with a discussion of the largest challenges in the field, including plans for the Einstein Telescope, a large underground observatory for gravitational-wave science.