When the political needs of governments, political parties, armed groups, etc., demand the making up of a past that justifies their specific present, their respective organs often seek to propagate a discourse that permeates the national social structure and allows the memory of the causes of past violence to be reinvented, through a strong perversion of history. In these situations, a trend known as historical presentism tends to emerge, i.e., the malformation of history and historical knowledge in the service of totalitarian projects, such as those of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Europe, or identity-based nationalisms, sponsored by violent guerrillas, as in the case of the FARC-EP in Colombia. Two scenarios that exemplify singular manifestations of historical presentism in Europe and Latin America are given.

Free Trade has always been highly contested, but both the arguments about it and the treaties that regulate it have changed dramatically since the Second World War. Under the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime, objections to free trade were essentially economic, and tariffs were a nation state's primary means of protecting its interests. However, by the early 1970s, tariffs had been substantially reduced, and the imposition and removal of non-tariff barriers that reflected a wide range of domestic concerns about the protection of health, safety, and the environment have since come to dominate trade agreements and their implementation. The expanding scope of these international treaties, and their effect on domestic regulatory objectives, has created new challenges for the nation-state, and for the international trade system as a whole. Domestic regulatory objectives that are generally embedded in a nation state's legal system or even in its constitution, are now negotiable and are susceptible to adjudication at the international level where they may, or may not, be used to camouflage unrelated economic interests. The international trade system adapted to this situation in 1994 by transforming the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has more effective means for dispute resolution and includes a number of special agreements – such as the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) – with rules for balancing the economic concerns of free trade with the social concerns of regulatory objectives. These developments have generated legal queries about the general legitimacy of transnational governance arrangements and their ‘constitutionalization’, i.e. the quest for transnational governance that is mediated by law and not only accepted de facto but considered deserving of acceptance.

The Swiss Academies have the experience of three decades of facilitating a dialogue between science and society. This includes the provision of scientific knowledge to policy decision-makers. Climate change is a topic that has been important in this context from the beginning. A recent example of science policy work in this domain has been the analysis of the findings of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),1 and the formulation of recommendations for policy-making at a national level in order to tackle the challenges posed by climate change on the population and the environment of Switzerland. Taking this specific example, the current paper showcases how academies can provide scientific knowledge at the science–policy interface to help tackle real-world challenges. With reference to this case study, and based on their longer-term science-policy engagement, this contribution concludes by describing the elements considered as essential for a successful dialogue between the actors in science and policy-making.

This paper will examine some of the types of biological evidence that allow us an insight into past environments and will consider some of the concepts that affect and limit our interpretations of past environments, and through them climatic changes.

Scandinavia was the birthplace of palaeoenvironmental studies; basic to these being the concepts of speciation formulated in Uppsala by Linnaeus nearly 250 years ago. Sernander proposed his bog regeneration theories in 1910 and von Post gave his first two lectures on pollen analysis in 1916. Iversen demonstrated how the impact of human activities could be disentangled from climate change and later discussed the effects of lags in the vegetation at the start of the post glacial. These laid the framework for much that I will describe.

At the turn of the century the two botanists Blytt and Sernander proposed a sub-division of the recent past (the post glacial period or Holocene as we now call it) on the basis of biological evidence preserved in bogs. They described wood layers in peat bogs and introduced the terms Boreal and Sub-Boreal for the time spanned by the wood layers, and the Atlantic and Sub-Atlantic for what they interpreted as the intervening wetter periods. These wood layers are as obvious now as they were in 1900 and the terms Boreal and Atlantic have gone in and out of fashion over the intervening years.

We still have much to learn about the morphologies of natural and synthetic polymers crystallized in bulk. Nevertheless, conventional X-ray and thermodynamic studies of crystallinity in polymeric materials over the past 60 years have given us a clear picture of the concept of crystallinity and the molecular features which promote crystallinity in these substances. Apart from issues of chain connectivity, the science of conventional molecules proved adequate for the task!

In this paper – given as a lecture at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 2003 – I survey the remarkable renaissance of museums – national and regional, public and private – in Britain in recent years, largely made possible with the financial support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. I look in detail at four non-national museum projects of particular interest: the Horniman Museum in South London, a remarkable and idiosyncratic collection of anthropological, natural history and musical material which has recently been re-housed and redisplayed; secondly, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century Old Master paintings, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture by Sir John Soane, which has been restored, and modern museum services provided. The third is the New Art Gallery, Walsall, where the Garman Ryan collection of early 20th-century painting and sculpture form the centrepiece of a new building with fine galleries and the forum is the Manchester Art Gallery, where the former City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum have been combined in a single building in which to display the city's rich art collections. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of which I am Director, is the most important museum of art and archaeology in England outside London and the greatest University Museum in the world. Its astonishingly rich collections are introduced and the transformational plan for the museum is described. In July 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a grant of £15 million and the renovation of the Museum is now underway.

George Francis Fitzgerald is known to most students of physics for his proposal of the Fitzgerald (-Lorentz) Contraction, but this is a minor episode in a remarkable life. Many of his ideas found expression through others. His powerful influence on the physics of his time has been reconstructed from his correspondence, as leader of the Maxwellians.

The article starts with the analysis of the origin and development of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) until the 2013 Gezi Uprisings. It tries to show that the AKP first tried to survive in a defensive manner in the so-called ‘Kemalist secular republic’, and thus established strategic relations with non- or anti-Kemalist sections of society. It then chose an offensive strategy to maintain its power against attacks from traditional political and ideological forces in Turkey, such as the army, mainstream political parties and the official ideology of the Republic. However, it is argued that the more power it accumulates the more it loses or leaves its allies and the more it is alienated. As a result, it becomes more authoritarian. The article will be followed by a second part to be published in the next issue of this journal, which deals with the reactions to AKP’s authoritarian and offensive politics and ideology, and the new measures AKP has taken for its survival.

This paper traces the presence of fin de siècle Wilde in the postmodernist fin de millénaire a century after his death. He is still alive, not only with scholars and critics but, more importantly, with a wider public and with writers and film makers who keep re-inventing him in their novels, plays and films, radicalizing him into a postmodernist avant la lettre. This ‘wilder’ Wilde is studied here in recent biopics, bioplays and biofictions, such as Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, as well as in re-writings of his texts, such as in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw or Mark Ravenhill's Handbag.

The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the question of the phenomenology of travel in terms of textual authority. Authority, in the perception in late colonial European writing, was often simultaneously questioned and affirmed, meaning that Western art, and the modern society, were seen as lacking something significant outside of its margin. At the same time, the idea of the pure exotic emerged as incompatible with modern historical consciousness, and colonial texts anticipate many later theoretical ideas in postcolonial studies. The question is how to portray cross-cultural encounters, and how to fashion the self in the contact zone of travel and sojourn. Modernist travel writing asks what was the writer's self and the recognition of identity and difference in others. The modernist image of Africa carries important implications for the re-evaluation of art and literature and the renewal of artistic or narrative forms.

Virology has undergone a profound transformation with the incorporation of quasispecies theory to the understanding of the composition and dynamics of viral populations as they cause disease. RNA viral populations do not consist of a genome class with a defined nucleotide sequence but of a cloud or swarm or related mutants due to high mutation rates (number of incorrect nucleotides introduced per nucleotide copied) during replication. DNA and RNA viruses whose multiplication is catalysed by a low fidelity polymerase replicate close to an error threshold for maintenance of their genetic information. This means that modest increases in mutation rate jeopardize their genetic stability. Realization of this important corollary of quasispecies theory has opened new approaches to combating viral disease. One of these approaches is lethal mutagenesis that consists of forcing virus extinction by an excess of mutations evoked by virus-specific mutagenic agents. This article summarizes the origin and current status of this new antiviral approach.

The first Institute for Advanced Study was founded in Princeton, New Jersey in 1930. Several other institutes followed, both in America, Europe and, more recently, in Asia and Africa. This paper is not a history of such institutes, but is about the idea of an Institute for Advanced Study. Like John Henry Newman in his famous book, The Idea of a University, it offers some general reflections on education, science and art and their interrelationship. It underlines the importance of these institutes in an academic world increasingly dominated by notions of measured output and impact and of policies imposed from ‘above’.

Theses about globalised, cosmopolitan, transnational or multilateral memories have received wide circulation over the past few decades. However, their reception in – and pertinence to – Latin America has up to now received little attention within the international debate. This article aims to contribute to this debate by focusing on the particular field of memorialisation discourses and practices. The text posits the existence of a certain global memorialising language, characterised by particular aesthetic and architectonic features. These traits are placed in contrast and in dialogue with the rich memorial tradition that has developed in Argentina since the 1970s, led by the human rights movement and its supporters.

The painful, unrepresentable event of the holocaust is one of the most salient and defining features of the history and identity of Europe. Its suitability for artistic representation has been the focus of intense debate, largely conducted within Europe (Adorno, Steiner, Ricoeur, Kertész), and fictions about the holocaust were, until recently, the domain of European (and Israeli) authors. In his novel on identity, The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips –a British author originating from the Caribbean island St. Kitts, and currently living in the USA, appears to defy this tradition and claims the holocaust as a natural subject for his seemingly disparate narratives that are also concerned with the first ghetto in Europe, the character of Othello, and Zionism in Israel. This unlikely mixture is not a mere postcolonial appropriation of metropolitan history, and cannot be explained by the mechanism of ‘the empire writing back’ that characterizes so much postcolonial fictions of the 1970–1990s. Rather, it explores some of the ideas developed in Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masque blancs, which in its rhetorical linking of the holocaust with racism and imperialist repression is in turn indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Why is it that the foreign policy of Germany's Red/Green government differs so remarkably from that of earlier German administrations – and what promises and dangers does this hold for the future? A careful analysis of the biographical background of today's German leaders, Chancellor Schröder and foreign minister Fischer in particular, explains the leftist and anti-American twist of current German policy. As children of the radical movement of 1968, these leaders hold a distorted view of Germany's history that ails their foreign policy decision-making. Instead of cultivating the success, the style, and the smoothness of German foreign policy until reunification, they try to distance the new ‘Berlin Republic’ from the old ‘Bonn Republic.’ Moralizing rhetoric and the divide between ambitions (permanent membership of the UN security council, for instance) and capabilities (especially regarding the chronically underfunded military) characterize Schröder's ‘German Way’ – with disastrous consequences. While containment of the Soviet Union was the overarching principle of the Cold War, German leaders today seem determined to contain American influence and to counter the American arrogance of power with the German arrogance of impotence. Thus, they fail to deliver any of the much-needed coherence and clarity about Germany's role in the world.

The consideration of some Italian writings on the Lisbon earthquake allows us to single out three different kinds of reaction to the catastrophe. The very first contemporary reports reflect the process of the construction of an event that, according to Gilles Deleuze, is characterized by extension, intensity and formation of something new. Then, some years after 1755, a new interest in the theme of ruins emerges in the work of Giuseppe Baretti, for whom ruins represent the reference to a past that has to be contemplated in its loss of functionality (following a pattern of perception recently described by Marc Augé). Finally, a third aspect is linked to the materialistic reflection about nature put forward by the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi who elaborates his pessimistic conception of nature in a strict dependence on Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne pointing out the antinomy between collective happiness and individual sorrow.

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.

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.

Far from being a simple and monolithic notion, man's biological identity embraces several closely related – but nevertheless partially autonomous – facets. Both the molecular identity and the easily identifiable body and face morphology derive quite directly from a unique set of genes. But the latter interacts, in a highly complex way, with a unique life-history in the progressive moulding of all the individual characteristics of brain functioning that underlie an individualized and evolving mental life, with the attitudes and behaviours that express it.