Many of the nations of Europe have at some time traced their origins to barbarian tribes that settled inside the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries the Early Middle Ages were, as a result, manipulated to racist ends. Not surprisingly, scholars who have worked on the period since 1945 have been concerned to undermine earlier interpretations. In this they have been helped by increasing archaeological evidence and by changes in methodology. The current interpretation of the period is one that emphasizes variety – an emphasis which itself reflects present concerns in Europe.

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!

To the scientist, personality is the complexity of psychological structures and processes that contribute to the unity and continuity of individual conduct and experience. Personality psychologists explore the mechanisms that mediate person–environment transactions and the ways in which these psychological mechanisms give rise to the uniqueness of each person. This paper reviews the history of the discipline of personality psychology and the current status of the field. It urges investigators to attend to the proactive, self-regulatory features of personality. People are self-organizing, proactive beings, not just reactive organisms. Self-reflective and self-regulatory capabilities enable people to shape the nature of their experiences and life paths. This potentialist view of personality enables one to identify and promote the social conditions required for the full realization of human capacities.

This paper examines the importance of human rights protection – in particular the European Convention on Human Rights – to the Council of Europe's survival as a political authority. Its underlying premise is that the proliferation of regional organisations in Europe in post-war Europe, and the creation of the Communities in 1958, contributed to a loss of a sense of purpose as to the Council of Europe's role in post-war Europe. Initial attempts to widen the scope of its political authority in relation to the Member States and other regional organisations were unsuccessful. It was, therefore, necessary for the Council of Europe to consolidate its existing mandate in ensuring the region's democratic security through human rights protection. Thus, led by its Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe institutions have, since 1949, provided the Member States with the necessary regional fora for examining and promulgating regional human rights legislation, such as the European Convention on Human Rights and its two additional protocols abolishing the death penalty.

The paper explores the notion of cultural dialogue in terms of a specific application: the contributions made by the sitar music of the Indian musician Ravi Shankar to the setting up of a conversation between the musical traditions of North India and their reception and partial assimilation by largely Western audiences. A survey of Shankar’s career, contextualized by a more general discussion of the problems and challenges encountered in bringing the musical conventions of one tradition into conversation with the musical expectations and assumptions of another culture leads to the conclusion that what Shankar achieved, over a lifetime of creativity and musical fusion, was a partial success: on the one hand, it disseminated the auratic aspects of this musical tradition to a wide global audience; but on the other, it did so at the cost measured by purists in terms of a simplification or dilution of the music as practised in its original cultural contexts.

A person’s image of a foreign country is often not related to an actual encounter, but limited and one-sided based on the environment of the person’s native land. Consider, for example, the Russian elite perception of the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great’s reign shook Russia’s traditional society and led to the spread of promiscuity and general immorality. Consequently, for many Russians, whether or not they traveled, the West, epitomized by France, was a place of erotic pleasures and easygoing life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century some members of the Russian elite started to question the political system of their native land. For some of them, like Peter Chaadaev, the West stood as a symbol of the ideal political institutions and Russia for the dead end of history.

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.

In February 2006, talks began in Vienna to decide the status of Kosovo. The solution was forecast in several statements: instead of officially remaining a province of Serbia, considering that 90% of the population of the area is Albanian, mostly Muslim, and want independence, independent statehood might be granted to Kosovo. Kosovo enjoyed an autonomous status under Tito (abolished by Milošević) and thus has the legal right to decide on independence.

Serbia wants to keep its authority over the province, which is considered to be the ‘cradle of Serbia,’ a sacrosanct place in Serbian history. However, the Serb population has gradually decreased and become a small minority. This happened due to a huge Serb emigration after the Ottoman conquest of the region, a spontaneous, sometimes forced emigration, which gained special impetus during the Second World War, when the region became part of ‘Great Albania,’ and Serbs were killed and chased out of the province. The tension and violence of the post-war decades made emigration advisable for Serbs. Milošević's Kosovo war-and-rape campaign made the Kosovars victims of exalted Serb nationalism in the late 1990s. The NATO bombing stopped this but the Serb minority declined into an unbearable situation. The Kosovo Liberation Army's violent actions, killing Serbs, burning their houses, shooting at school buses, continued until recently and led to the flight of half of the remaining Serb population, and ‘cleansed’ Kosovo of 80% of the Roma population.

In this article, I claim that Wittgenstein was familiar with Hamann’s work, particularly with two of the latter’s original contributions: (a) the idea of transforming Luther’s concept of grammar into a critical philosophical and linguistic tool; and (b) Hamann’s use of a kenotic, impure style as a means to attain the humility his religious stance demands. I suggest that an understanding of Hamann’s style as a tool to achieve humility sheds light on Wittgenstein’s later refutation of the purity of the Tractarian style. As reflected in remarks published in collections such as Culture and Value and Public and Private Occasions, Wittgenstein – like Hamann – aspired to modesty not only in his private life, but also in his philosophical work, attributing it a religious significance. In this context, his later style of philosophizing, characterized by the use of everyday rather than metaphysical terms, the inclusion of impure concepts and humble examples, dialogue and fragmentariness, is a means to ‘dismantle one’s pride’, in the practice of philosophy conceived as ‘working on oneself’.

Inspired by the well-established trope of Eastern Europe’s in-betweenness, this article uses the notion of liminality to explore the images of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the works of three American authors: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Not only do these works map Eastern Europe as liminal in the imagological sense of the term, that is, as oscillating between competing narratives of otherness and familiarity; empathy and hostility; the East and the West, but also the very experience of venturing behind the Iron Curtain is charged with potentiality: the Eastern-European cityscape becomes the contact zone between cultures and the locus of self-discovery for the American characters. The resultant imaginative geography is at once contemporary and allochronic; political and personal, as it reiterates the Cold War balance of power while at the same time recycling existing representations of the area and reflecting the authors’ sensibilities.

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.

France was one of the main supporters of Solidarność. The events in August and September 1980 immediately gained the interest of the French media. Trade unionists started to collaborate with their Polish colleagues, for instance by setting up exchange programs or by introducing Solidarność to international trade unions. Organisations of solidarity were founded and started to collect food, clothes and drugs. After the proclamation of Martial Law in Poland, this grew into a mass movement, involving many layers of the French population. Both workers and intellectuals were drawn to the idea of a ‘second left’: an alternative to the old and radical socialism.

When the debate on globalization started in the early 1990s, the dominant assumption was that globalization was a shocking new phenomenon. Moreover, this new development was seen as an attempt to undermine the sovereignty and economic functions of the nation state, hence undermining the fundamental basis of the welfare state. According to this perspective, the welfare state was expected to collapse as a result of economic constraints. Some influential publications promoted the idea that countries would find themselves captured in a global trap. At least in the field of social sciences, this thesis was interpreted differently: the weakening of the nation state by globalization was considered a myth that served as an excuse for cutting government budgets. Since then, the social sciences have developed an approach to globalization as a long-term trend within the capitalistic framework, driven by economic and political developments and dependent on pre-existing social conditions.

The public debate about the consequences of Brexit in Britain follows certain predictable lines of established academic concepts in British constitutional law. This arguably overlooks the important constitutional complications of Brexit, including the position of Scotland in post-Brexit Britain. This article takes the unorthodox approach of focusing on legal and intellectual history rather than British constitutional law, because in this way one obtains a better understanding of the present British constitutional framework in the context of Europe. The discussion is from a continental European viewpoint and through the eyes of a private and commercial lawyer. The completely different understanding of Britain and Europe about the nature of a constitution and the structure of a state becomes more apparent with Britain’s departure from the EU, which may also influence the future national cohesion of the UK itself, particularly the relationship between England and Scotland after Brexit.

The war-generation dealt with the Holocaust as a part of the spectrum of crimes inflicted by the Hitler regime on humanity. The postwar generation, which bore no responsibility, even as neutral witnesses or accomplices, saw it as a special monstrosity; Auschwitz has been integrated into their cultural heritage. In education this means that an obligation of remembrance can provoke reactions of boredom, irritation or worse, since youth is confronted daily with other problems. But remembrance should not be marginal in school history.

The article is concerned with analysing the key challenges afflicting the world order. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the entire world order, and only now is humankind beginning to realize its far-reaching consequences. An analysis of expert opinions allows us to conclude that, in the near future, not much of the global balance of power will change, although tensions will rise among the world powers regarding leadership and ‘survival’ in terms of the political and economic crisis of the world system caused by the pandemic. The research results can be used to reinforce the line of international and foreign policy activities, as well as be used in the development of scientific programmes in the field of challenges and alternatives to globalization.

Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an explanatory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble.