Assisted reproduction has been carried out within the Danish health care system since the beginning of the 1980s. The first independent act on artificial reproduction was adopted in Denmark 15 years later, in 1997. The issue of assisted reproduction is still a subject of debate in Denmark. The main driving forces in Danish society when establishing legal regulation in this area are existential, social and cultural/religious. The involvement of both scientific and lay voices and the timing of the ethical debate are important factors in the creation of the Danish legislation on assisted reproduction.

The common opinion that the history of Greek medicine can be characterized as the triumph of a rational, Hippocratic medicine, has been strongly attacked over the last 30 years. Instead of a single dominant theory of humoral medicine, scholars now point to the great variety of theories current in the time of Hippocrates, 450–350 BC, and to the great variety and number of those who offered healing in the medical marketplace. They are best described as craftsman, with similar behaviour and status to the local carpenter. Others sought the aid of the gods in temple medicine. The resulting picture emphasizes a dynamic situation.

The idea of continuous progress for mankind is no longer unquestioned. Problems of equality, rationality and emotion are unsolved. Conflict exists between cultural conformity and the threat of internationalism. In particular, modern rationalism is in conflict with traditional beliefs.

Studies of self-reported health on large cohorts in Sweden indicate that men and women in lower social classes in this country report considerably worse health than men and women in the upper classes. This is in line with many other research findings in many countries. What is interesting in Swedish data, however, is that self-reported health improved during the ten-year period after retirement. This was particularly pronounced during the years of financial crisis during the 1990s. Low decision latitude at work seems to account for part of the poor health in the lower social classes. An important task in future research will be to tie the epidemiological findings on ageing to endocrine factors strongly correlated with ageing, such as female and male sex hormones as well as their precursor, DHEA.

The Mediterranean Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development (MSESD) Report reveals that the Mediterranean is an exceptional eco-region not only due to its geographical characteristics, but also its heterogeneous economic structure, in which education is regarded as a key driver of sustainable development. Given this importance, this study attempts to investigate the impact of education as a channel for human capital accumulation on two different growth concepts in a panel group of eight Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) countries. We utilize an endogenous growth model using annual observations spanning from 2000 to 2017 by employing the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator. Empirical results obtained from the Augmented Mean Group estimator indicate a positive impact of education, regardless of the growth proxy. In addition, empirical findings reveal that the impact of education on inclusive growth is five times higher than that on output growth. We also find that capital is the main driver of growth while inclusive growth is primarily triggered by education. One of the main policy implications raised in this study is that education reforms that attempt to improve educational quality will assist policymakers to achieve sustainable development goals. Extensive policy discussions related to the experiential findings are also provided.

New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages, a seminar organised by Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub, the University of Wrocław and the Lower Silesian University, on 25–27 September 2017, inquired into the problem of the rise of right-wing populism in Central Europe. Manifest in responses to the refugee crisis of 2015 and to the Brexit referendum in 2016 across Europe, the populists successfully mobilised constituencies with anti-EU and anti-immigration sentiments. These attitudes, in turn, stimulated the emergence of nationalist agendas on an unexpected scale, moving radical right-wing parties with a pronounced nationalist programme from the margins, much closer to real political power. As part of the Relocating Central Europe seminar series, our reflection focused on that region, attempting to answer fundamental questions about the sources, purposes and modes of operation of the new nationalist impetus in political programmes, including those fostered at government level.

In matters of migration, it is not only the immigrants that are influenced by the new environment in their host country. The autochthonous population of the receiving country is affected by contact with the newcomers. This article analyses the impact of Polish domestic and construction workers on their employers in Leuven, a mid-size Belgian town. It shows that there was much more contact between employer and employee than one might have expected, despite the lack of a common language and the regular absence of the employer during the employee’s working hours. This contact led to the personalization of the anonymous mass of immigrants. New images arose, mostly very positive ones, and mostly related to the workplace. Old stereotypes did not disappear, but they were overshadowed by an awareness of particularities (clichés do not count for all Poles) and similarities (Poles have much in common with Belgians). In this way, the employment of Poles somehow stimulated a ‘Europeanization’ of sorts, and contributed towards developing a sense of common European features and values.

Public authorities in Europe are faced with increasing demands to accommodate religious diversity. This article traces some key issues concerning the limits of the secular State in Europe to accept and accommodate those ethno-religious minorities that are perceived to be partially different entities and claim some jurisdiction, without thereby rejecting guarantees from the receiving legal system. This multicultural challenge that minorities pose to institutionalized secularism is amongst the most complex political and long-term issues European states have to face. Such a challenge has not only to do with socio-economic disadvantage and discrimination in the labour markets but also with the constitutional status or corporate relationship with the State. On the other hand, European anxieties question whether or not Muslims can be and are willing to be integrated into European society and its political values; in particular, values of freedom, tolerance, democracy, sexual equality and secularism. Across Europe, multiculturalism seems to be in retreat and ‘integration’ is once again the watchword.

In the post-imperial East Central Europe after the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, disappointment was commonplace. The imperial successor states were involved in revengeful animosities with neighbouring states, torn by their majority population’s hatred of domestic minorities, bereft of tens of millions of their co-nationals who had remained in now foreign nation-states, exposed to huge influxes of refugees, and embittered by the territorial concessions that they were forced to make. By contrast, the newly established nation-states were plagued by miserable social and economic conditions, poor infrastructures, unemployment, inflation, rigid and immobile social stratification, and corrupt and inefficient administrations. Such developments gave rise to huge and traumatic deportations and migrations of populations, which, paradoxically, simultaneously immensely increased the mobility of their imagination. Using the technique of ‘subversive mimicry’, these nationally indistinct elements established cross-national transborder communities as the zones of ‘national indifference’ within the new nation-states. Carried by the energy of their longing, these communities introduced imbalances, fissures, and divisions into the nation-state communities, which determined their belonging.

In this article, I examine how defeat in war has shaped intellectual discourse in postwar Japan, particularly intellectual debates on war guilt. Known as ‘war responsibility debates’ in Japanese, the disconnection that is imposed on national identity by defeat has led to a number of different responses from Japanese opinion leaders and scholars. Implicit in these responses is a desire to restore fundamental continuity, either by revising the appraisal of war, or by making guilt the unifying element in a transwar national identity. Defeat is the crux of the issue around which intellectuals have had to navigate in their quest for a continuous history for postwar Japan. This article considers the contributions made to this debate by Maruyama Masao, a pioneering thinker on political thought in postwar Japan; by the scholars in the Science of Thought Research Group in their study of political apostasy (tenkō) and the more recent advent of revisionist historians in the ‘Liberal School of History’ group. I conclude that this ongoing debate should itself be regarded as a positive phenomenon, as it continues to presume a basic link between the war and accountability that is fundamental to the integrity of Japan's postwar democracy.

Early in 2020, while we were preparing for the Chinese lunar calendar’s New Year’s Day and Spring Festival on 25 January, the Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province and one of China’s biggest cities. The virus quickly spread through the entire country, causing thousands of people to lose their lives and many more to be hospitalized or quarantined. As a natural disaster suddenly appearing in the present world, the virus is a kind of revenge of nature upon human beings, who have exhausted the earth’s natural resources, ill-treated nature, and sometimes continued eating wild animals during the past few decades, as the grand project of modernity led to a process of globalization. The Butterfly Effect of this Black Swan, the coronavirus, set off a global upheaval. In China itself, through the joint efforts of ordinary people and medical personnel as well as central and local government intervention, the virus was effectively contained. Cases imported from abroad still flare up now and again though, and the epidemic escalates globally. Since this is a global health emergency, it should be contained by global governance.

Our modern representation of elementary processes considers that all physical phenomena result from the interplay of four fundamental interactions: the gravitational attraction, the electromagnetic force, the strong interaction and the weak interaction. Formally, the quantum mechanical description of elementary processes introduces the concept of discrete symmetry, illustrated for instance by space and time inversions. Discrete symmetries play a central role in the elaboration of theories and models, and have profound consequences in the predictions of these theories. For nearly 50 years, it has been observed that, of the four fundamental interactions, only the weak interaction violates mirror symmetry, and all observations so far indicate that it does so in a so-called maximal way. Despite overwhelming evidence of mirror-symmetry breaking, the search for a possibly underlying left–right symmetry has been pursued for many years by dedicated experiments. In this paper we review the context of mirror symmetry breaking in the weak interaction, we describe its interpretation in the framework of the standard model of particle physics and describe current efforts to identify the restoration of the left–right symmetry.

Every society produces its own concept of otherness. It is a universal fact, necessary for the social cohesion of the majority group. In recent decades, along with the development of a European consciousness and citizenship, the concept of ‘other’ relating to immigration is largely imposed on Muslims in Western Europe. There are historical reasons for this social enmity that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and to nineteenth century colonialism. However, other contemporary reasons have reinforced these mind-sets; some of which are international events (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution, the wars in Iraq and Syria, international terror of Islamic inspiration, and so on). These facts have – at least since 11 September 2001 – made the expression of Islamophobic opinions politically and morally more acceptable in Europe.

In the first part of this paper the molecular epidemiological evidence linking HPV to cervical cancer and other genital cancers is reviewed based mainly on the research work of the author. In the second part, the implications of the epidemiological findings for the prevention of cervical cancer are discussed in two areas: in primary prevention by the use of prophylactic HPV vaccines and in secondary prevention by increasing the accuracy of cervical cancer screening.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain, the European Union (EU) has included more and more new member states from Central and Eastern parts of the European continent. This enlargement process has increased the cultural diversity of the European community as new languages and minority groups have been subsumed into the EU. It is the purpose of this article to discuss the challenges that result from the EU's enlargement, together with the added intra-European mobility of cultures, that affect the national knowledge infrastructures. Based on recent social scientific scholarship on mobility and cultures, this article proposes that knowledge management in contemporary Europe is not only a technological or organisational issue but also a cultural question. Since people are free to move within the EU, it becomes of greater importance not only to increase our understanding of other cultures but also to ensure that member states can provide public services for EU citizens arriving from other cultural regimes. The paper shows that, because of the increased mobility of cultures, national knowledge infrastructures have to be opened and remodelled. New forms of collaboration between national knowledge systems are needed to guarantee the equal treatment of people representing different cultures in contemporary Europe.

‘Philosophical anthropology’ was initiated in the late 1920s as an alternative to abstract philosophical definitions of human nature (‘animal rationale’) and to the exclusively empirical, physical study of anthropology. Philosophical anthropology focused upon what it meant to be a human being. Its founders concentrated upon the situated existence of human beings and their ability to think beyond and to deny even what was actually vitally important to them. For Cassirer, these efforts remained too abstract because they failed to take the breadth of human cultural activity into account. The decisive feature of human life is neither reason nor language. These are derivative from symbolism, not the other way around. Human beings are best described as ‘animal symbolicum’. The error of earlier anthropological conceptions was not that they venerated reason, but that they ignored the body and so separated reason from emotion. The concept of symbolism, as Cassirer conceived it, overcame this dualism. His philosophical anthropology has been vindicated today in many areas of empirical research, but replacing the concept of ‘reason’ with that of ‘symbolism’ was no minor revision to the Western philosophical tradition, and the amplification and application of this new outlook has barely begun.

The theme of the 2006 IAP Conference, held at Alexandria, from 1–3 December 2006, was ‘The Unity of Science’. Let me explain how I interpret this interesting motto. For me, this does not mean that there is one regina scientiarum that rules over the other fields of science and learning; a role that was allotted to theology in olden times, and that nowadays – in a more secular vein – is claimed by physics. In my view, the notion ‘unity of science’ rather refers to ‘communality within diversity’. Disciplines vary in content, issues and methods. But there are also quite some common objectives, interests and concerns, the most important of which may be the common goal of searching for testable truth with objective and independent evidence. The communalities render it possible, or even imperative, to communicate and to cooperate. The diversity implies complementariness and calls for interdisciplinarity in the study of today’s numerous and complex phenomena in science and society.

Permanent dialogue, steered by continual negotiation, was the driving force behind the construction of Post-War Europe. In this context, the countries of the European Union have extended the mandate of the European Commission (EC) to negotiate an increasing number of topics, giving the EC’s high-ranking officials a pre-eminent role of agents in the process. It is, then, urgent and useful to investigate these negotiators’ practices, to list a number of recurrent features, and to compare them with current negotiation theories. In 2004, at the request of the EC, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted with high-ranking EC officials, from different directorates, in charge of top-level negotiations. An interview guide was drawn up to address the five following points:

• • the success factors in negotiation,

• • the reasons for failure,

• • the management of people, relationships, cultural aspects, the mandate, and the stakeholders’ map,

• • the management of substantive issues and their solutions, including the use of justification criteria,

• • the management of the process, agenda, multilateral mechanisms, and communication.

Following the interviews, a report was submitted to the EC’s General Administration Directorate. The report highlights a number of features that may favour the success of European negotiators. In what follows, some keys to success are linked to three dimensions of negotiation: process, people, and problem.

(Translation: Stefan Menhofer, 2004, revised by Peter Burke, 2005)

The question: ‘How to write the history of Europe?’ can only be answered in context. The reply depends on what sort of readership one wants to write for, what ideas one entertains about tasks of exploring and conveying historical studies, how one views the relation of European history to other forms of historiography. The following reflections seek to take up and connect with one another two strands of historiographical discussion which are surprisingly disconnected, namely the discussions about concepts of European history and of global history. Suggestions for a European history in a global context, such as are presented here under the heading ‘exceptionalism’, are based not only on theoretical reflections but also on several attempts to put them into practice over the past few years.