Public works began, at least in the Spanish Empire, after the failure of Christopher Columbus’s governance in the Antilles. The foundation of cities in the Americas was a colonization strategy. Urban republics formed a network to support the kingdoms of the Indies for more than three centuries. Far beyond traditional and nationalistic explanations, it was precisely the ability to establish bridges – social, as well as material – that explains the resilience and durability of this network until 1825.

A defining feature of new nationalisms, with their right-wing populist rhetoric, is the way they exploit the regime of truth prevalent in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. Despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse consistently advances demands framed in terms of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). By using the Pussy Riot case as an empirical example, this article argues that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’ unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, is how to navigate between the totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

In this article I discuss intercontinental migration during the early modern period. The discovery of the New World sparked a large-scale movement lasting more than four centuries. Before 1800, only 2 to 3 million Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to move to the New World. Colonial powers, therefore, turned to Africa and transported about 11.5 million slaves to America. After 1850 and the gradual abolition of slavery, the migration of Europeans increased dramatically, but these migrants avoided the former slave regions. Some areas therefore resorted to the importation of Asian indentured labourers, mainly from British India.

The modern Polish–Ukrainian dialogue is the second interstate dialogue of the twentieth century, in the development of which the historical and political discourses have played an important role. The so-called Volhynia discourse poses the most serious challenge in this dialogue, while at the same time being its main component. The article claims the Volhynia discourse plays a major role in bringing about the asymmetry of historical memory between the two states. The events of Volhynia-43 have remained in Polish historical memory as an act of genocide perpetrated in 1941–1943 by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), on over 100,000 Poles and citizens of the Polish state inhabiting Galicia and Eastern Małopolska, including Volhynia. These territories, considered by the Ukrainian nationalist party OUN as indigenously Ukrainian, were to be included in the future independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian historiography, apart from sparse exceptions, avoids the term ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ in reference to the events in Volhynia, defining them as a conflict or a Polish–Ukrainian war with a comparable number of casualties on both sides. The article, analysing speeches and announcements by political leaders of Poland and Ukraine, focuses on explaining the causes and effects of this shift in accentuation in the Ukrainian discourse on Volhynia, and, broadly, in Ukraine working through its past.

This article sketches the context of education in Glasgow, which is Scotland’s largest local authority, serving some of the most deprived communities in Scotland and the UK. It considers the ways in which we work with our schools to raise aspirations and extend young people’s horizons, and explores some of the successes and some of the challenges we have faced and continue to face in bridging the gap between school and higher education. In Scotland, higher education can be delivered through colleges as well as universities. This is an important dimension for our young people, as colleges offer a different learning experience for them and, for some, this can be a more successful learning pathway. There are also other pathways to higher education, for example through work-based learning, such as apprenticeships. Our partnerships with universities and colleges is very strong. Through this partnership there is a range of programmes which support young people across the city to learn about life in university. This is especially important for young people from deprived communities as, often, their families do not have prior experience of higher education. The means of funding and planning these programmes can be viewed as both an enabler and a barrier in certain contexts.

People build bridges in many ways, and not least over time, spanning the different epochs that define their lives. For social anthropologists, this process is far from self-evident. Diverse ways of thinking about transitions summon anthropology’s traditional mode of making bridges, cross-cultural comparison. This account thus interweaves materials from Europe and Melanesia. Stimulated by an ethnography of an East German town being precipitated into a new world, it focuses on abrupt transitions and their recurrence. What is happening when a radical break with one kind of past is also recalled as looking forward to a moment when another kind of past might finally come into its own? Pursuing such paradoxes, the article turns to today’s Papua New Guinea where many have seen colonialism – like socialism – come and go in a lifetime. People’s aspirations for the future, raising questions about the abruptness of breaks and the crisis that new times create, throw out challenges as to how to envisage worlds old and new.

In this contribution the focus is on nationalism, i.e. the view that one’s own country and people are unique and superior, implying a negative comparison with regard to other national groups and countries. The research questions we set out to answer are: (1) what are the cross-national differences and trends in nationalism across Europe? (2) Which individual and national characteristics can explain these differences and changes in nationalism in European countries? We use high-quality cross-national data from 20 countries from the ‘National Identity’ modules of the International Social Survey Programme, collected in 1995, 2003 and 2013. Considerable differences between countries were found; however, within countries the level of nationalism remained rather stable over the period from 1995 to 2013.

The article argues that Poland’s mainstream national historical narrative, at least as far as the last two centuries of history of the country is concerned, is full of ‘traumatic’ motives which are regularly used and developed in diverse current political and intellectual contexts. Polish history is imagined to a large extent as an endless chain of 200 years of suffering, caused, among other things, by occupations, wars and exploitation, which are usually seen as not fully recognized in other countries, in particular in the West. The article attempts first of all to explain this specific nature of Poland’s historical identity by the privileged role of the intelligentsia, understood as a specific type of elite based on possession and control of cultural capital. It reconstructs the historical rise of the intelligentsia and its impact on the mainstream narrative in question, pointing to a selective choice of potential ‘traumas’ which are assigned a national status. They may be seen as tools to build positions in what can be called the Polish ‘field of power’, to use the notion coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The particular configuration and recent history of the field of power in Poland is reconstructed in order to explain different strategies of what can be called the social and political construction of historical traumas in Poland.

The kings’ travel patterns in thirteenth-century Norway raise the question of the relationship between geographic and social mobility. A clearer social hierarchy would reduce the king’s need for travelling and the introduction of permanent and professional administrators would mean that these people would visit the king rather than vice versa. Moreover, the king did not travel exclusively for political reasons, but also for hunting and other entertainments and on pilgrimages. The changes in this field form a significant part of the development of European monarchy.

This paper addresses the theme of mobility in the context of late medieval political thought, more specifically, the rhetoric of royal charters issued in England and the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth century.

In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.

This article explores the relevance of economic and cultural (identity-based) factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments among young people in Poland. It discusses the changing labour market situation of young workers, involving their precarisation and critically reviews existing accounts of new nationalism in Poland. In the body of the article, based on the analysis of biographical narrative interviews with young nationalist activists and right-wing supporters, the subjective justifications of their far-right views are analysed. It is concluded that the central motives for supporting the agenda of the nationalist movement by our informants are not directly connected with their economic situation, but related to their search for solid, clear and unambiguous foundations of social order and their biographical identities.

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.

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 the last two decades, mirroring systems have been detected in the monkey and in the human brain. The mirroring mechanisms have been considered as the neural basis for social cognition and interpersonal reactivity, and they have been assumed to support imitation, sharing of emotional states and empathy. Here I would like to compare ‘mirroring phenomena’ to ‘symmetrization phenomena’. In psychoanalytic literature, the construct of symmetrization has been proposed in the context of the Bi-Logic theory by Matte Blanco in 1975, on the basis of clinical evidence obtained in the psychoanalytical setting and following a theoretical analysis derived from the Freudian distinction between Primary and Secondary Processes. I will consider two different types of behaviours, empathic social interactions and the creation of transitional objects and spaces as defined by Winnicott in order to argue that symmetrization, in Matte Blanco’s terms, cannot be reduced to mirroring. I will then sketch a hypothesis on the interplay between the symmetric aspects of the mind and external reality in the development of higher relational functions of humans, also taking playing, arts and creativity into account. Finally I will describe the paradigmatic shift in neuro-imaging studies that was introduced with the discovery of the ‘Default Mode Network’ and its potential relevance in the research on the symmetric and asymmetric aspects of the human mind.

This article reads the German writer Jenny Erpenbeckʼs influential novel Go, Went, Gone (2015) as a significant contribution to connecting the current refugee problematic to the decolonization discourse in the German and European public sphere. Along with the public discussions about looted art objects during German colonialism in existing German museums and the emerging Humboldt Forum, the novel registers a shift in the culture of collective memory from a singular focus on the holocaust toward a more inclusive and more connected memory of multiple pasts of violence and atrocity, including German colonialism. This multilayered memory reveals the refugee problem not as something external and unexpected but as something that is deeply connected to German and European history. The novelʼs protagonist Richard, an educated former East German, is the novelistʼs experiment to articulate the urgent need for decolonization as a possible solution toward the refugee problematic. The novel depicts the reality and imagines a decolonized world in which less discrimination, less exclusion, more hospitality, and more acceptance might be possible.

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are tools for scientific research that have received increased attention in science policy in Europe in recent years, including the launch of specific governance bodies and a structured process of prioritization and organization of RI projects in the making. But there is no commonly accepted definition of what RIs are, and the category is both very varied and lacks historical roots. This article provides a historical contextualization of this policy area and discusses, in some detail, different ways of categorizing the 60 RIs identified by EU-level governance bodies as strategically important for Europe as a whole. Showing that the concept of RIs is a political construct with little analytical value for assessing the role and function of RIs in science and innovation systems, the article paves the way for more conceptually and analytically stringent studies of the politics of RIs in Europe.

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.

Catchy slogans about tourism’s peace-promoting qualities abound – ‘passport to peace’, ‘a vital force for peace’ and ‘the peace industry’, to name but a few. Yet, despite the critical scrutiny of the peace–tourism nexus in recent decades, its historical roots remain unexplored. This article traces the origins of the idea that tourism can help advance peace and international understanding. It examines the aspirations of the various international tourist organisations founded during the interwar and early post-war period. While these organisations sought to foster peaceful relations across national and cultural borders, their discourse of tourism as a force for peace also gave legitimacy to a transnational tourist industry and government attempts to secure hard currency in the Cold War.

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?