One of the most frequently described cultural borders in European public discourse is that between Europe and Islam. Further to which, there are many concerns as to whether Islam can be integrated into Europe. This article argues that it is impossible to understand the real and imagined problems addressed in the ‘integration of Islam in Europe’ debate using the categories ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’. The question of categories is addressed through Bourdieu’s critique of journalism’s influence on research, leading to questions about suitable criteria of demarcation and meaningful terminologies. The route goes via classical theorists of science, such as Carnap, Popper and Kuhn, to Ricoeur, Said and Connolly. Some segments of the modern genealogy of the category of Islam in European studies are also touched upon. The article ends with a call for unpopular categories as an escape from the popular and political frames of debate.

Post-communist Central and Eastern European legal cultures in general, and judicial style in particular, are often characterized as formalistic. This article reconstructs two ideological narratives about the formalist heritage of CEE judiciary, variants of which have dominated academic and policy debates about rule of law, judicial reforms and European integration in the last three decades. As the debate becomes linked to deeply rooted and long-term, sometimes traumatic issues of national and political identity, patterns of ideological thinking resurface easily. While it is symptomatic of CEE political cultures that the debate on judicial method has become a battleground for fierce controversies about collective (political) identity, arguably this exemplifies a broader phenomenon. Other weak or peripheral national cultures also face and struggle with issues of collective identity and inferiority complexes which may resurface in professional discourses and seemingly unpolitical domains.

This paper focuses on Hungary’s illiberal regimes from the perspective of the opposition – a perspective we believe has been under-scrutinized so far. It argues that in order to understand the regime’s success it is crucial to explain why opposition parties have been unable to offer a credible alternative. The paper argues that the opposition is in a trap with three unfavourable factors mutually strengthening each other and undermining its ability for success. They are (1) the cartel party system; (2) the weak social embeddedness of opposition parties; and (3) lack of their presence in local politics. At the same time, we also point out that the rise of a tiny joke-party’s success (The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party) highlights that these obstacles can be overcome even with very limited resources. Nevertheless, it is still unclear if the Dog Party’s innovative approach to doing politics could be ‘institutionalized’ – i.e. if it offers a feasible model strategy for opposition parties – or it is only an efficient way of mocking and criticizing how the political system operates.

This study aims to analyse the policies with respect to, and structuring of, science and technology in Turkey from a historical perspective, and to evaluate the restructuring currently going on, from the viewpoint of institutions on science and technology. Such restructuring has undergone many transformations throughout Turkish history, and has been influenced directly by both internal and external dynamics. From the examples of other countries, we learn that success in high technology production results from well-established and sound industrial and scientific infrastructures. It would be useful to set forth such a vision for Turkey as well.

Initiated in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution toppled our Earth from its theological pedestal, revealing it not to be the centre of everything but a planet among several others in orbit around one of the zillions of stars of our Universe. Already proposed by some philosophers at the dawn of this major paradigm shift, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun, remained suspected but unconfirmed for centuries. It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that the first of these extrasolar worlds were found. Their seminal discoveries initiated the development of more and more ambitious projects that led eventually to the detection of thousands of exoplanets, including a few dozen potentially habitable ones, i.e. terrestrial exoplanets that could harbour large amounts of liquid water – and maybe life – on their surfaces. Upcoming astronomical facilities will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, maybe performing in the process the historical detection of chemical signs of life light-years away. But while the existence of extraterrestrial life remains pure speculation for now, it has been a major theme of science fiction for more than a century. By creating countless stories of encounters between humans and alien forms of life, science-fiction authors have pursued, in a sense, the Copernican revolution, confronting us with the idea that not only could life be widespread in the Universe, but also that our species may be far from the Cosmic pinnacle in matters of intelligence and technological development.

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 main question this article seeks to answer is: who governs who within the EU? To provide an answer, we will analyse the relationship between national sovereignty and the ability to exercise independent economic policy within the EMU, as well as re-examine the development of this relationship regarding the process of European integration. This research offers a complementary study to understand better the relationship between European integration and national sovereignty.

Equality of opportunity is a central aim in the political agenda of many nations, and political leaders consequently speak about the importance of reducing differences in educational attainment between young persons from differing social origins. Such differences are apparent at two educational steps – the transition from compulsory school to upper secondary and at the transition from upper secondary school to tertiary institutions. Both steps have to be considered if the interest lies in attainment of university degrees, since the outcome at the first transition affects that at the second. Differences in educational attainment by parental origin appear through two separate mechanisms. Children from higher origins tend to perform better at school than other children, and consequently they more than others continue to higher educational levels. However, also among children who did perform equally well, children from more advantaged origins more often than other children choose to continue to higher and more academically oriented tracks. Children of immigrants tend to perform less well at school than native-born children, but given performance, they tend more than the native-born to choose to continue in academically oriented school tracks.

This article contends that the category of civil war is not suitable for studying the massacres of civilians during the Spanish 1936–1039 war and its aftermath. In trying to build an alternative narrative for the understanding of the destruction of the democratic republic of 1931 founded on the human rights paradigm, an analytical framework is devised based on the deficit in deliberation processes allowing for the re-classification of social constituencies as ontological enemies. By showing that the repression by Franco's followers supplemented institutional logics and rationalities from colonial warfare and religious wars, the article also provides insights for a qualitative differentiation in repression between the two contending sides.

In the most recent two decades, the political campaigns conducted by the Social Democratic Party in Romania targeted specific groups of voters, with little intention to attract new voters. The reason behind their strategy is that they could secure a relatively constant support of roughly one third of the electorate and so win the popular vote in every election since 2000. However, the 2016 parliamentary elections marked a turning point in this approach and the party used almost exclusively online marketing to organize, streamline and channel its messages. This article seeks to understand why this change occurred although it did not seem to be necessary. This change is more surprising in a context in which the main political competitors were weak and disorganized. Our qualitative analysis aims to identify and explain the main elements that determined this change. It accounts for three main variables: experiential learning, the role of a new party leader and the use of new opportunities.

About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean basin was the location of one of the most extraordinary events in the recent geological history of the Earth: the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Restriction of the seawater exchange between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean led to excess evaporation and deposition on the bottom of the deep Mediterranean basins of a 1.5 km-thick salt layer. Research on this event initiated a long-term scientific controversy. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Networks were identified as the most appropriate tools to address and solve the controversy using a highly cross-disciplinary approach.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a specific type of games took place in the Roman Academy of Arcadia. These games were a major cultural event in the academy and were a type of poetry competition which, in many aspects, was similar to the ancient Olympic Games. Therefore, they are a perfect example of the heritage of the Olympic spirit of the given era.

This article studies the different scenarios for the fiscal union in the Eurozone beyond 2019. It explains the different alternatives that the literature has explored to ensure fiscal transfers within Eurozone states as well as for common debt issuance. It also describes the role that monetary policy has played as a backstop for sovereign defaults and highlights the limits that inflation and an anti-euro backlash impose on public debt sustainability.

In the late works of María Zambrano (1904–1991), the author presents exile as a particular kind of experience, by which the structure and arquitectonics of human existence become visible. Similarly, in his posthumously published Passagen-Werk Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) introduces the flanêur – which he repeatedly likens to the immigrant or exile – as the representation of a particular kind of gaze, disclosing the arquitectonics and structure of capitalist bourgeois society. In this article, I suggest that the notions of figura and dialektisches Bild from the authors’ respective works are connected to an exile mode of perception, centred on the problem of translatability across cultural and linguistic borders. I believe that the similarities between the two authors can be explained by a reading which contextualizes them as a political generation with a shared experience of exilic boundary-crossing.

Globally connected and commodified digital means of communication offer a wealth of information across age-bands and across formal and informal sites of learning, yet few students obtain systematic training in transforming this information to knowledge that is tailored to their level of understanding and to the settings of learning. This gap between access to unsorted and often unsolicited information across boundaries of space, learning and generation and training in the formation of valid knowledge poses a threat to democratic societies that are based on informed citizens’ joint debate and decision-making. This article addresses the gap between students’ information access and their knowledge formation and discusses the challenges and possible solutions with empirical focus on the transition between upper-secondary and tertiary education. Globally connected social network sites (‘social media’) are key information sources for many students. Owing to their commodified, algorithmic and non-transparent character, these sites offer little guidance in terms of validation and verification of claims. I propose Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as an important means of minimizing the gap between information access and sound knowledge formation. This is because MIL goes beyond training of access to digital technologies and information search and retrieval. It also trains skills in applying communication technologies for validation, critique and knowledge production. I discuss the challenges posed to education to apply (MIL) as a key pathway to minimizing the gap in order to advance public value and societal resilience and suggest that educational systems shift their focus from teaching to learning in tandem with more inclusive approaches to where learning takes place.

The acquisition of domain-specific knowledge and interdisciplinary skills such as critical thinking is increasingly gaining significance as key learning outcomes in higher education that are crucial for all professionals and engaged citizens and that enable lifelong learning. Despite this socio-political consensus, up until the last decade there have only been a few evidence-based insights into the competencies of higher education students. Therefore, the Germany-wide research program Modelling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHs) was established in 2011 by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In the 85 projects, theoretical-conceptual competence models and corresponding assessments were developed for selected large study domains (e.g. economics) to reliably measure the students’ competencies in different phases of higher education (entering, undergraduate, graduate). More than 100 technology-based assessments of both discipline-specific competencies and generic skills were validated across Germany at over 350 universities with over 75,000 students. This article presents findings from the Germany-wide entry diagnostics in the one KoKoHs project (WiWiKom II) with beginning students in business, economic and social sciences that provide evidence-based insights into students’ learning preconditions and their impact on domain-specific knowledge acquisition in bachelor’s degree courses. The results lead to far-reaching practical implications for successful transitions between secondary and tertiary education, including recommendations for the development of mechanisms to support access to tertiary education and to prevent high dropout rates.

The introduction of the euro has led to three dominant currencies in the financial markets, namely the euro, dollar and yen. The use of the euro as the single currency is a key element for economic and political unification in the EU (European Union). While some of the criteria for achieving monetary integration between the European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries in the euro area have been satisfied, some problems still remain. As the euro is not the currency of a single country like the dollar, the dollar still retains its dominant position in the international markets. After the Brexit referendum, apprehension regarding the collapse of the EU has reached a peak. Originally introduced in 12 EU member countries, and since extended to 19, the euro may potentially embrace 27 member countries. In this study, the economic impacts of the euro on the per capita income, inflation rate and foreign direct investment are analysed. The analysis will be performed on three countries participating in the EMU, namely, Germany, France and Italy.

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.

This paper analyses the e-voting experience of the local elections undertaken by Osh city Council in 2016. The process was introduced to ensure fair and democratic elections in Kyrgyzstan after continuous and repeated violent political uprising. The e-system, based on biometrics registration, biometric identification of voters and automated vote counting, was designed to help to avoid the most common election frauds: vote buying, carousel voting and group/family voting. The case study, mainly based on interviews, illustrates the adaptation and modernization of strategies to resist and cheat within the e-voting system. The analysis outlines three widely practised cheating strategies: procedural violations, such as avoiding cross-checking of manual and automated counting and allowing voting without biometrical identification; transformation of bribery into ‘vote auctioning’; and strengthening of kinship-based/regional support and tribal/regional identity under conditions of e-voting.

This article elaborates upon the idea of cultural borders from the perspective of European unification before EU-integration. It addresses discussions on how to manage or even transcend religious and linguistic borders, from William Penn, Novalis and Conrad Friedrich Schmidt-Phiseldeck, to Johann Caspar Bluntschli and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. The historical contexts are nationalism and Europeanization. These are further illuminated by the use of constructivist theory and the concept of a ‘stagist theory’ from Dipesh Chakrabarty and Roberto Dainotto which legitimizes the domination of some nations over others.