In Europe, building transnational networks has become a crucial means for realizing bottom-up Europeanization and implementing the European Union (EU) policy at the grassroots. The value of transnational networks lies in clarifying political exchanges, decision making and policy transfer below the EU level. As a core element of the EU’s cultural action, the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) is an important vehicle to promote transnational cooperation. However, whether in theory or practice, transnational networks among ECOC host cities have not received much attention from academia. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis, this study offers a holistic overview of the experiences of the ECOC programme over 40 years. It aims to answer two sets of research questions: (1) What types of transnational networks have been established among ECOCs? How do they operate? What functions do they have, and what are their impacts and limitations? (2) How do these transnational networks reflect the multilayered nature of European governance and the dynamics of Europeanization? Through this article, ECOC research can have a closer relationship with recent innovations in disciplines that are studying the EU’s political and societal processes.

This study topic is highly relevant as it explores the geopolitical dynamics of Kazakhstan, which serves as a hub where the interests of major world powers intersect with regional significance. The purpose of this article is to examine and analyse the state of Kazakhstan within the Central Asian region, considering its characteristics, such as high levels of socio-political and economic development, political stability, and its ability to conduct independent policies. The study utilized a range of research methods including deductive and inductive approaches, historical research, content analysis and event analysis. These methods were employed to analyse the current higher education system in Kazakhstan and explore the potential for its transformation, while also examining the impact of the Declaration on the creation of the Central Asian Higher Educational Area (Turkestan Declaration). The study reveals that Kazakhstan plays a significant role as a geopolitical actor in Central Asia, with stable socio-political and economic development. Kazakhstan aims to elevate the ‘Turkic world’ on the international stage and build strong foreign-policy relations. The findings have implications for specialists, policymakers, and readers interested in the region. The study emphasizes the importance of a ‘Knowledge Society’ and research capacity in forming a Common Central Asian Higher Education Area.

The enlargement of the European Union to new countries in 2004 introduced mechanisms to support the development of various social and economic areas, while also aiming to level the differences between the member states. The primary purpose of this study is to analyse the development and similarities of the insurance markets in the old and new member states of the EU after the enlargement in 2004. We examine the insurance sector of both groups of countries, i.e., those that were members before 2004 and those that joined in 2004, using Hellwig’s development measure, which takes into account several characteristics. Additionally, we analyse the similarity of these countries using three statistical methods of unsupervised classification: Ward’s method, the k-means method, and the Partitioning Among Medoids. Our results indicate that there was a significant variation in the insurance characteristics of these compared groups of EU members after 2004. In general, the insurance markets of the old and new EU countries developed differently. Since the enlargement in 2004, the insurance markets of the old and new EU countries have not yet aligned.

This article analyses academic publishing in modern society by means of a governance model focusing on three groups of governors: Regulators, Market Actors, and Professions. It demonstrates how these three groups have interacted and how this interaction has put pressure on faculty members to produce publications for top journals. It also points to the strong position of publishers, which leads to high profit margins. The article therefore also discusses different possible measures to change the publishing system.

Innovation and R&D activities have significant effects on economic development and firm success. Innovation is a key factor in economic development through productivity gains. However, firms do not perform the socially optimal level of innovation due to market failures. Therefore, innovation activity is largely supported by governments for both developed and developing countries with the aim of creating additionality. While additionality effects from government supports are widely discussed for developed countries, there is scarce evidence for developing countries. The aim of this article is to analyse innovation behaviour of Turkish firms based on firm characteristics. Further, the behavioural additionality of government support is also analysed in order to provide a full picture. For this aim, the innovation structure is analysed using a multinomial logit model and the additionality effects are analysed using the propensity score matching (PSM) technique. Results indicate that firms that are profit-oriented, produce for the internal market and have an internal R&D unit, are more likely to implement organization and/or marketing innovation in comparison with product innovation. In addition, the same pattern is observed in companies that received government support. The results additionality indicate positive effects on behavioural additionality; however, this effect is evaluated to be limited.

Zinnie Harris’ play, How to Hold Your Breath, predominantly involves Dana’s journey to Alexandria for a job interview. During her journey, Europe goes into financial collapse, and Dana and her sister Jasmine’s pride and sense of security, only because they are Europeans, are recurrently tested and gradually shatter due to a series of nightmarish experiences and encounters. The play deals, in particular, with the current discussions of the refugee crisis and the concept of Europe as the gist of civilization, yet it satirizes the latter by reducing it to an illusion that easily dissolves. Hence, even though the play is concerned with contemporary politics, it is curiously categorized, referring to the medieval genre, as a modern morality play. In this respect, this article analyses the concepts of being European as a sin – specifically pride, one of the seven deadly sins – in How to Hold Your Breath, and of Europe as a system that provides shelter to individuals in times of economic hardships. Accordingly, it explores Harris’ fusion of the medieval and the contemporary in Dana’s story, including the appalling conditions she has to endure as a refugee, so as to offer a novel perspective on the debates regarding Europe, Brexit, and the refugee crisis.

The importance of fundamental rights has been seen especially during the Covid-19 crisis. Although fundamental rights are usually perceived as abstract by individuals, they concretely and directly influence our everyday lives. With this article I want to confirm the thesis that, despite the fact that rights are generally not absolute, their limitation is possible only in exceptional cases. This article will discuss fundamental rights in the EU. It will present the regulation and possibilities of limiting fundamental rights in EU law, in particular in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (the Charter). The article will also present the role of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the field of fundamental rights. Moreover, it will depict the jurisprudence of the CJEU regarding health care rights. This is particularly important due to the problems of restricting several fundamental rights during the Covid-19 crisis, where health-related rights were at the forefront and accompanied by the search for a fair balance and assessment of proportionality. The article will also present the CJEU case law on the limitation of fundamental rights in the digital society, in the context of which we are also often faced with the search for a fair balance between several rights, especially concerning the protection of personal data on the one hand and other rights on the other hand (e.g. the freedom to conduct a business).

Economic resilience consists of the decisions taken by firms in order to face decreasing demand (during an economic crisis) while maintaining a functional economic structure so that they may then return to business as usual after the crisis has passed. In addition, it refers to how the population acts in order to stay in the labour market and maintain their standard of living. The educational structure must fit the needs of firms. This study relies on three datasets at the NUTS V level for the Central Development Region in Romania for the demographic, labour market and educational structure: the situation in 2008, the evolution of the three structures during the crisis period (2009–2011), and the evolution of the above-mentioned structures during the 2012–2019 post-crisis period. The migration of people with a domicile from urban areas to rural areas was associated with a decrease in the number of employees and the unemployed in urban areas (big and medium-sized cities) simultaneously with an increase in the unemployed population in rural areas. The unemployed moved their domiciles from urban areas to peri-urban areas, commuting to the cities. There were people who moved their residence from small cities to big and medium-sized ones. The post-crisis economic recovery was quick and the economic structure remained functional during the crisis.

This article deals with the transition to open access in Sweden, as part of the general transition to open science. Goals set by the Parliament and the government are discussed, as well as the strategies of the national Bibsam consortium, handling national deals with publishers, and of the Swedish Association of Higher Education Institutions. The development from the first stages in this process, where a main goal was to gain cost control, over a period with read-and-publish agreements to a situation where transformative agreements seem to tend to become permanent, is analysed. Finally, a number of possible scenarios for future developments are discussed, arguing for the need for university leadership to take an active part in the work towards a transition; it is not only an issue for individual researchers, or for librarians, but for the research community as a whole where universities are key players.

Media discourse is the main ideographic system in the world today. Post-Marxist discourse theory, represented by Laclau and Mouffe, argues that media discourse no longer merely conveys information but, more importantly, it has a powerful constructive and representational power over reality. Post-Marxist discourse theory has been gradually applied to social science research, and has also been further developed in the field of communication studies. ‘Articulation’ is a very significant rhetorical practice in the discursive generation mechanism of image events. The basic idea of articulation is to discover and activate the relationship between things and specific discourses. Many of the image events are disseminated through the deliberate appropriation of a series of established discourses, discovering a hidden interface between the topic and the established discourse, which not only enables the production and recreation of a new discourse, but also gives the event a legitimate discursive underpinning. This article aims to provide a post-Marxist analysis of the media discourse interface that exists in the image event in order to broaden theoretical and methodological horizons and create new perspectives for the study of media discourse.

The European Plan S initiative intending to transform the field of academic publishing towards open access has been received with both enthusiasm and criticism. This article reflects on this case as an example of how policymaking in ‘the Europe of Knowledge’ – characterized by increasing complexity caused by problems of multi-level coordination, combined with multi-actor divergence of norms, ideas, and interests − affects and triggers university responses. The analysis of response to this initiative for reform of scientific publishing takes the concept of normative match and mismatch as its theoretical point of departure, and the article provides an overview of how Plan S has been implemented in Norwegian higher education, where the challenge for universities has been to find a balance between responding to political expectations and expectations from societal and academic stakeholders. Our findings suggest a normative mismatch related to the Plan S initiative. The article argues that the university level was left with the task of defending the academic freedom of the individual scholar, while also being delegated the responsibility of controlling the rising costs of publishing services. As a result, issues relating to academic publishing are currently of strategic interest to universities.

‘Cultural unconscious’ is a vague term in literary and cultural studies. It has not yet been systematically examined from the conceptual standpoint. As a concept, it is not a simple idea that combines ‘culture’ and ‘unconscious’, but refers to the mechanism of cultural psychology and epistemology structured on the interaction of history, psychology, discourse, ideology and other factors. By investigating how culture and the unconscious work together to form a concept from the integrated approach of psychoanalysis and semiotics, this article aims to turn a vague idea into a clearly defined theory of criticism with practical applicability for cultural studies. After a conception of its logic and mechanism in terms of Freud’s unconscious, Lacan’s renovation, Peirce’s semiosis, and Barthes’s semiology, the article applies the new theory to the analysis of a literary text to see how it may not only help reveal deep dimensions and mechanism of cultural consciousness but also has the potential of becoming a theory of cultural criticism.

This article analyses the self-perceived health of the population surveyed by the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS), with 316,277 observations. The main novelties of this research are: first, we use the econometric technique of quantile regression, which will allow us to distinguish the respondent’s income level. Second, the personal, social, lifestyle and macroeconomic context dimensions of the respondents are considered simultaneously as determinants of self-perceived health. In this way, we will be able to see what the determinants of health are, and whether they vary with income. Finally, it is evident that there are indeed different responses to the same stimulus depending on the level of income, especially in the elasticity of the response, seeing how the higher the income, the more or less the same stimulus influences a person. In addition, it is established that age, nationality and employment status are the most influential variables in self-perceived health.

This study examines the role of perceptions about environmental regulations and their influence on the innovative performance and productivity of firms in Germany, Southern Europe, and Central and Eastern Europe. Utilizing the CDM model for innovative performance and data stemming from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), we explore the alignment with the Porter hypothesis, which posits that well-designed environmental regulations can stimulate technological innovation and enhance market competitiveness. Our findings present a mixed view: in Germany, positive perceptions about environmental regulations correlate with the initiation of innovation activities, contributing to an increase in labour productivity. This supports the Porter hypothesis, evidencing that regulations can lead to beneficial ‘innovation offsets’ such as reduced resource use and pollution. Conversely, in Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, the perceptions about these regulations on innovation activities are insignificant, with no considerable correlation observed between perceptions about environmental regulations and innovation output. Our findings are crucial for policymakers, environmental regulators, and business leaders aiming to leverage environmental regulations to boost innovation and competitiveness within their regions.

The amount and quality of clinical research are constantly increasing; however, the translation of results into daily practice is not keeping pace. University curricula provide minimal methodological background for understanding the latest scientific findings. In this project, we aimed to investigate the quality and amount of clinical research compared with basic research by analysing ten doctoral schools in Hungary. We found that 71% of PhD theses were submitted in basic sciences. The majority of physicians (53%) working in clinical institutions did their PhD projects in theoretical departments. Importantly, recent clinical methodologies such as pre-registered randomized clinical trials and meta-analysis are only rarely used (1% and 1%, respectively) compared with retrospective data analysis or cross-sectional studies (30% and 43%, respectively). Quality measures such as international registration, sample size calculation, and multicentricity of clinical sciences are generally absent from articles. Our results suggest that doctoral schools are seriously lagging behind in both teaching and scholarly activity in terms of recent clinical research methodology. Innovation and new educational platforms are essential to improve the proportion of science-oriented physicians.

The purpose of the article is to determine the degree of influence of international migration issues on the process of transformation of European identity and to assess the prospects for applying this experience in the countries of Central Asia. The methodological base of the study was built on the basis of a combination of methods of structural-functional, comparative, institutional analysis and forecasting with elements of a descriptive method. The results of the scientific work consist of characterizing the concept of European identity and the main problems of its development in connection with the intensification of migration processes in the world, formulating the features of the incorporation and integration of foreign citizens in the EU states, as well as highlighting the principles and norms used by members of the Commonwealth to regulate migration flows. The materials of this work can be applied in research and applied fields: the article can be useful for scientists whose interests include the formation and development of regional identity in a globalized world, as well as the topics of migration processes and linguistic, cultural and social adaptation of immigrants.

This article looks at publication strategies from two perspectives. First, the author describes her own publication strategy. She shows how it evolved over time and explains why she adopted a balanced strategy mixing books and papers, English and French, collective and individual authorship. She then builds on her experience as co-editor of two journals, one French and one international, analyses the consequences of the passage of the first to a big commercial publisher and compares the decision-making processes in the two cases. She finishes by pleading for decision-making procedures that allow more discussions and collegial work than the current systems of editors soliciting reviewers.

This research aims to identify the features and characteristics of the policies of the European Union and Central Asian countries in the sphere of human rights by examining the main vectors and elements of governance at the national and international levels. The research methodology consists of system analysis, which reviews the general situation in the field of civil rights, outlines the problems of protection activities in individual states and regions, and identifies key areas for improvement. The basic elements and components of the activity of the European Union countries in the sphere of protection of fundamental human rights are considered, and the distinctive features of this type of activity in the Central Asian countries are outlined. Positive and negative tendencies of the legal protection of human rights in separate Central Asian states as well as probable scenarios of further development of the sphere in the region are presented. The uniqueness and peculiarities of the Republic of Kazakhstan’s policy in the sphere of human rights protection as a key vector in the process of development of a democratic state are studied. Based on the results, practical recommendations are presented to improve the process of formation of the activity of the Republic in the sphere of human rights and freedoms.