The European Union (EU) has suffered from fall-out recently. Clear cases in point were the anti-EU outcomes of the referenda in France and the Netherlands, as well as the messy process in response to the Euro crisis. More broadly, recent elections in many European countries have resulted in winning parties that advertise an explicit anti-EU sentiment, often linked to an equally explicit anti-immigrant stance. Apparently, in the eyes of many, the EU is not delivering – quite to the contrary. In this essay, insights from a variety of social sciences will be reviewed that may shed light on this issue, with a focus on the role of a multidimensional conception of diversity.

The paper considers the growing diversity of higher education systems and institutions by exploring three main trends of expansion, differentiation and globalisation together with linked features concerning new forms of governance and more responsive relationships with other social institutions. At the heart of this expansion and differentiation are a number of tensions concerning the role of modern higher education systems: to do with balancing autonomy and responsiveness, reproductive and transformative functions, public and private benefits, economic and broader socio-political agendas. The paper goes on to ask whether future knowledge societies will continue to need separate institutions of ‘higher’ education and, if the answer is yes, what form these will take.

It is sometimes assumed in the Italian historiography that the medieval school of medicine at Salerno continued the medical tradition of ancient Salerno; the ancient Salernitan school, in its turn, would represent a continuation of that of Velia. The existence of such a school has been assumed on the grounds of rather sparse evidence consisting of a passage in the first book of Horace's Epistles and a Latin inscription from the first century AD mentioning a medicus clinicus.

Modernist theories of development and democratization predicted that secularization would lead to the disappearance of religion. This has not happened. But contemporary democratic states are secular and define religion as a private matter. At the same time, a politics of recognizing religiosity is deeply rooted in the modern state, and it is obvious that intangible values play an important role and have a valid claim to public spaces. On the metaphorical agora, the square that constitutes the middle ground between the cathedral and the parliament, commitment born in the cathedral is transformed into rational arguments that can be presented in parliament. But who governs the square? Do spiritual values need a public defence? Can or should all religious commitments and expressions be transformed into profane arguments? How could public spaces be designed and maintained to promote peaceful mediations between profane, sacred and other principled commitments? By assembling artistic and academic thinkers who do not confine themselves to intellectual analysis, but demand our involvement and our realization that we are part of the processes we are considering, this Focus contributes to a discussion of religiosity and public spaces in post-secular societies.

The history of medicine in the Roman world has frequently been viewed from the perspective of the Elder Pliny (ca. AD 70), who described an invasion of incompetent, worthless charlatans from Greece and beyond. This extreme viewpoint was not shared by many of the inhabitants of Italy and the Western provinces, who welcomed these outsiders. This paper looks at the reasons why Greek-speaking doctors migrated westwards, and, through the writings of their most famous representative, Galen of Pergamum (127–216), how they became integrated into a Latin society.

At http://www.evaingemarsson.se/verk/defensa you will find a medley of scenes from Eve Ingemarsson's performance Defensa – Tesoro II, which was included in the seminar programme.

The media and political scientists create the impression that the world of Islam and the Occident are two totally different civilizations. The author shows, on the contrary, that life in the 14 centuries of the Christian Middle Ages and the Ancien Régime – Old Europe – was in many ways similar to that of the area's Muslim neighbours, and only moved into the modern world with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The author also examines the chances of an Arab spring heralding, after 14 centuries of Old Islam, the entry into the modern democratic world. He argues that the two civilizations are not fundamentally dissimilar, but that they move through comparable stages of development at different moments in time: a difference in chronology rather than in essence.

This paper aims to examine the critical success and failure factors for the new generation of ethnic (or migrant) entrepreneurs in high-tech and creative industries in Dutch cities. The present study investigates their entrepreneurial behaviour with a particular focus on their personal and business characteristics as well as their motivations and driving forces, which all determine their entrepreneurship and their business performance. An empirical application is presented, in which the results from an in-depth interview study on second-generation Moroccan entrepreneurs are discussed. The findings of our study show that, in general, these entrepreneurs are more open and are looking for new opportunities beyond the traditional markets by using modern break-out strategies. This research helps to map out key factors that influence their entrepreneurial behaviour and activity, business entry decisions, and creative business strategies. It also identifies conditions for success and other factors that impact on the performance of ethnic entrepreneurs in the Netherlands, within the broader context of entrepreneurship. These findings are informative for various stakeholders such as other ethnic entrepreneurs, policy makers and business investors in this dynamic and promising urban business environment.

The Council of Europe (CoE) is an essential building block of the European integration process. However, the organisation is confronted with fundamental challenges relating to the erosion of its core principles, the overload of the ECHR system and the expansion of the European Union. These developments put the CoE's future in jeopardy. Yet, there are three reasons why the organisation should have a future: the CoE has the potential to become the key forum for dialogue between Europe and Russia, it could make further contributions to a European stability policy, and it could continue to build a pan-European legal space.

The creation, roles, and experience of meaningful places in contemporary urban environments can be effectively informed through understandings of pertinent aspects of sacred architecture. To do so, this paper will discuss the mediating roles traditionally performed by sacred architecture and, in particular, its traditional role as an in-between place believed by its creators to establish connections to the understandings they sought or the gods they worshipped. Enduring themes of sacred places will be presented in the context of their communicative capacity and ritual uses, as a means to offer interpretations appropriate to today. The case study of the recently completed Oakland (CA) Cathedral will serve to illustrate contemporary positions and iterations. The conclusion suggests that the sacred place was (and still is), an intermediate zone created in the belief that it had the ability to engage, elucidate and transform, and that a re-introduction and repositioning of the mediating roles performed by the built environment can inform the creation of engaging and meaningful places today.

An ‘International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization’ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has earned the merit of editing an interesting tract by Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā’ al-Rāzī, in Latin tradition known as Rhazes (854–925 or 935), with the title ‘Doubts on Galen’.1 This sounds programmatic, but it is confined to minor details, and the author confesses that he feels very uneasy when criticizing a man whom he reveres as his most benevolent master in the medical art, but he is compelled to comply with the principle ‘magis amica veritas’ as Galen himself has always done in his time. The edition is intended to be the start of a series with the title ‘Islamic Thought’, and the director of the institute, Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas,2 announces in his foreword its aim ‘to formulate an Islamic philosophy of science’, which he further specifies with the following words: ‘In order to learn from the past and be able to equip ourselves spiritually and intellectually for the future, we must return to the early masters of the religious and intellectual tradition of Islam, which was established upon the sacred foundation of the Holy Qur’an and the Tradition of the Holy Prophet.’ (Ref. 1, p. 3). But here we feel obliged to add that Rhazes was not the right man to inaugurate such a series, as he showed himself in his philosophical writings as an outright apostate who deemed all prophets of the revealed religions to be frauds and had even chosen as his spiritual leader, his imam, none else than Socrates.3

The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two challengers is twice as large as the average support in the pre-election polls (a comparable difference was never registered in post-communist Romania). Our quantitative analysis uses election results from the past two decades and aggregated poll data from 2009 and reveals that a large share of the Romanian electorate avoids wasting votes and casts them for candidates with real winning chances. This article argues that polls presented to the voters, by the media during the elections, made the difference. They were used as electoral strategies to trigger strategic voting and thus promote specific candidates.

The transmission and acquisition of the wisdom of the ancients throughout the Middle Ages is a fascinating phenomenon in which languages served as the primary vehicles for this journey of classical culture. The main route – but not the only one – was located on the Mediterranean coasts and incorporated Asia, Europe and Africa. It was a multidirectional journey.

The purpose of this paper is to revise essentialist conceptions of the European Union citizenship and European identity, and make a case for a ‘politics of affinity’. This politics is founded on flexible notion of Union citizenship that accommodates multiple identities. The ‘politics of affinity’ avoids homogenizing assumptions and unitary conceptions of European, national, regional and other identities. It promotes diversity, otherness and fluid character of the postmodern European citizenship. It also advocates a more fluid idea of boundaries. The politics of affinity grounds European politics and citizenship discourse on affinity (not identity). The following lines will reflect on the institutional mechanisms, reforms and policies needed for the implementation of the politics of affinity. This paper will focus on the Treaty of Lisbon, the 2004/38 Citizenship Directive, the 2003 Directive on Long-term Residence Third Country Nationals and some ECJ's rulings in the new millennium.

This article examines Turkish politics and policies during the 1980s and 1990s in light of occurrences in Turkey and neighboring states, with particular attention to the impact of the 1980’s PKK revolt and the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990. In doing so, it outlines the political debates among the major political parties and the perspectives of the Turkish army generals on the important political issues of the period. These events, and those of the subsequent decade, have led to the emergence of a new status quo in Turkey that has had major political and economic repercussions.

This article discusses religion in public space and the case study is Muslim minorities in Sweden. The discussion deals with secularisation trends within Muslim communities in Swedish society in view of the notion of counter-secularisation as a fixed and unchanged form of religious expressions in contemporary public life. What happens in Muslim communities as Muslims of various cultural backgrounds and religious orientations meet and interact in a new secular context? The article argues that, similar to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian reform movements opened up for a relativisation of faith and thus to a certain extent initiated a secularisation process, a relativisation of faith is at present an ongoing process in Muslim communities in Sweden. Of the three definitions on secularisation, promoted by Jose Casanova, secularisation as ‘differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’, ‘marginalisation of religion to a privatised sphere’, and ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, Muslim practices in Sweden indicate an adherence to these two first notions of the relation between ‘church and state’. As for the last definition of secularisation; ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, which has to do with private religious practices, many Muslims would regard themselves as religious without claiming a public role for religion, similar to many Christians in Sweden. Furthermore, many of the traits considered to be ‘religious’, might well be attempts to protect a particular cultural context rather than being signs on increased religion as such.

The notion of ‘sufficiency consciousness’ is a way of life to be adopted towards attitude change in a world that craves for absolutist secularity and religious dogmatism. The paper explores aspects of sufficiency that could promote material development, and as such require a total attitude change and behaviour remodification of public life. It is obvious that performance-driven targets, accelerated growth, investment and prosperity-driven agenda by market forces alone would lead to a skewed understanding of both the notion of sufficiency and material development. Hence, a proposition for value-based sense of material development, ethical buying and consumption have all become survival strategies for civil society groups and organisations to effect change from within. In the Buddhist scheme of thought, two significant core concepts of wisdom and compassion impact on social change and behaviour. Developing non-material values generated by wisdom and compassion are proposed as a lifelong pursuit in understanding human tendencies such as greed, clinging, and craving to amass wealth and excessive indulgence. Such an approach and an analysis evoke a sense of sufficiency alongside appropriate and sustainable material development. The use of certain economic indexes and other technical data in the paper indicate and symbolise the extent to which material progress is emphasised over and above the non-material. A possible development of an index such as Gross National Happiness (GNH) as proposed by the Thai specialists is included as an alternative to the sole-material-progress-based data discourses. Cultivating oneself with compassion juxtaposed by wisdom challenges all to uphold goodness as part of being human. Opposition to such a view of life and a way of life is problematic in the light of the current phenomena of theatrical performance of violence to redress grievances as well as limitless confidence in economic growth and greedy investment plans. It is a value-laden counterpoint to the zero tolerance that can address the larger socio-political issue of the alterity1 that both help to understand what actually sufficiency means in the array material development. Wisdom becomes a guide to action with compassion, while compassion expands the capacity of wisdom to understand the part and the whole. It is in this interplay of value-tracking that one is able to realise the importance of human activity that can evolve checks and balances, which are imperative to measure material development and social progress. ‘Sufficiency consciousness’ and material development are healthy, vibrant and adaptive aspects for civil society groups as well as other institutions to participate critically in ‘religious affairs’ in a ‘secular realm’ with what life offers. The non-material basis of wisdom and compassion offers a wholesome view of ‘sufficiency consciousness’, which is fundamental to material development, economic activity, political governance, institutional arrangements and campaign strategies, for civil society groups to achieve their potential. Wisdom steers compassion while compassion transforms wisdom in those engaged in human activity, which is both about ‘here’ and the ‘not yet’.

At least as far back as the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Russia's state bureaucracy has been widely considered to be top-heavy, corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical. By the early twentieth century the real driving force of Russian history and society was neither the constitutional façade erected by the autocracy to stifle the revolution nor the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, but rather the growth of the state bureaucracy. Similarly, in the course of the twentieth century, analysts on both the left and the right came to view hyper-bureaucratic growth unchecked by democratic constraint as the major problem of Soviet society. Attempts to reduce bureaucratic interference in the economy of post-Soviet Russia have not resulted in positive change.

Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal secular institutions (SES), whereas less developed civilisations often rely on informal, often religious, institutions (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between different enforcement systems, and their implications for society development using an example of two different enforcement models: one informal (RES) and one formal (SES). We find that, because the RES is based on beliefs, its efficiency depends heavily on its credibility, making it hardly flexible and highly susceptible to conflicts in dynamic environments. In contrast, because under the SES societal rules are enforced through a formal legal enforcement sector, the SES is more flexible, although also more costly than the RES. The empirical evidence strongly supports our findings that wealthy, dynamic and fast growing economies typically choose the SES for enforcing societal norms and rules.