Jürgen Habermas’ recent work attempts to find ‘inspiring energy’ in the religious traditions, but without disturbing the rationality and freedoms of enlightenment modernity. Rather, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger, but not losing its hard-won advantage. For Habermas, the post-secular problem lies in how best to preserve the secular democratic institutions, and keep them from being ‘violated’ through religiously motivated politics. Habermas criticizes Nicholas Wolterstorff, who would allow the religious to overrun the political, potentially violating vulnerable democratic institutions such as the parliament. Habermas suggests use of an ‘institutional filter’ to protect parliament from violation. Throughout his post-secular writings, he persistently employs Victorian-like innuendo bestowing masculine ‘inspiring energy’, ‘vitality’, and danger onto religion, which runs the risk of ‘violating’ effeminate democratic institutions symbolized by the parliament; thus the prophylactic device, the ‘filter’, which protects her virtue. One is reminded of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’: in contrast to the Bundestag of today, with its glass dome (representing transparency) open to the public, we find in Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's work an enclosed, protective environment, a filter or prophylactic. In this vein, this paper will attempt to tease out from the language, word-choice, metaphors, and discourse of Habermas’ (post)secular dialectics that the religious enters solely on terms set by the secular, and plurality solely on terms set by stability/security.

The paper deals with the definition of eligibility criteria for regions and states to draw resources within the Convergence objective and the Regional Competitiveness and Employment objective of the EU Cohesion Policy funds. It proposes which regions and countries should be regarded as poor ones and to what extent they should be eligible for financing. The paper proposes that support would only go to regions in Member States poorer than the EU average and, within these countries, support would only be available to NUTS 2 regions poorer than the EU average. In addition, the difference between the region's GDP per capita in PPS and the EU average would be reflected by setting a ceiling for maximum admissible allocation to eligible regions between 1 and 4% of the region's GDP in EUR. The paper also proposes to abolish the Cohesion Fund. Finally, eligible regions and countries are identified based on a numerical model, where support going to regions with lower-than-average GDPpc PPS belonging to countries with lower-than-average GNIpc PPS is also calculated.

Almost a generation has gone by since the end of the Cold War, a time that has brought many changes. It has become steadily clearer that not the affirmation of the centrality of the democratic West – as asserted by Francis Fukuyama in his famous essay – but the opposite has occurred. There has been continuous erosion of the power of the West. First, the economic and geopolitical balance has increasingly shifted to Southeast Asia, where quite a few states have authoritarian, even totalitarian, socioeconomic arrangements. China is, of course, the best-known example. Second, the demographic and cultural tides have changed. In the past, Europe sent waves of émigrés all over the world. Now the West has become the destination of millions from non-European countries. The pattern of cultural adaptation has also undergone dramatic changes. A considerable number of non-Europeans have no desire to assimilate, or at least they wish to preserve their heritage. All these processes – especially as they relate to the fact that the West is losing its economic competitiveness – cause a response that often leads to racism and neo-fascism. Those who study European neo-fascists almost instinctively compare them with pre-Second World War fascists and Nazis. This temptation is reinforced by the fact that these neo-fascists often use Nazi symbols and trappings. However, a close look at these European neo-fascists/neo-Nazis and their prewar counterparts indicates that their similarities are usually deceptive and they actually belong to quite different species. Present-day neo-fascists/neo-Nazis are not imperialists, as were the German Nazis who dreamed about a worldwide empire. Current European right-wingers are parochial isolationists. They want not an empire but the cleansing of their state from newcomers, especially those of non-European origin. Many are even suspicious of European unity; they see the European Union as the key that opens the gates of their countries, not just to Asians/Africans but to East Europeans, seen as almost an alien race. Second, their view of Jews is different from that of the Nazis. They may be anti-Semitic, but their dislike of Jews is hardly the central element of their worldview. Moreover, they are similar to many of the general public who differentiate between ‘their’ native Jews – against whom they have no grudges – and newcomers from, say, Eastern Europe, whom they consider parasitic aliens. Furthermore, they have problems with the church. Some may be neo-pagans; in this they are also quite different from the Nazis, who had a tense relationship with the church but did not openly oppose it. Russian rightists in many ways follow the model of the European far right. This is due not only to direct ideological borrowing but also to similar conditions. Russia's heartland, for example, is also a major destination for non-European migrants. Still, the Russian far right's views unquestionably have elements arising from the country's specific conditions. As a result, they have developed several peculiar ideological characteristics. They are often pagan and quite hostile to the Orthodox Church. They also see Jews as part of an unholy cabal of Asiatics set on Russia's destruction.

This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy – the discovery some 15 years ago of the first planets around other stars (referred to as exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own solar system, with its planets, planetary satellites, asteroids, and comets. The surprising diversity of exoplanets, of which more than 500 have already been discovered, has required new models to explain their formation and evolution. In turn, these models explain, rather naturally, a number of important features of our own solar system, amongst them the masses and orbits of the ‘terrestrial’ and ‘gas giant’ planets, the presence and distribution of asteroids and comets, the origin and impact cratering of the Moon, and the existence of water on Earth.