This paper deals with what I think can be an aspect of the culture of peace, based on my own experience as a person coming from a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic African Society. It also reflects the many encounters I have had with different people as Ethiopia's former ambassador to the United Nations and now France, Spain, Portugal, the Vatican and UNESCO. During my tour of duty and presentation of credentials to heads of state, I had talks with many very stimulating people, which had an impact on my thinking. However, I would like to mention just one, because it is most relevant to this paper.

A medical view on ‘the value of life’ can be inferred from medical accounts of the quality of life: a life has value if it embodies certain qualities. Scales have been developed to quantify quality of life. While the term ‘quality of life’ is used frequently in everyday discourse, perceptions of what it might actually mean differ greatly and are often incompatible. This incompatibility can be illustrated through an examination and extension of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. The different models explored in this paper rest on ‘significant toil’, ‘choice’, ‘happiness or well-being’, or ‘social factors’ being the prerequisite for quality of existence. These models are incommensurable and, as intangible concepts, cannot be quantified. Decision-making in medicine does not require a complex evaluation of the quality of life: it consists of the doctor's offer of treatment based on the best evidence, and the patient's consent to, or refusal of, that offer. Apart from the need to obtain consent, the main ethical constraint on the doctor is equity.

Organized sport was first developed in Germany in the form of the so-called Turnvereine, and in England at the public schools. It came to France later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the modern Olympic Games was a French invention, the result of the ambitions and efforts of an aristocratic admirer of England, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His ideas and attitudes were in many ways characteristic of fin-de-siècle France.

The page is defined as a textual support, whether the text be present or virtual. This phenomenon is not specific to our book- and alphabet-based civilization. The very invention of writing rests on an original means of exploiting the space inaugurated by the image, and on the questions raised by that particular kind of space. By calibrating and structuring this space, soothsayers established the laws of a system of signs specific to visual communication – divine visual communication – which was also capable of transcribing human language. Far from being the origin of writing, counting, on the other hand, was only developed and refined by being integrated into the page's space.

The Nordic achievements in the visual arts in the age of romanticism were first and foremost accomplished by Danish artists. The great initiator was C. W. Eckersberg, who observed reality with great scrutiny and demanded of himself a faithful rendering of all the details. However, at the same time, he stuck to the classical principles of composition and omitted all accidental and ugly aspects of the motif that did not fit into his concept of an ideal picture. The principles he laid down in his art in around 1815 formed the basis of Danish (and Norwegian) painting until 1850. He introduced open-air painting as part of the tuition at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen and was, in this respect, a pioneer in a European context. During the 1820s and 30s almost all the young Danish painters were pupils of Eckersberg, and he also influenced the Norwegian J. C. Dahl. The subjects of the Danish paintings are very down-to-earth – they are first and foremost taken from everyday life. In the first decades of nineteenth century, Copenhagen had the status as the most important art centre in Northern Europe, and the art academy attracted many German artists. However, around 1840, a growing nationalism separated the Danish and German artists, and many Danish landscape painters devoted their art to the praise of Denmark. The nationalist artists, however, still stuck to the reality they had actually seen.

The understanding of welfare states hitherto suffers from characteristic biases – national, political and disciplinary. This paper proposes a generalized framework for international comparative research, which remains as neutral as possible to such biases. The guarantee of social rights for everybody and the issue of societal reproduction are taken as reference points to define the political criteria for social welfare. However, politics and social policies remain a partial aspect of the production of welfare in a given society. A theory of the welfare state has to take into account the interactions among household production, market production and associative forms of welfare production, on the one side, and of political interventions on the other.

The significance of emotion and social experiences in young children's growing understanding of emotion and mind is discussed here. There is evidence for early mind-reading, and the role of emotional experience in these developments; differentiation of various aspects of social understanding is indicated from studies of discourse, and longitudinal research. The challenges to be addressed in research on links between affect and cognition include a focus on children at risk of relationship problems, on the relations between attachment and mind-reading, and on possible developmental changes in the connections between emotion and social understanding.

This paper focuses on the linkages between postwar economic and social policy development. Examining the relationship between affluence and levels of welfare over the period as a whole reveals a tendency for social expenditure effort to be higher in moderately affluent then in extremely affluent nations. Turning to the question of how economic growth impacted on welfare expansion in the early postwar decades, the paper argues that growth was a necessary, rather than a sufficient, condition of welfare development. Finally, analysis of the era of welfare containment suggests that domestic economic performance has been the main factor conditioning expenditure change

The first of the three waves of economic development covering the 20th century started back in the previous century. The factors determining the success of this so-called ‘long 19th century’ were ideological and political, as well as economical. They generated, at the end of that wave, the move towards the first global economy. During the second wave (1914–1945), economic liberalism and globalisation came under pressure. The mixed economy of the postwar period – the framework of the third wave – initiated a trend towards a new global economy, covering ‘les trente années glorieuses’ (1945–1973), the uncertain 1970s, and the restructuring of the economy along neo-liberal lines (1980s and 1990s). What will be the economic future of Europe?

This article attempts to outline the development in our time of two ideas of freedom. At first, economic freedom depended on political freedom and the aim of both was moral improvement. From the beginning of the 20th century, economic freedom has become an end in itself and political freedom has given up any moral claim; both ideas of freedom are no longer what they were.

Research councils are under pressure and some are responding pro-actively. This has implications for their functioning as ‘aggregation machines’ taking in proposals and churning out judgements and decisions. Five scenarios of possible futures for research councils in the world of strategic science are laid out, with examples

This article highlights the position of mathematics within general culture at various stages of the development of Western civilization. Special emphasis is given to the role of mathematics in Greek philosophy, the influence of mathematics on Gothic architecture and the place of mathematics in 17th and 18th century society. Literary quotations illustrate the shifts in the view of mathematics in society.

Medieval lawsuits from the highest courts of England and France show the concern of authorities for even minor issues involving ordinary people – a democratic and modern trait. In comparing the English Court of Common Pleas to the Parlement of Paris, it can be seen that classical Roman law made a great impact on France, while the English Court ignored Roman law and applied English customary law and acts of Parliament. The Parlement of Paris also had to apply local customs, but its judges had all studied Roman and no customary law at the university; however, for political reasons they were not allowed to refer openly to the Roman law in which they had been educated. The jury was a major medieval contribution to modern democratic thinking, as was the political idea that matters concerning the whole community ought to be decided by all its members. The American power-sharing system, between President and Congress, continues the late medieval balance between King and Parliament. English common law was one of the great creations of the Middle Ages and the only system of comparable importance is continental civil law (with Germanic and Roman roots). This paper considers the chances of the elaboration in the 21st century of a common European law combining elements from both traditions.

Plants cannot themselves obtain their nitrogen from the air but rely mainly on the supply of combined nitrogen in the form of ammonia, or nitrates, resulting from nitrogen fixation by free-living bacteria in the soil or bacteria living symbiotically in nodules on the roots of legumes. Increased crop yields in the twentieth century required this biological nitrogen fixation to be supplemented increasingly by the use of fixed nitrogen from chemical fertilizers. The development of the Haber–Bosch process for catalytically combining atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen from fossil fuels to produce ammonia enabled increased crop yields. However, energy and environmental concerns arising from the overuse of nitrogenous fertilizers have highlighted the need for plants to obtain more of their nitrogen from the air by biological nitrogen fixation. New systems are being developed for increased biological nitrogen fixation with cereals and other non-legumes by establishing nitrogen-fixing bacteria within their roots. This new inoculation technology is aimed at significantly reducing the use of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers in world agriculture.

In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare constituencies and the inertia of institutional arrangements – in short, through ‘path dependency’. Welfare state institutions play a special role in framing the politics of social reform and can explain trajectories and forms of policy change. The institutional shape of the existing social policy landscape poses a significant constraint on the degree and the direction of change. This approach is applied to welfare state developments in the UK and France, comparing reforms of unemployment compensation, old-age pensions and health care. Both countries have developed welfare states, although with extremely different institutional features. Two institutional effects in particular emerge: schemes that mainly redistribute horizontally and protect the middle classes well are likely to be more resistant against cuts. Their support base is larger and more influential compared with schemes that are targeted on the poor or are so parsimonious as to be insignificant for most of the electorate. The contrast between the overall resistance of French social insurance against cuts and the withering away of its British counterpart is telling. In addition, the involvement of the social partners, and particularly of the labour movement in managing the schemes, seems to provide an obstacle for government sponsored retrenchment exercises.

The discovery of the inert gases is an excellent example of one variety of scientific investigation, where an increase in precision in methodology identifies a discrepancy that leads to a totally unpredicted, novel discovery.

Approaching the 21st century, humankind faces a paradox: the ocean covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface and has a core role in providing living and non-living resources for the world's population, but it is much less understood than the terrestrial part of our planet.

Among OECD countries there are two clusters of old-age security systems: (1) ‘Social insurance’ countries had, by the end of the 1960s, fashioned the core of old-age security as public, contributory, earnings-related and unfunded insurance schemes; (2) a diverse collection of countries that, after 1970, topped up their basic pension arrangements with funded occupational pension schemes with (almost) universal coverage. ‘Social insurance’ countries, on which this essay focuses, reveal at least six common trends in pension reform, all about improving the financial sustainability of public schemes. Although the repertoire of incremental adjustment strategies is quite limited, policy changes since the early 1980s have not led to a clear convergence among ‘social insurance’ countries (or across the two clusters). Their original diversity has been somewhat diminished, but it has for the most part merely taken a different form. Public pension reforms regularly harmed (future) beneficiaries. Nevertheless, most reforms were actually based on broad political consensus. The success of attempts to introduce retrenchment policies depends on prior negotiation with – and support obtained from – collective actors above and beyond a simple parliamentary majority. This peculiar prerequisite ensures success in the sense of a sustained implementation of the measures taken and of actual improvement in public trust in ‘reliable’ pension schemes.