The history of Europe cannot be written without taking into account both the Islamic presence on the soil of Europe from the Arab invasion of Spain in 711 onwards, and the impact of that contact with Islam on the attitudes of the inhabitants of those countries not invaded by the Muslims. This paper seeks to challenge the view that the history of medieval Europe (and by extension more recent history, in areas under or close to Ottoman rule) can be written solely as the rise of the Christian west: the intermingling of Jews, Christians and Muslims on European soil proved very fertile. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There is an official enthusiasm about the eastern enlargement of the EU. A select group of advanced transition countries (the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and Poland) may enter the EU in the future. Nonetheless, the cost of the eastern (to a large extent agricultural) enlargement is not fully understood. That holds true both for the applicant countries and the EU. The actual costs could be assessed following the end of the seventh Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) that was supposed to prepare the EU for the coming decades. At the same time, the IGC was expected to set the final terms of entry. No matter how settled, the eastern enlargement will be very costly, the EU will have to ‘pay’ for the cohesion and agriculture, while the applicant countries will have to implement acquis communautaire. The accepted countries could not expect to be fully absorbed into the EU before 2015! An arrangement such as the European Economic Space (full membership minus agriculture, minus labour mobility and minus regional funds) may be a more workable solution for the transition countries, and for the EU. Full membership may be necessary in the end as the foundation of European integration is the preservation of peace and liberty in Europe. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

I have tried to trace the development of human rights from antiquity to the present day by quoting a succession of great thinkers from Pericles, St Paul and Marcus Aurelius to John Locke, Montesquieu and John Stuart Mill. I also quote the key provisions of covenants and resolutions from Magna Carta to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I list the many shameful countries where torture is still in constant use, and the very few where suspects are not subjected to inhuman treatments. I deplore our exclusive preoccupation with rights which has made us forget about human duties. Finally, I discuss some of the criticisms that have been made of the concept of human rights.

It is a great honour to have been invited to present this year's Erasmus Lecture to the distinguished plenary audience of the Academia Europaea. To deliver a lecture connected with Erasmus, this eminent European humanist, imposes an obligation from which greater minds than myself would shrink in diffidence. On the other hand, exactly such a challenge may encourage one to address a topic grand enough to be really worthy of this illustrious scholar, who probably, more than anyone else in his time, was able to bridge the manifold chasms which are—since earliest times—both the strength and the predicament of not only the intellectual history of Europe:

The modified new growth theory yields the growth trajectories and gross fixed capital formations of the US, Germany, Japan, Korea and China analytically in closed form. Growth is driven by the gap in relevant knowledge compared with the state of the art. Excellent quantitative agreement is obtained with only two fundamental economic parameters: the ‘maximum sustainable growth rate’ 0.16 p.a. corresponds to the generation gap of 25 years. It is not by chance that it is equal to the physical lifetime of our capital stock. The ‘skill parameter’ measures the overall ability of a country to achieve optimal growth. For the first time there is a good explanation for the long postwar periods of nearly linear growth as well as for the dynamic structural unemployment of Germany, and a fairly reliable prediction of the world's changing resource balance which might result from the development of China. Adam Smith's 1776 prediction is verified, that there can be no sustainable solution to the employment problem within the paradigm of the industrial society. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language has been assumed to be housed in two small areas in the language-dominant hemisphere. However, because words can refer to actions and objects usually perceived through all modalities, it seemed possible that additional cortical areas may contribute to word processing. Recent investigations of brain activity during word processing indicate that areas outside the language regions do indeed participate in the processing of words. Individual words appear to be organized in the cortex as distributed cell assemblies that comprise neurons in both hemispheres, in the language areas and outside. The areas outside may reflect semantic word properties.

For almost 600 years Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, even before the region fell victim to nationalism, the Ottoman Empire did not live in an atmosphere of pure and undisturbed harmony. But Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together for centuries without experiencing conflict as the predominant factor of their existence. The status and fate of the individual religious groups living in the Ottoman Empire has been the object of nationalistic interpretation of the past. Much less has been thought and written about the functioning of such a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. This paper will try to rectify that. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This essay will be divided into four parts. In the first part I shall report on the somewhat problematic prospects facing the new science graduate today when meeting the job market for the first time. In the second part I shall try to relate this situation to what could be called ‘the changing ecology of science’ in the post cold-war period. But impressions must be based on facts, and in the third part I shall review some facts and problems in todays research training. Finally, I shall offer some speculations on the future of career prospects in science. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The historiography of Islam is complex and the relationship between doctrine and behaviour is largely governed by this complexity. This is discussed in relation to some of the geographical variants in Islamic activity. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the United Kingdom, support from private charities for medical research has become of increased importance as state funding has been subjected to tight control. The article outlines the changes and the current pattern of private medical charities. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We are currently in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of human disease. The greater understanding that has been achieved of many inherited diseases is giving insights into many more common conditions not previously regarded as ‘inherited’. An individual can be identified from a DNA fingerprint obtained from the analysis of a very small DNA sample in a hair root, mouth wash or a blood spot. By the turn of the century, we will know the sequences of most, if not all, human genes. We will have the ‘recipe’ of human life. We may not be able to develop treatments for some years, but we will have the tools for identifying those predisposed to disease. Although the use of genetic tests raises many social, ethical, legal and economic issues, this potential is already with us and we cannot ignore it. Society should already openly be debating the implications of genetic knowledge so that the enormous benefits to human health can be gained without too many suffering from misuse of the technology.

Language is not only the servant of the law but also its master. Language constitutes a pattern of recognition that sets the frame for legal discussions. It is normally not as precise as we are made to believe. From language to writing again changes the pattern of recognition. Writing is a time machine, it is characterized by inertia, and rigidity. It pretends to offer a context free language, and thus tends to give abstract rules a superior meaning. We have to be aware of this when interpreting written texts which should not be taken more seriously than oral words. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The European Community Treaty ascribes a precise role in the promotion of research to the Commission. The contribution of EC-sponsored research to industrial competitiveness, socio-economic development and scientific knowledge is discussed on the basis of recent experience and with reference to new goals. In this framework, problems of scientific and administrative management and the relations of the European Community with other European and national research systems are examined. An increasing role is suggested for EC research as an early warning system about emerging problems, based on the scientific assessment of weak signals. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This essay examines the spectacles of the Roman amphitheatre—gladiatorial combat, displays involving animals, and the execution of criminals—as an example of orchestrated violence integral to the functioning of society, and tries to account for their spectator-appeal. The evidence of literary, epigraphic, and artistic sources from the Roman Empire suggests a range of important factors: the ubiquity of violent crime in Antiquity, and of its corollary, public punishment; the social status of gladiators and the expertise required of them; the view of Nature as a spectacle provided for mankind; the loss of inhibition among spectators through crowd-identity and emotional stimuli; the provision of spectacles as a function of patronage; the role of spectacle in the Roman economy; and the ‘imperial imperative’ whereby the dominant power has to assert its physical and moral superiority in order to sustain its ideology and control its subject peoples. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The assumption is that a nation is a people, a group of people, or a historic concentration of people, giving a political system acceptable to the whole, that is to say, grosso modo, democratic. It is shown that this process is analogous, although greatly contrasted in detail, between Africa and Europe. The differences lie in three contrasting times of evolution which accentuate the risk of crises from contradictory sources: the building of a state, the life of ethnic groups and national ideologies. These three aspects are analysed and placed in the context of historical evolution within different areas and recent writings on this subject.

We are living in a period of great changes in public attitudes, particularly in Eastern Europe. These changes affect our mental attitudes, employment patterns and economic prospects. These and other aspects of modern life are reviewed. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Can governments trust the universities to be ‘market responsive’? What changes in the relationship between government and higher education are emerging in Europe? In what way do they differ from the assumptions which until recently underpinned similar policy in Britain? Different political values lead to different arrangements. This article examines some of the contemporary issues posed by strengthening of mechanisms of accountability and the implications their reinforcement has for participation in institutional decision making. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

At present, industry seems to expect much less from science in general and from its academic home base in particular than during the times of technology push, where industry itself was a major source of science. The volume of science for science sake has, in many fields, grown beyond its perceived utility. The reasons for this change are discussed in their historical context in order to derive ideas for improvements. Yet it is by no means certain, that the good old times of technology push will come back. The demand for existing technology in Asia is much larger than the demand for new technology in the saturated G7 countries. New technology has a comparatively small market, unless it is less expensive and less risky than existing technology. Industry must expect therefore that science listens to non-scientific input already in the planning phase. Funding authorities appreciate this. Creative scientists, who apparently had the freedom to do research for its own sake, were often the most successful innovators of the industrial society. They won their support. This is still the model for funding research and excellence in any field. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The study of the distribution of matter in the Universe is at the forefront of modern astronomy, and stimulates numerous research programmes both in theory, observation and experiment. The distribution of galaxies has a cell-like structure resulting from the alternation of sheets and voids with the topological properties of a ‘sponge’. The large diameter of the voids (150 million light-years) and the high degree of isotropy of the microwave background radiation define the reference frame for the theoretical models for the formation of the large-scale structure. The essential ingredients of these models are: the clustering of matter under the gravitational attraction, the initial matter fluctuations which left their imprint into the cosmic microwave background radiation and a large amount of dark matter filling the voids and walls of galaxies. Measurement of the statistical properties of the large-scale structure, and determination of the scale at which it becomes homogeneous provide direct tests of the Big Bang model. Major advances are expected by the end of the century from the largest telescopes and their sophisticated instruments. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Today it is fashionable to see things in a ‘global context’ and to refer local events to all kinds of ‘globalization processes’. Some even argue that we all live in the ‘global village’. This paper argues that we do not and that the concept of globalization is often used in inappropriate ways. The so called ‘globalization process’ is strongly geographically limited and large parts of the world are not (yet) affected by it. Hence, the world is not (yet) becoming economically or culturally homogenized and that which is often labelled ‘global’ is, in fact, a sign of various internationalization and/or regionalization processes.