Classical compositions, such as those of Claude Lorrain (1600–1680), show balanced situations where the depicted objects seem to represent beauty – they appear to exist in an ideal order; they seem right, once and for all. They allow their viewers, who live in a contingent world, believe that unity and beauty are attainable. English landscape gardens in the eighteenth century offered viewers the experience of moving in real settings that seem to reproduce the canvasses of classical landscape painting. Contemporary visitors know this is an imitation; they appreciate that this is not everyday reality but a kind of realized utopia. Artworks such as the early ones by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) and those from the nineteenth century onwards (Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet), make us understand that a final rightness is not possible; that it is only possible to try again and again to attain the real – without ever arriving at the one right solution. In their endeavour to depict reality, these artists engage in a serial elaboration of the same subjects and objects of their art. These series of nearly the same subjects invoke the impossibility of getting it right once and for all. Piet Mondrian illustrates the development from seriality, as repeated attempts to depict the same with a difference, to the practice of seriality as an experiment in symmetry and balance that both goes back to Claude Lorrain and modernizes the concept of the ideal for application to abstract art. In contemporary art after the Second World War serial structures in single artworks were common, thus superseding compositions with their discredited promise of ideality. Series occurred not only in the contemporary visual arts, but also in literature, music and in the theatre. The repetitive structures of Minimal Art offer to the beholder the possibility of experiencing ‘reality’ in an age of media and fakes. My example will be the repetitive structures of Christian Boltanskiʼs oeuvre which provides an opportunity to reflect on the similarity and difference of people in contemporary democracies. My main argument is therefore that the change from composition to seriality corresponds to historical change.

The Covid-19 pandemic reminds people of the 1918 influenza pandemic which lasted for two years and which is estimated to have taken between 17 million to 50 million lives. The current Covid-19 pandemic, a force majeure, causing tension between states and the distancing of people physically, is steering the world into an unknown future. This article attempts to delineate the biopolitical practices in Beijing, from spring to summer, in the dimensions of the disciplinary supervision of government work, the allocation of medical resources, and the implementation of social control. Therein lies the mingling of sovereign power and biopower, conceptualized as a mutated pattern of ‘governmentality’. The public obedience to strict social control, an expression of the ‘general will’, originates from the conception of nationalism, underpinning the official narrative of ‘China’s experience’. Finally, a new pattern to handle the second outbreak, which started at Xinfadi market, has shed a new light on the thinking about ‘China’s path’.

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

The kings’ travel patterns in thirteenth-century Norway raise the question of the relationship between geographic and social mobility. A clearer social hierarchy would reduce the king’s need for travelling and the introduction of permanent and professional administrators would mean that these people would visit the king rather than vice versa. Moreover, the king did not travel exclusively for political reasons, but also for hunting and other entertainments and on pilgrimages. The changes in this field form a significant part of the development of European monarchy.

With a special focus on the Republic of Serbia, this article will examine the macroeconomic performance of the external macroeconomic sector and its impact on the economic progress of developing countries. Our aim is to prove that economic development and the growth of the external macroeconomic sector are correlated. We will do so by analysing how macroeconomic parameters are conditioned. By analysing the macroeconomic and primarily dynamic indicators of countries in transition, including Serbia, it is possible to determine the situation and changes as well as potential causes of economic development. A macroeconomic analysis of developing countries can also determine the characteristics of economic development and mutual relations between macroeconomic indicators.

In the pre-globalization era, when communication between nations was difficult and infrequent, and direct (experiential) or indirect (textual-descriptive) knowledge was scant, images of ‘foreign countries’ were frequently constructions based on inadequate information. As a result, fictional descriptions and images were the primary source for people to gain some knowledge of other nations. However, beginning with the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we began to step into an age of globalization, which generated the diversification of ‘source texts’ in this regard. Today, the emergence of new media has accelerated and proliferated such diversity. These new media texts now play a dominant role in forming the image of other countries, to some degree replacing traditional fictional texts. The basic presuppositions of comparative literature imagology have changed accordingly. Starting from the core concept of ‘images’, this paper discusses why it is necessary to integrate imagology, with ‘semiotic images’ as core concept, and ‘communications research’.

Although the European Union (EU) has a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the policy stance of the Member States towards the Syrian crisis caused some problems in the implementation of the CEAS. Within this context, Turkey has turned into the most important partner of the EU due to the fact that it prevents the entrance of the asylum-seekers into the territory of the Member States. Therefore, the Syrian issue has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and the EU. This article examines the Europeanization process of Turkey’s asylum policy as well as the development of the CEAS and its implementation with respect to Syrian refugees within the EU.

This paper addresses the theme of mobility in the context of late medieval political thought, more specifically, the rhetoric of royal charters issued in England and the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth century.

Public works began, at least in the Spanish Empire, after the failure of Christopher Columbus’s governance in the Antilles. The foundation of cities in the Americas was a colonization strategy. Urban republics formed a network to support the kingdoms of the Indies for more than three centuries. Far beyond traditional and nationalistic explanations, it was precisely the ability to establish bridges – social, as well as material – that explains the resilience and durability of this network until 1825.

In this article I discuss intercontinental migration during the early modern period. The discovery of the New World sparked a large-scale movement lasting more than four centuries. Before 1800, only 2 to 3 million Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to move to the New World. Colonial powers, therefore, turned to Africa and transported about 11.5 million slaves to America. After 1850 and the gradual abolition of slavery, the migration of Europeans increased dramatically, but these migrants avoided the former slave regions. Some areas therefore resorted to the importation of Asian indentured labourers, mainly from British India.

The global refugee crisis has reignited long-standing debates about how to successfully integrate religious minorities into liberal democratic societies. In the United States, security fears, particularly connected with terrorism, are preponderant. In Western Europe cultural fears seem to dominate, with many misunderstanding Islam as a direct threat to the norms and values that bind their societies together.

Will Kymlicka’s liberal theory of justice and of minority rights provides a useful explanation of why the rights of national cultural minorities are worthy of being protected. Kymlicka argues in particular that minorities’ exploitation of their own cultures (read: languages) supplies them with the possibility to make some meaningful (life) choices. It follows, then, that deprivation of such exploitation constitutes a deprivation of individuals’ liberty. Kymlicka’s liberal theory of justice and of minority rights, however, is deficient in the two major respects. In the first respect, it is plagued by ambiguities as regards Kymlicka’s theoretical treatment of justice as a factor that helps to account for the change of states’ policies towards national cultural minorities. In the second respect, it accords remarkably little room, at the end of the day, to the possibility of there being legitimate concerns shareable by majorities rather than minorities regarding minority rights claims in ethnic politics. It follows, then, that re-thinking of received insights is called for.