Whether there is or has ever been such a thing as a European identity of some real substance and what changes that identity, if found to exist, has undergone in the course of history; at what time and why it was lost, if it no longer exists, and why it cannot be said ever to have existed at all, are questions which are among the favourite subjects of a certain kind of after-dinner speech and the welcoming or concluding addresses at academic – and indeed, of late, also political – gatherings. The fact that these questions are thus frequently dealt with in a branch of oral literature that is not above suspicion does not mean that they are devoid of importance or should be avoided in serious contexts. It seems clear, on the other hand, that they can be treated with intellectual honesty only if formulated in such a way that the answers can be determined, in the first place, by a clear choice of criteria for establishing identity and difference, but also by an equally explicit and clear choice of the geographical and chronological perspectives in which the application of these criteria is to take place.

It is obvious that the broader the chosen historical perspective, the narrower in range are those elements of European life and history that can be said to have retained a minimum of identity over time. If you adopt a truly multi-secular perspective, one which still has room for what a French thinker has aptly called les grands récits, ‘the great tales’, the myths of peoples and tribes engaged in founding, migration, conquest and defeat, it must be admitted that a very modest identifiable identity remains. Likewise, the observer who insists on referring to the whole area, which is today called Europe, and also on contemporaneousness, is likely to find a meagre catch in his nets, were it only because time and change travel – or at least, travelled, in a not too distant past – at very different speeds over that vast area.

The health status of populations of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union underwent major changes after the fall of communism. While mortality started declining in Central Europe, mortality in Russia and most other countries of the former Soviet Union rose dramatically and has yet to improve. In terms of the socioeconomic changes, some countries (mainly Central Europe) were able to contain the fall in income and rise in income inequalities, but across the former Soviet Union gross domestic product plummeted and income inequality grew rapidly. This led to two types of inequality: first, the widening gap in mortality between countries, and second, the increasing social gradient in health and disease within countries. The thrust of our argument is that the disadvantages in health in Eastern Europe, and the growing social inequalities in health in the region, are direct results of the social changes, and that psychosocial factors played a pivotal role in the health pattern seen in Central and Eastern Europe.

Cities, and especially capital cities, have always offered a stage for political ceremonies, festivals, processions, triumphs and struggles. The built mass in the centre, the axial streets and the accesses of capital cities consisting for a considerable part of public buildings and open spaces which have practical and symbolic functions for the state. By their shape, location and decoration, the buildings express the vision of political power as the rulers wanted it to be disseminated. This paper focuses on the changes introduced in existing cityscapes by rulers representing new ideologies, especially in Istanbul, Moscow and Berlin.

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.

Fully adequate high-level cross-cultural communication is not feasible, whereas advanced high-level cross-cultural communication is both possible and necessary. In this spirit, four important areas relating to literature, language, research, and religion are discussed. To the extent that cross-cultural communication does not work satisfactorily, as with respect to EU languages and large-scale religious relations, we are dealing with an ignited cultural fuse.

‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘postcolonial’ are fashionable terms in literary studies these days. Henk Wesseling, in his ‘Editorial’ in the European Review (12(3): 267–271, 2004), with regard to another fashionable term, ‘empire,’ warned that the same word may mean different things to different people. So too it is with ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’.

To begin with, there is the matter of orthography. I have used unhyphenated ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism.’ In fact, the hyphenated forms are the older and more conventional. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin use them in their 1989 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, still a landmark publication in the field, as does John Thieme in his 1996 Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Both restrict the use of ‘post-colonial’ to ‘writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain’ (Ref. 1, p. 1) and ‘the anglophone literatures of countries other than Britain and the United States’ (Ref. 2, p. 1). Both spurn chronology, reaching back to the 19th and early 20th centuries for examples of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Ashcroft et al. and Thieme thoroughly differ, though, as to the term's precise charge. Ashcroft et al. see ‘post-colonialism’ as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,’ and this because they find there to be ‘a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’ (Ref. 1, p. 2). Thieme finds this use of the term problematic, because of its association with ‘writing and other forms of cultural production which display an oppositional attitude towards colonialism, which are to a greater or lesser degree anti-colonial in orientation’ (Ref. 2, p. 1-2).

Crime fiction is currently one of the most globalized, most popular, and biggest-selling of commercial genres, but there has been almost no attempt to study it in relation to other kinds of post-colonial literature. There is no bibliography of crime writers as ‘post-colonial’, and no attempt to generalize about a body of fiction. This paper is a brief extract from work in progress, based on the books of over fifty Anglophone or Francophone authors who might be categorized as ‘post-colonial’ by birth or residence. I test post-colonial theory against crime fiction, to argue that strong generic conventions call into question some of that theory's received ideas. I consider two linked problems: first, so-called ‘colonial mimicry’ and its obverse, ‘ventriloquism’, because it seems to me a wrong turning in 20th-century criticism; and, second, the demand for new literatures which would create ‘national identities’. I argue that ‘mimicry’ makes no sense in the context of a strong popular genre, and that accusations of ‘colonial mimicry’ reinscribe the asymmetries of judgement they appear to attack. The possibility of imagined geopolitical units as identity-forming, especially in genres which are informed by social criticism, calls into question the demand for literature as a source of national identity.

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the meeting between Prospero and Caliban is an allegory of a Renaissance colonial encounter. Although Prospero emphasizes his gift of language to Caliban, he deems him incapable of ‘nurture’ (cultural progress). After the Second World War, the Barbadian novelist Georges Lamming saw in that gift the possibility of a ‘new departure’, which in the following decades was to modify not only Caliban's prospects but most emphatically the European, and specifically, the British cultural scene. I intend to illustrate this transformation through the contribution of postcolonial writers to the metamorphosis of the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel. The changes are formal, linguistic but also evince a metaphysical cross-culturalism best exemplified, among others, in the fiction of the Guyanese-born, British novelist Wilson Harris.

The Postcolonial representation of European culture can alter our (European) perspectives on Western arts. The case of the novel An Equal Music by the Indian writer Vikram Seth is particularly interesting. Although set in Europe (between London, Vienna and Venice) and dealing with European characters, situations, landscapes, and cultural myths, the book offers a peculiarly Postcolonial reading of our classical music. Therefore, by applying Said's contrapuntal analysis to Postcolonial writing, I deal with ‘What the Postcolonial means for us’, taking into account, besides European Literature and Postcolonialism, also the relationship between European music and the Postcolonial sensibility, using Said's and Kundera's essays as keys to Seth's musical and fictional world.

The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the question of the phenomenology of travel in terms of textual authority. Authority, in the perception in late colonial European writing, was often simultaneously questioned and affirmed, meaning that Western art, and the modern society, were seen as lacking something significant outside of its margin. At the same time, the idea of the pure exotic emerged as incompatible with modern historical consciousness, and colonial texts anticipate many later theoretical ideas in postcolonial studies. The question is how to portray cross-cultural encounters, and how to fashion the self in the contact zone of travel and sojourn. Modernist travel writing asks what was the writer's self and the recognition of identity and difference in others. The modernist image of Africa carries important implications for the re-evaluation of art and literature and the renewal of artistic or narrative forms.

I discuss the Dutch maritime and colonial empire in South East Asia (1600–1950) and its literature. Focusing in particular on its absence from most postcolonial debate today, my aim here is to explore why and how this missing Dutch empire and its literature matter to postcolonial theory. I will consider a range of recent reactions to the 19th-century Dutch author Multatuli and his classic novel Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860). The Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, for example, has expressed the view that it was this novel that ‘put an end to colonialism”. I will also try and assess the continuing relevance of Multatuli's Max Havelaar, considering in particular the issues of justice and humanity raised by this novel about the human cost of coffee production.

Postcolonialism is briefly presented as an academic approach in contemporary literary studies, with two opposite currents as far as the study of Latin American literature is concerned. The first constructs the relationship between Latin American and European literature as oppositional, whereas the second focuses in a more harmonious way on their interrelationship. It is argued that both currents cluster around a divergent reading of the ‘cannibal’ metaphor. The article then centres on the position of the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who covers both postcolonial tendencies. This is shown by focusing upon a specific case, his early novella Aura. Attention is paid to the tension between Europe and Latin America, both on a literary level (intertextuality) and on a historical level (colonization and nation-building).

By focusing almost exclusively on the circumstances of British colonialism, postcolonial theory has failed to take into consideration other histories of colonization and other forms of postcoloniality. By considering a few elements from the history of Portuguese colonialism and a few lusophone texts, it is my hope to demonstrate what I consider to be a limited perspective on postcolonial studies, at the same time that one may also ponder the fact that so much in postcolonial literature depends precisely on acts of remembrance. Ruins, all sorts of ruins, form a privileged space for the construction of postcolonial memories and in this essay I will focus especially on one kind, the shipwreck, as a special figure for varied postcolonial memories. In the process, I hope to also make a case for the reconsideration of European literature, via the example of Portuguese literature, from a postcolonial point of view. Germano Almeida's novel, O Testamento do Senhor Napumoceno (1991) and its film version, de-emphasize cultural hegemony and the dichotomy between colony and metropolis. The legacy of Portuguese tradition remains complex.