The history of mnemonic concepts encompasses utopian and sceptical views that produce either a hypertrophic memory or denounce any representation as false. Each literary text incorporates or stores other texts, thus mnemonic space unfolds between and within texts. In storing and accumulating cultural data, the literary text in its intertextual dimension functions as part of cultural memory. A fantastic text points to a silenced repressed memory, confronting culture with its oblivion. Yet the fantastic in restoring the displaced and vanished parts of culture is not merely a mnemonic memory: its speculative potential strives for arbitrary creations that erase the accepted mnemonic imagery.

France, Belgium and the Netherlands faced the same fundamental challenge in 1945. In spite of differences in institutional setting, chronology or demography, their experience of Nazi occupation had been traumatizing and humiliating. Their national reconstruction required a self-confident image of the recent past. Nonetheless, the contours of the policies of memory pursued in the three countries diverged in a striking measure. In the Netherlands, post-war governments deliberately constructed a forced national consensus around the myth of a unanimous resistance, at the expense of veterans’ movements and all forms of associative memory. However, the latter dominated the commemorations in France and Belgium, continuing a post-1918 tradition. The conflicts between different categories of war veterans and victims and between different political families characterized the conflicting memories in these two countries. Rather than a monolithic resistance myth, different memories of Nazi persecution were rivals for public attention. In France, neither de Gaulle nor the Communist party succeeded in monopolizing the heroic legacy of the resistance. In Belgium, the Royal question, the left–right divide and subsequently the regional tensions between French and Dutch speakers, estranged part of opinion from the memory of the resistance and even ended up favouring, in some quarters, the rehabilitation of collaboration with the Nazi occupier.

Starting from the premise that human knowledge develops in terms of paradigm shifts, the article draws attention to the problems caused by the demise of transcendent knowledge after the Newtonian paradigm shift. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ensuing ideology of endless progress, unfettered by emotional, affective and imaginative knowledge, brought about a split of cognitive cohesion observable in the increase of mental diseases and the birth of psychoanalysis. The trauma paradigm thus initiated an ‘ethical turn’ in the 1990s heralding a wider scientific and academic shift towards the recuperation of holistic knowledge.

This article empirically examines the relationship between alternative measures of financial development and the unemployment rate in a selected group of ten EU countries. Using annual data for the sample period of 1991–2012, we first perform different panel regressions (using averaged and non-averaged versions of data) for unemployment rate. These panel regressions are based on a regression equation that includes inflation rate and growth rate of GDP, in addition to the level of financial development, as explanatory variables. Secondly, we apply Granger causality tests to investigate the nature of the causality between financial development and the unemployment rate for each country in our sample. The empirical findings suggest that unemployment rate and financial development are negatively correlated, and there is a statistically significant causal effect of financial development on unemployment in certain countries. However, the results are not robust to the choice of proxy measure for financial development.

Looking at the Spanish impact on Nahuatl both in its full historical trajectory and modern synchronic dimension, I focus on the differentiation between ‘balanced’, long-term language contact and ‘unbalanced’ contact leading to rapid language shift in contemporary indigenous communities. I discuss the connection between accelerated contact-induced language change and language endangerment and shift, highlighting and assessing the mutually interdependent extra- and inter-linguistic variables that influence and shape both processes. Of special importance is the synchronic variation linked to speakers’ proficiency that influences language transmission in the diachronic perspective. On the basis of extensive fieldwork and linguistic documentation I identify several types of Nahuatl speakers as agents of this accelerated language change which leads to individual attrition and shift at the community level. This kind of multidisciplinary approach, taking into account both historical and modern data, can also potentially be useful for other minority languages in the scenario of long-term contact with a dominant language.

The concept of transdisciplinarity has found a foothold in science. It is increasingly taking the place of the concept of interdisciplinarity and is making the concept of disciplinarity look pale. However, the concept of transdisciplinarity is not self-explanatory – as it is often understood – and the concept of disciplinarity is not at all outdated – as it seems. This becomes clear in the conceptual analysis of the concepts of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.

The large number of discoveries in the last few decades has caused a scientific crisis that is characterised by overspecialisation and compartmentalisation. To deal with this crisis, scientists look for integrating approaches, such as general laws and unifying theories. Representing what can be considered a general form law, the operator hierarchy is used here as a bridge between existing integrating approaches, including: a cosmic timeline, hierarchy and ontology, a periodic table of periodic tables, the unification of evolutionary processes, a general evolution concept, and general aspects of thermodynamics. At the end of the paper an inventory of unifying concepts is presented in the form of a cross table. The study ends with a discussion of major integrating principles in science.

During the second half of the 19th century, the psychology of language was invented as a discipline for the sole purpose of explaining the evolution of spoken language. These efforts culminated in Wilhelm Wundt's monumental Die Sprache of 1900, which outlined the psychological mechanisms involved in producing utterances and considered how these mechanisms could have evolved. Wundt assumes that articulatory movements were originally rather arbitrary concomitants of larger, meaningful expressive bodily gestures. The sounds such articulations happened to produce slowly acquired the meaning of the gesture as a whole, ultimately making the gesture superfluous. Over a century later, gestural theories of language origins still abound. I argue that such theories are unlikely and wasteful, given the biological, neurological and genetic evidence.

This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories, of which the first was quantum electrodynamics, describing the interactions of electrons with light. This was later incorporated into the electroweak theory, describing electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions. The standard model also includes quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. The final capstone of the model was the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 at CERN. But the model is very far from being the last word; there are still many gaps in our understanding.

Interdisciplinarity has entered the agenda of researchers, teachers and policy makers and will remain there in the future. This does not mean that interdisciplinarity is understood the same way, let alone is appreciated everywhere. Researchers are challenged by increasingly complex problems in culture, nature and society beyond disciplinary boundaries; higher education has to cater to a volatile job market where known disciplines no longer define their own niches in terms of topics or practices for their candidates; and decision makers are confronted with challenges that do not respect ideologies of political parties and reports based on mainstream knowledge. In this context, interdisciplinarity is an ongoing re-consideration of the creation, the communication and the application of knowledge uniting the perspectives of research, teaching and decision making. While most discussions on interdisciplinarity focus on its theoretical and methodological complexity in an exclusively contemporary perspective, this article will discuss interdisciplinarity in a historical perspective as central to European history of knowledge as well as in an intercultural perspective.*

Research is considered as a major component of innovation and a key to the development of modern societies. However, fundamental research, which essentially aims at improving our understanding of Nature, is often questioned about its specific role. In this paper, arguments of ‘general interests’ in support of fundamental research are presented to contribute to the science-policy debate. Beyond a notable return on investment, now acknowledged by most economists, a number of positive societal impacts of fundamental research can be underlined. Fundamental research helps society as a whole, as well as individual firms, to keep options, possible scenarios and choices open (e.g. in relation with sustainable development), to maintain a good capability for top-level scientific expertise, to develop conditions favourable to scientific and technological breakthroughs, to ensure training at the highest possible level and also to guarantee access to, and free circulation of, the most valuable information. Finally, fundamental research may contribute to a better structural link between science and society.

This article reviews the changes in historical writing about slavery and the slave trade over the last 50 years.

Most empirical studies of social stratification and inequality remain confined to the micrological level, while their very aim is to construct and to test macrological statements. The first part of this paper discusses the main hypotheses that are implicit in this research tradition and that do not allow the transition from micro to macro. Based on recent findings in this field, the second part outlines a macrosociological theory of stratification, which allows the possibility of deducing micro as well as macro propositions that remain unexplainable by micrological theories.

This essay considers reactions to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in particular the ways in which the founders of English Methodism, John and Charles Wesley used the event in their sermons and hymns respectively. The Wesleys focused on the vengeful power of the divine in order to urge people to look into their hearts and change their ways to avoid damnation. In contrast, the reaction to the global natural disasters of 2005 has been quite different. The Archbishop of Canterbury's essay that emphasises the privacy of faith that exists because it is engaged in a struggle against doubt is compared with the Wesleyan response, and through these very different religious positions the contrast between eighteenth century and twenty-first century reactions to natural disasters is highlighted.

Although part of a wider cultural and political phenomenon in world democracies, the revival movement on memory from traumatic past events has in the case of Spain strong contextual bearings. Drawing on the concept of ‘regimes of memory’, this article discusses two successive patterns of supply and demand of discourse and policies on memory from the end of the 1936–1939 Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Describing the rhetoric of ‘total victory’ under Franco's dictatorship, and later of ‘collective and shared guilt’ under democracy, it outlines a dialectics between hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on collective trauma that helps explain the rise and decline of regimes of memory in general, as well as the current orientation of public debates in Spain towards a new regime of memory based on a claim for ‘instituted remembrance’ of the traumatic past.

This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature. Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the different valences of this shift, and the tensions and contradictions it has generated within the wider anglophone literary field.

One of the most important problems facing Greece is the long-term and high-level unemployment rate. The Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAPs) focused on the supply side of the economy, aiming at the adjustment of prices and wages, draw on the classical economic model, as it is widely accepted that internal devaluation policies keep inflation low. This article attempts to examine whether the Keynesian theory and the Phillips Curve, which shows the relationship between unemployment and inflation, apply in the case of the Greek economy. We use descriptive statistics, ordinary least squares (OLS) and VAR Analysis to examine the relationship between the variables. According to the results, there is a negative correlation between unemployment and inflation in Greece, thus confirming the Phillips Curve hypothesis. Finally, results show that unemployment is less dependent on inflation compared with the past, and there are numerous other decisive factors affecting unemployment.

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.

Through a panel analysis conducted in Bavaria, which covers two adjacent elections – the federal elections and the European elections in 2013 and 2014 – we examine the attitudinal factors that drive citizens’ propensity to turn out. We find that abstainers have generally low levels of knowledge, interest and sense of civic duty. National-level voters have relatively high interest, knowledge and sense of duty in national politics, but not in European affairs. In contrast, European- and national-level voters have high interest, knowledge and a sense of duty for both national and European politics. This finding contextualizes the characterization of European elections as second-order national elections. While prior research has established that voters make their vote choice based on national-level politics, we demonstrate that European elections are not national elections when it comes to citizens’ decision to vote. Rather, knowledge, interest and a sense of duty about national politics are not sufficient conditions for somebody to vote in the European elections. The person needs to have the same positive attitudes about European affairs as they have about national politics to participate in European elections.