Predictions of the legacies of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals reflect far greater expectations for the impact of justice than earlier historical war crimes prosecutions. The most ambitious of these is the promise of peace and reconciliation. Its formal inclusion in the Security Council's mandate for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda converged with a modern discourse on war crimes prosecutions that infuses the ideals of Nuremberg with the revolutionary aspirations of the human rights movement in a new world order. Contemporary trends invest international justice with powerful assumptions about its capacity to transform post-conflict societies, as is reflected in the Tribunal's own presentation of its role for the future of Rwanda. Alongside the general assumptions regarding the political powers of international justice, are contesting perspectives that make specific allegations of the effects of its failings. Neither rigorously address causality, highlighting the absence of empirical research on international prosecutions and their impact on national communities. It is argued that ambitious expectations have generated ambiguous-and unrealistic- benchmarks for effectively assessing the record of a nascent international justice system. Viable benchmarks are necessary to ground external expectations, and to strengthen and focus institutional performance. To achieve this, expectations should adjust to the modest realities of delivering international justice.

Coubertin's contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games and the widespread opinion that the modern Games were ‘a French invention’ should be placed in their broad historical context. There are several arguments for and against the assumption that he was the founder, or ‘father’, of the modern Olympics and the Olympic movement. The historical development of the Olympic ideas since the time of Humanism will be discussed, along with the Renaissance and the various attempts to organize Olympic Games before 1896, with a further emphasis on the importance of Neo-Humanism and classical scholarship in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, in order better to understand ancient Greek athletics. Finally Pierre de Coubertin's concept of the Olympic Games and the contributions of the young Greek nation for the rebirth of the famous ancient games after the War of Independence will be analysed.

The Jews of Spain in the Middle Ages played an important role in the transmission of Graeco-Arabic learning by translating, or participating in translations, of scientific texts. They also composed original works on mathematics, astronomy, astrology and medicine in which they adapted the theories of the ancients for their own time. Science was used by the ruling powers as an element of prestige, and by the Jewish scientists as a way to obtain a high social status. The policy of cultural sponsorship of Muslim caliphs, as well as of Christian kings, was fundamental in the process of transmission of the Greek sciences to the Western world. The School of Translators of Toledo is an example of this process. The astronomical theories developed by Jewish scientists at the end of the 15th century played an important role in the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries of the 16th century. Their knowledge of astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and medicine was also used by the Jewish intellectuals to provide a rational and scientific support for the Jewish religion and tradition, as is reflected in the interpretations of the Bible by medieval Spanish Jewish authors.

This essay provides a timely account of China’s recent initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), centring on the ‘16+1’ format. It discusses China’s motivation in this part of Europe in relation to its ‘Go Global’ policy and, more recently and relevantly, the ‘One Road, One Belt’ initiative. It argues that China has made big efforts to strengthen its presence in CEE through state-driven commercialism. While there have been some meaningful outcomes, particularly in building institutional ties, China’s ambition in the CEE region faces some practical and deep-rooted obstacles. Put succinctly, there is still a long way to go before China becomes a mature global power.

Research about interdisciplinary research is less and less done by those doing it. This paper tries to reflect upon my own interdisciplinary practices and experiences. In the first part, I present an example of successful interdisciplinary research. Then, I attempt to introduce two nested cases of interdisciplinary scholarship and their development, one being my ‘Fakultät’ (which roughly equals a department) and the other, smaller one, being my research group. In the third part, I attempt to offer explanations for the development described with reference to some of the burgeoning literature on interdisciplinarity. Incentive structures, epistemological challenges such as disciplinary capture and structural effects of the hosting university are discussed. In a final section, othering as an inevitable process is used to elucidate the dynamics of developments within and beyond academia and to draw conclusions about the two cases presented.

This Introduction was written in November 2002, when the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was being held where more than 2000 delegates (representing 66 million Party members) decided on future policies and changes in the leadership. The way these decisions were prepared and endorsed reminds us how China differs from Western democracies. However, apart from the political structures, to what extent is China different?

The following five essays, all written by Chinese scholars, allow us a glimpse into contemporary Chinese culture through informative reports on philosophy, cultural studies, fiction, gender construction and women's poetry, and traditional Chinese medicine. Of course, these articles are far from covering all aspects, or even all major aspects, of Chinese culture, yet they offer us views of specific areas by experts who, from their insiders' vantage points, lead us into the heart of the intellectual debate in contemporary China.

Although the authors of these essays, with few exceptions, hesitate to generalize on present conditions and possible future scenarios, their arguments have something in common and suggest, perhaps unknowingly, important clues for understanding Chinese culture. When reading these essays, I am struck by the following, recurrent aspects.

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.

Almost ten years after the first production of cold antimatter at CERN, the confinement of antihydrogen has recently been achieved for the first time. Several experiments installed at the Antiproton Decelerator intend to test the symmetry between matter and antimatter by means of trapped anti-atoms. In addition, in the coming years it is planned to study the effect of gravity on antiparticles for the first time. Meanwhile, evidence from the Large Hadron Collider hinting at a violation of charge–parity symmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to be confirmed. A violation of the discrete symmetries that describe the relation between matter and antimatter could explain the excess of ordinary matter in the Universe.

Corruption is a phenomenon that affects societies. It lowers trust in public institutions, lowers trust among people, undermines economic development, undermines democracy, and has implications for political participation. This article contributes to current debates on the impact of corruption by looking at other possible consequences of corruption. Specifically, this article looks at the impact of the perception of corruption on the approval of public protest meetings and demonstrations because, if corruption leads to these non-institutionalized forms of political participation, this may lead to security problems or a direct outbreak of violence. This study analyses this relationship by using seven post-communist countries that have undergone specific developments in terms of corruption. These developments were largely due to large-scale privatizations, politicized state administration, and the linking of politicians to the private sector. This research was conducted with individual-level data. The module ‘The Role of Government V’ from the International Social Survey Programme was used. Descriptive charts have revealed that in six out of the seven countries, most respondents considered politicians to be very corrupt. Around 80% of respondents in all seven countries approve of the organization of public protest meetings. Around 70% of respondents in all seven countries approve of demonstrations. Regression analysis revealed that there is a relationship between the perception of corruption among politicians and the approval of protest activities. Specifically, the more politicians are corrupt, the more people approve of holding public protest meetings and demonstrations.

This article looks at the history of European culture from three angles, those of European uniqueness, European variety and European consciousness. The first section discusses the question of whether the fundamental unit of study, for cultural as well as economic historians, is not Eurasia. The second section is concerned with cultural divisions within Europe, with Europes in the plural. It asks whether it is more illuminating to distinguish two Europes (like Leopold von Ranke), or three (like Jenő Szűcs), or even five (like Hugo Hassinger), and examine both centripetal and centrifugal forces in early modern history. The final section deals with the history of the idea of Europe, or more exactly with the rise of consciousness of being European, as it is revealed in early modern histories, geographies, journals and newspapers.

Analysing the images of the self and the enemy of the two main kinds of political language in the post-communist countries of East Central European, this Hungarian case study shows the shift from personal liberty to social protection, from liberal democracy to a mixture of oligarchic and ochlocratic phenomena, from constitutional revolution to a search for forging collective identity, from individual universal human-rights discourse to collectivist, including ethnicist, public speech, and from establishing the constitutional bases of the new democratic political system to different political hysterias. Its ultimate question is how to surpass political hysteria through research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas.

In health care, a trend may be noted to fundamentally question some of today’s assumptions about the traditional roles of medical disciplines, the doctor–patient relationship, the feasibility of medical studies, and about the role of computers as an aid or replacement of doctors. Diagnostics and therapy decision-making become more complex, and no end is in sight. Amounts of health-related data are being collected individually, and through the health care systems. On the example of breast cancer care, technological advances and societal changes can be observed as they take place concurrently, and patterns and hypotheses emerge that will be the focus of this article. In particular, three key changes are to be considered: (1) the growing appreciation of the uniqueness of diseases and the impact of this notion on the future of evidence-based medicine; (2) the acknowledgment of a ‘big data’ problem in today’s medical practice and science, and the role of computers; and (3) the societal demand for ‘P4 medicine’ (predictive, preventive, participatory, personalized), and its impact on the roles of doctors and patients.

The point of departure for this article is the principle of the separation of powers, formulated long ago by the Frenchman Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu. It is argued that this principle is important for the governance of universities, entailing a balance between university boards, university presidents and university senates. To this end, the article presents evidence about the governance structure of two highly-ranked US universities, UC Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford University. It reports on board compositions, the selection of presidents and the role of academic senates. The conclusion is that the principle of the balance of powers (‘shared governance’ as it is called at UCB) has served the two universities well. Therefore, despite differences in other conditions, such as their endowments, other universities might benefit from the evidence reported.

Euroscepticism has become a stable component of the European Parliament. But is there one distinct Euroscepticism in the European Parliament or do various types exist there? Departing from the widely accepted definitions of hard and soft Euroscepticism, we analysed the behaviour of Eurosceptical groups in the European Parliament in order to assess how they differ. Using data from parliamentary questions, we argue that there are substantial differences between these two groups. This suggests that hard and soft Euroscepticisms do not represent different degrees of one phenomenon, but instead refer to two fundamentally different stances towards European integration.

Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only gradually on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well – again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multiword utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.

Symmetry is a relevant concept in sociological theories of exchange. It is rooted in the evolutionary old norm of social reciprocity and is particularly important in social contracts. Symmetry breaking through violation of the norm of reciprocity generates strain in micro-social systems and, above all, in victims of non-symmetric exchange. In this contribution, adverse healthconsequences of symmetry breaking in contractual social exchange are analysed, with a main focus on the employment contract. Scientific evidence is derived from prospective epidemiological studies testing the model of effort-reward imbalance at work. Overall, a twofold elevated risk of incident disease is observed in employed men and women who are exposed to non-symmetric exchange. Health risks include coronary heart disease, depression and alcohol dependence, among others. Preliminary results suggest similar effects on health produced by symmetry breaking in other types of social relationships (e.g. partnership, parental roles). These findings underline the importance of symmetry in contractual social exchange for health and well-being.

What happened 20 years ago in the region formerly ruled by a communist regime was a velvet revolution. And even if it was a revolution without bloodshed, it is a legitimate question to ask what was realized of the revolutionary motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? Liberty is a bundle of rights, composed of at least three sets: (1) political rights; (2) rights of free entrepreneurship, free entry to the market; and (3) freedom of choice between alternative goods and services. There is great progress in achieving all three categories of liberty. As for egalitarian values, inequality rapidly increased, causing aversion against the new order in a large fraction of society. Fraternité, in other words solidarity, is a widely accepted value, but there are great difficulties in its implementation. Post-socialist countries inherited a premature welfare state. The majority of people would prefer universal social entitlements, while the necessary material resources are not sufficient for these ambitious goals. This paper concludes with a discussion of various policy options for easing the contradictions between conflicting and inconsistent objectives.

The essay first describes the Chinese intellectual condition in the age of globalization and the necessity of liberal arts or humanities education, and then deals with the function of humanities education in China’s institutions of higher learning with Tsinghua University as the particular case. Since current Chinese universities are divided into three types: (1) research universities; (2) teaching-research universities; and (3) teaching-oriented universities, liberal arts education always plays an important part in students’ comprehensive schooling although in most of the research universities priority is given to science and technology. As China has a long tradition of humanities education, even long before the establishment of those Western type universities, offering humanities education to all the university students as a major educational task has never changed. Even during the Cultural Revolution when all the universities stopped teaching and research work, students and faculty members were still educated with Mao’s instructions. Along with the rapid development of Chinese economy, traditional humanities are suffering more or less. But the author argues that no matter how rapidly the Chinese economy has been developing and how well Chinese people are pursuing the so-called Chinese Dream, it is necessary to pay attention to the humanities and to offer humanities education to young students. The author also offers his reconstruction of Neo-Confucianism as an alternative discourse to various postmodern discourses in the new framework of global culture.

This article attempts to identify and document social mobility barriers for Roma. We have identified two types of social mobility barriers: the cost of exit from the traditional Roma community, and the cost of entry into the mainstream society. Most of the existing policy and academic debate on the social and economic marginalisation of Roma has focused almost entirely on entry barriers. The main contribution of the current paper to the existing literature is to draw attention to exit barriers, which usually are neglected in the public debate and the academic literature. In the current paper we show that understanding both types of social mobility barriers for Roma is crucial for designing effective policy measures.