On 1 May 2004, Europe changed. This date marks both a beginning and an end. The enlargement of the European Union signals the beginning of a new phase in the history of Western Europe, and, for the new members from Eastern Europe, the end of a long period of exclusion and separation. Commentaries on this epochal event usually focus on ‘hard’ institutional factors such as political rearrangements, legal coordination and economic readjustments, etc. I will focus more on the ‘soft’ cultural and human factors; what I consider to be the intangibles and imponderables of a new, emerging Europe. I am convinced that culture really matters in social life.

The persistently high popularity of migration marriages within large immigrant populations in Western Europe is an intriguing phenomenon. Why do so many young people born and raised in Western Europe opt for an unknown partner coming from a region that, although it is where their parents or grandparents came from, is by and large unknown to them personally? This contribution attempts to shed some light on the dynamics of this particular kind of migration which impacts significantly on the social fabric of Western European societies. Our focus here is specifically on the Belgian case, namely the so-called ‘Emirdag connection’. In Belgium, the majority of immigrants with a Turkish background come from the region of Emirdag, in the province of Afyon. Over the last 40 years a close relationship has been established between this region of emigration and a number of Turkish communities in Flanders and Brussels. Over the last decade chain migration became for most the most popular means to enter Belgium; in other words, the majority of newcomers arrived in Belgium as (future) spouses of Belgian residents. This certainly applies to Turkish migration. Particular to the Turkish residents in Belgium, including the second generation, is that the majority still marry a person who grew up in Turkey.

It is a recurrent theme in sociolinguistics that besides fully documenting endangered languages, it is important to ensure somehow that they will continue to be used. The basic trope is that of ‘language death’, analogous to the extinction of species. But the analogy fails: languages do not die, although their users may abandon them, usually in favour of a more widely spoken language. Nor does linguistic diversity increase cultural diversity — or the equal treatment of language groups mitigate inequality between and within groups. In addition, promoting minority, local and immigrant languages, which are all too often ill-equipped for modern life, actually strengthens the position of the dominant language as the only common language of communication: the more languages are spoken, the sooner English will take over. This process can be seen at work both in post-Apartheid South Africa and in the European Union as it undergoes enlargement.

‘How did life start on Earth?’ and ‘Why were left-handed amino acids selected for the architecture of proteins?’ A new attempt to answer these questions of high public and interdisciplinary scientific interest will be provided by this review. It will describe most recent experimental data on how the basic and molecular building blocks of life, amino acids, formed in a prebiotic setting. Most amino acids are chiral, that is that they cannot be superimposed with their mirror image molecules (enantiomers). In processes triggering the origin of life on Earth, the equal occurrence, i.e. the parity between left-handed amino acids and their right-handed mirror images, was violated. In the case of amino acids, the balance was tipped to the left – as a result of which life's proteins today exclusively implement the left-handed form of amino acids, called l-amino acid enantiomers. Neither plants, nor animals, including humans, make use of d-amino acids for the molecular architecture of their proteins (enzymes). This review addresses the molecular asymmetry of amino acids in living organisms, namely the preference for left-handedness. What was the cause for the violation of molecular parity of amino acids in the emergence of life on Earth? All the fascinating models proposed by physicists, chemists, and biologists will be vividly presented including the scientific conflicts. Special emphasis will be given to amino acid enantiomers that were subjected to chiral photons. The interaction between racemic molecules and chiral photons was shown to produce an enantiomeric enrichment that will be discussed in the context of absolute asymmetric synthesis. The concluding paragraphs will describe the attempt to verify any of those models with the chirality-module of the Rosetta mission. This European space mission contains probe Philae that was launched on board the Rosetta spacecraft with the aim of landing on the icy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and analysing whether chiral organic compounds are present that could have been brought to the Earth by comet impacts.

Scientific literacy should not be taken to mean the knowledge of a lot of science, but rather the understanding of how science really works.

This article critically addresses the varied ways in which political parties can be said to represent. Three important ideal-typical modes of party representation are outlined: the popular, the statal, and the reflexive. Arguments are offered for countering the common view that, for example, popular modes are the most democratic, and statal modes the least democratic. Statal modes in particular are often taken to be an indicator of a decline in parties’ representative functions; however, shifting modes of party representation often have more to do with strategic choices and contextual pressures than democratic ideals. No one ideal-typical mode is intrinsically more democratic than others. Further, there is evidence that a new mode of party representation, the reflexive, may be emerging; parties may be transforming into something they never were in order to continue to do the things they have always sought to do. Whether democracy is unthinkable save for political parties is no longer the question we need to ask. Rather, we need to ask: what kinds of representative democracy are thinkable? And what forms of party claims, if any, are appropriate to them?

The world within which the EU and China have to deal with each other is changing. The unipolar moment is definitely fading and slowly giving way to an international system characterized by multilayered and culturally diversified polarity. This development has far-reaching consequences for the EU–China relationship; the more so since the EU and China have distinctive identities and define their value preferences differently. China is no longer the developing country it once was and is becoming more assertive by the day. Beijing is at the head of the world’s most successful economy and will weigh more and more heavily on global governance.1 Three decades of impressive economic growth have boosted the self-confidence of the Chinese leaders significantly. In Beijing, the notion that China should start taking on an attitude befitting a great power is gaining ground. China is taking up ever more space within various multilateral organizations and is setting up diplomatic activities throughout the globe. Moreover, Beijing has become more active in setting up its own multilateral channels to further its national interests and own norms. China no longer considers itself an outsider that should crawl back into its shell and steer clear of a global political system dominated by the West. All this puts into question the EU’s conditional policy towards China, which is based on the assumption that China can be socialized and persuaded to incorporate Europe’s post-modern values. The way ahead seems to be for Europe to opt for a more pragmatic approach, which takes stock of the changes in the underlying power and identity relations between the EU and China. The analysis of this paper will be developed at three levels. First, it examines the changes in the structure of international politics. To what kind of structure are we evolving and where do China and the EU fit in? Second, it takes a closer look at the respective identities of China and the EU and explicates the major differences between them. Finally, this study appraises the implications of the emerging multilayered and culturally diversified polarity for the further development of the EU–China relationship.

This special issue demonstrates the strengths of a located approach to transnational memory. The issue focuses intensively on Argentina and Spain, but also makes forays into Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, among other locations. By ‘located’ I do not mean simply ‘local’ – indeed, negotiating the question of the local and its relation to the global is high on the agenda of this special issue. A located approach to transnational memory might take inspiration from the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich’s concept of a ‘politics of location’.1 A politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local – starting from the intimate terrain of the body – but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global. While Rich’s essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ does not address the question of memory directly, her famous assertion that ‘a place on the map is also a place in history’ resonates with the stakes of the essays collected here – essays that deal, as does Rich’s ‘Notes’, with the contradictory and intersecting legacies of state-sponsored violence (Ref. 1, p. 212).

In this article, I argue that policymakers employed unconscious biases and racist beliefs in the formulation and the implementation of the current EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies (ʻEU Roma Frameworkʼ) and its corresponding national strategies. Using Critical Race Theory, I explore how these policies have reinforced the commonly held belief in the need to civilize and otherwise change the habits of the Roma, and consequently have further reinforced the power imbalance between the Roma and the dominant majority groups (hereinafter used interchangeably with ʻnon-Romaʼ). I analyse examples of Roma versus universal policies comparatively, emphasizing biases in formulation, implementation, and discourse. I show that the objectives of the EU Roma Framework and national Roma strategies toward Roma education involve ethnic presuppositions and are far less ambitious than the avowed Europe 2020 strategy; this policy mismatch will likely lead to further educational discrepancies post-2020. Finally, I conclude that policies focused on the Roma are doomed to fail if no prior and concurrent actions are taken to change prejudiced attitudes and the behaviours of non-Roma, in particular those biases influencing policy formulation and implementation.

The decline in confidence in the traditional parties in Western Europe has manifested itself through the emergence of the Green parties on the Left and populist parties on the Right. Despite successes in some countries, these parties have remained small, although they have been able, respectively, to play on the growth of ‘post-materialist’ values on the Left, and of anti-immigrant sentiments on the Right. The prospects for these parties are not very good, in particular for the right-wing populist parties, which are highly dependent on the popularity of their leaders, and even for the Green parties, although these can exploit the internal divisions within Socialist parties between supporters of the ‘traditional’ Left and supporters of the ‘New’ Left.

It is proposed that the transition from secondary to higher education can be facilitated by improving secondary school students’ capabilities for independent, self-directed, and self-regulated learning (SRL). University learning places high demands on students for complex and independent learning, namely learning that requires the ability to plan, monitor and evaluate one’s work and to control one’s motivation and emotion. A major stream of educational research has shown the beneficial impact of self-regulated learning on student motivation and has concluded that self-regulation is a significant source of achievement differences among students. However, many secondary school students lack the skills of an independent and self-regulated learner when they enter higher education, something that contributes to considerable student attrition during the first year of university study. In this article I argue that more attention should be paid to the promotion of self-regulated learning in secondary schools. This can be achieved by helping teachers understand how to enrich students’ knowledge about learning and strategies to manage it. Some exemplary practices developed at secondary schools are discussed as a means of providing examples of effective learning environments for SRL.

Human language is qualitatively different from animal communication systems in at least two separate ways. Human languages contain tens of thousands of arbitrary learned symbols (mainly words). No other animal communication system involves learning the component symbolic elements afresh in each individual's lifetime, and certainly not in such vast numbers. Human language also has complex compositional syntax. The meanings of our sentences are composed from the meanings of the constituent parts (e.g. the words). This is obvious to us, but no other animal communication system (with honeybees as an odd but distracting exception) puts messages together in this way. A recent theoretical claim that the sole distinguishing feature of human language is recursion is discussed, and related to these features of learned symbols and compositional syntax. It is argued that recursive thought could have existed in prelinguistic hominids, and that the key step to language was the innovative disposition to learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols

While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. Public information and debate are essential ingredients of democracy, and their confinement to the individual national public sphere threatens the democratic aspirations and legitimacy of transnational institutions. Therefore, it is often argued that the European Union can only achieve greater legitimacy if there is a Europeanization of national public spheres. Has public discourse in fact Europeanized in the last decades? Here we present results from a study of major national newspapers from five European countries. Europeanization is defined in three dimensions: Europeanization of contents, Europeanization of public identities, and Europeanization of communication flows. Our results show that national public spheres are, in fact, quite resilient and that change is slow or halting. We discuss several possible explanations for this resilience, and go on to question the assumption that the legitimacy of European institutions depends on Europeanization of public discourse.

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

Spurred by the recent global economic crisis, Social Innovation (SI) has gained increasing attention in the European Commission (EC) agenda. However, it remains a heterogeneous and ill-defined concept, whose boundaries are unclear. Currently, within EC discussions, it encapsulates a variety of concepts from social enterprises to societal change. Adopting an ethnographic methodology, this analysis provides insight into the contrasting official ‘front-stage’ and ‘back-stage’ views, constraints and practices by which SI has been adopted and promoted by the EC. While the ‘front-stage’ perspective is more intentionally based on the official situations, documents, and statements, the ‘back-stage’ is informed by both the ethnographic analysis and its relationship with the ‘front-stage’ perspective. The main finding of the analysis is that SI might presumably be seen as the only way to align the Commission's conservative-liberal policy, which is rooted in the Lisbon Agenda, with the pressing social demands that stem from the 2008 financial crisis. However, this analysis also indicates that, rather than a novel policy stream, SI can also be seen as a policy compromise that can be used to detract from debates around the need to develop a fully-fledged EU Social Policy; more deeply, it can detract the policy debate from facing a thorough reflection on our society and development model. The analysis here will also provide an overview of the risks associated with current thinking viewed from the perspective of EU players operating in the socio-political domain.

This article places European welfare states squarely in today's European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives ‘top down’ from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture that links EU member states more effectively into All-European corridors of reform efforts. The authors argue that the overriding need in welfare state reform is to identify new value combinations and institutional arrangements in national systems that are both mixed – in terms of solidarity and growth objectives – and virtuous, that is capable of producing advances on all necessary fronts. The authors recapitulate the EU's present social agenda – where the search for ‘new value combinations’ is seen to be most actively undertaken. They take up the nature of the ‘bottom up’ challenges to, and the adjustment problems of, the four different sets of European welfare states at length and also their differing needs for functional, distributive as well as normative re-calibration. They present core components of an optimal adjustment strategy that could reconcile growth with solidarity. Finally, they focus on different instruments that might further substantiate the role the EU could play in preserving and developing the ‘European Social Model’ in different welfare domains.

Universities see a need for major changes in their organisational structures and functioning to be able to respond adequately to current social expectations. A greater provision of funds and an increase of university autonomy are priorities of today’s university policy. This article presents the results of relating excellence and autonomy through data from the Academic Ranking of World Universities of the University of Shanghai and the indicators developed by the European University Association for four types of university autonomy: organisational, academic, staffing and financial.

In the Soviet Union, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was both a uniquely traumatic ordeal that took the lives of approximately 30 million people, and the focus of a decades-long myth and cult that celebrated the most glorious achievement of the Soviet era. At the war’s end, Stalin, whose mistakes and brutality had greatly increased Soviet war losses, sought to obscure popular memories of the war experience, but the Brezhnev regime turned an idealized memory of the Great Patriotic War into the focus of an elaborate cult. As the Soviet Union declined and finally expired, the memory of the war became highly contested, as ugly truths about the war were made public. Today the war myth lives on as evidence of Stalin’s inhuman rule, and as a source of Russian national pride and patriotism.

Despite the tendency to create a European Higher Education and Research area, academic systems are still quite different across Europe. We selected five countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the UK) to investigate how the differences have an impact on a number of aspects of the working conditions of academic staff. One crucial aspect is the growing diversification of professional activity: reduction of tenured and tenure tracked position, the growing number of fixed-term contracts for both teaching and research, including the growing recruitment of academic staff from external professional fields. These changes are connected with the changing functions of higher education systems and signal the growing openness of higher education institutions to their outside social and economic environment. To understand these trends one has to take into consideration the different degree in which systems distinguish between teaching and research functions. A second aspect has to do with career paths, their regulation, their length and speed. Here, the history of recruitment and career mechanisms in different countries are of particular importance because the different systems went through different periods of change and stability. Also connected to career is the willingness and the opportunity to move from one position to another, both within and outside the academic world. A third aspect deserving attention that is connected to mobility is the professional satisfaction among academic staff in the five systems considered.

In recent historiography, it has been argued that the expansion of Europe between 1500 and 1800 created a ‘system’ in the Atlantic by which the economies of Europe, West Africa and the New World were closely interconnected by trade and migration. However, the available evidence suggests that the economic implications of such a system were of marginal importance. Rather than boosting the economy, the ‘Atlantic System’ stimulated the expansion of European values and norms, such as private property, monogamy, the nuclear family, free labour and the place of women and children in society.