The attitudes of the ancient Greeks towards their material culture—so far as we can discover from their writings—was rather different from that of most modern students of the remains of classical antiquity. The Greeks esteemed gold and silver vessels, while many archaeologists still believe that they preferred painted pottery. This reversal of classical values came about through the entry of Utopian ideals into the mainstream of classical scholarship in the 18th century. Laudable in themselves, these ideals have led to a serious misunderstanding of the role of ceramic in antiquity. Prices for painted pottery were extremely low and it can hardly have been the vehicle for what the Ancients would have considered to be ‘Art’. It is ironic that the classical tradition has been subverted by many of those charged with the scholarly interpretation of the classical past.

Over the last few years, the regulatory system for GM foods and crops in Europe has ground to a halt because of the difficulty in reaching agreement. Regulators, in struggling to overcome the distrust and suspicion that has greeted GM soya in particular, have introduced a new mantra: transparency, accountability and inclusivity. I argue in this paper that this mantra, although a considerable advance on what has gone before, will not solve all our problems; basically, because such procedures can only partially deal with the loss of trust and the climate of suspicion in which we now working. Some suggestions are made as to what we should do next.

In the early modern period (1500–1800), shipping and trade within Europe were the domain of individual merchants and small companies organised on a temporary basis. Outside Europe, however, new financial and commercial institutions such as permanent joint stock companies came into existence in order to limit the risks. These large institutions played an important role in inter-continental trade and shipping, albeit that their role in Asia differed from that in the Atlantic, where small companies as well as individual merchants remained the dominant form of organisation. In addition, privateers played an important role in the Atlantic economy in times of war while piracy could flourish in those parts of the overseas world where the Iberian trade circuits bordered on those of France, England and the Dutch republic. The conclusion points to the fact that a direct link between the overseas expansion of Europe and its industrialisation might be difficult to construct, but that the creation of long distance trading companies created the institutional environment that must have facilitated Europe's rapid economic growth after the middle of the eighteenth century.

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

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.

The European Union (EU) has suffered from fall-out recently. Clear cases in point were the anti-EU outcomes of the referenda in France and the Netherlands, as well as the messy process in response to the Euro crisis. More broadly, recent elections in many European countries have resulted in winning parties that advertise an explicit anti-EU sentiment, often linked to an equally explicit anti-immigrant stance. Apparently, in the eyes of many, the EU is not delivering – quite to the contrary. In this essay, insights from a variety of social sciences will be reviewed that may shed light on this issue, with a focus on the role of a multidimensional conception of diversity.

A new leading actor has been added to the Cyprus Conflict. The winner of the Presidential elections held on the morning of Sunday, 26 April 2015, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Kuzey Kıbrıs Türk Cumhuriyeti – TRNC) was the independent candidate Mustafa Akıncı. Both Nicos Anastasiades, who was elected President of the Republic of Cyprus in 2013, and Akıncı are rare leaders supporting the Fifth Annan Plan, which was rejected in a referendum by the Greek Cypriots in 2004. One of the most vital catalysts that could play a role in the resolution of the Cyprus Conflict is a charismatic leader who aims for the resolution of the conflict. Whether the current Presidents have this personality and can change the current balances that are monopolized by the conservatives-nationalists on the Island will be revealed as a result of the negotiations. This article briefly tackles the UN parameters relative to the Cyprus Conflict and addresses the problems awaiting Presidents Anastasiades and Akıncı during the peace negotiations that have started anew.

This article discusses the validity for historians of the concept of a pax britannica (a reminiscence, of course, of the pax romana), which Britain would have imposed during the 19th century, when she was the only superpower. Admittedly, from 1815 to 1914, there was no general war, even though ‘small’ wars broke out in Europe and overseas. The superior economic and naval power of Britain obliged France to avoid open conflict; Russia was also constrained, but not without the Crimean war. On the other hand, the influence of Britain in Europe had its limits, and eventually the British panicked before the rise of a strong German navy and this was a significant factor in the origins of World War I. Thanks to peace in Europe, Britain could devote her energies to overseas expansion. Besides her Empire stricto sensu, which grew relentlessly, she had a vast ‘informal Empire’ where the ‘imperialism of free trade’ prevailed. Altogether, the notion of pax britannica is most legitimate within the ‘formal’ empire. To her subject peoples Britain brought law and order, honest and efficient government, some economic development and a fast demographic growth. Pax britannica was both myth and reality, but it evaporated as Britain lost her economic and naval ascendancy.

This article contends that the category of civil war is not suitable for studying the massacres of civilians during the Spanish 1936–1039 war and its aftermath. In trying to build an alternative narrative for the understanding of the destruction of the democratic republic of 1931 founded on the human rights paradigm, an analytical framework is devised based on the deficit in deliberation processes allowing for the re-classification of social constituencies as ontological enemies. By showing that the repression by Franco's followers supplemented institutional logics and rationalities from colonial warfare and religious wars, the article also provides insights for a qualitative differentiation in repression between the two contending sides.

Glasses can be defined as non-crystalline solids with a disordered liquid-like structure. After recalling the concepts of order and disorder in various states of aggregation of matter, the problem of glass formation by quench of melt is described as well as other ways of obtaining disordered solids. The evolution of the technology of glass-making is outlined and various applications of traditional and novel glasses are presented. The extraordinary development of glasses, which are essential in a modern economy, can be explained by the fact that these non-crystalline materials combine the properties of their parent crystals with those of liquids where the constraints linked with order are no longer present.

Stem cells are capable of regenerating tissue cells. They have an important potential use in a wide range of therapies, especially as an alternative to organ transplantation, with the advantage that they can be derived from the patient and thus avoid rejection. Embryonic stem cells are potentially capable of forming all kinds of cells. Their use is controversial however, because they are derived from early embryos and because, if they were to match the patient, they would have to be obtained using the same techniques that could, in theory, be used to produce cloned individuals. This article discusses the uses and problems of stem cell research and therapy.

My study draws on the construction of a pro-European identity in modern Romania, a process set in motion by two main engines: a political one (the export around 1848 of the Great French Revolution, in a ‘tamed’ version, to Eastern Europe) and a cultural one (the emergence of Paris as the capital-city of European modernism). Born at the periphery of the continent, the Romanian identity project puts on display a series of insightful dimensions: a logic of homogenization, a centripetal pull towards centralization, linguistic standardization and unity, against any centrifugal forces of cultural difference, a top-down dynamics and, finally, an imaginary self-colonizing drive. As illustrated by the Romanian case, the paradigm of European nationalism opened up new ways of linking nation-building to the needs of modern societies and the interests of professional elites.

The environment has many of the properties that economists associate with the concept of a public good. It has long been realized that, if left to itself, the market economy is likely to lead to an undersupply of public goods and, in the environmental area, to an insufficient use of resources to preserve environmental quality. Economics research in this area has concentrated on three central issues. First, exactly why is it that a market economy fails to allocate resources efficiently in the presence of environmental public goods or externalities? Second, how can one assess the economic value of environmental goods? Third, what kinds of policy are best suited for the protection of the environment, e.g. should one rely on tax and price incentives or on quantitative regulations? This article discusses these questions and also describes the evolution of the economic perspective on the environment, from a concern with local problems to focus on international and global issues of environmental pollution.

European Union (EU) coexistence policy is based on the principle of subsidiarity, which implies a multilevel governance framework. Different legislative approaches have been developed in EU Member States. These legal rules are oriented to both preventing on-farm adventitious admixture (ex-ante regulations) and reducing potential economic consequences (ex-post liability). So coexistence deals with a subject of negative externalities involving an issue of property-right allocation between farmers. Considering the impacts that coexistence policy has on GM (genetically modified) crop adoption rates and the generation of trade distortions, potential effects of the EU coexistence framework are reviewed from a theoretical property-right allocation view. Derived from the analysis, property-right allocation is focused on non-GM farmers according to EU regulation enforcement, which tends to rigid coexistence measures. Nonetheless, the multilevel EU framework has led Member States to pursue their aims: trade interests and social legitimation.

The amount and quality of clinical research are constantly increasing; however, the translation of results into daily practice is not keeping pace. University curricula provide minimal methodological background for understanding the latest scientific findings. In this project, we aimed to investigate the quality and amount of clinical research compared with basic research by analysing ten doctoral schools in Hungary. We found that 71% of PhD theses were submitted in basic sciences. The majority of physicians (53%) working in clinical institutions did their PhD projects in theoretical departments. Importantly, recent clinical methodologies such as pre-registered randomized clinical trials and meta-analysis are only rarely used (1% and 1%, respectively) compared with retrospective data analysis or cross-sectional studies (30% and 43%, respectively). Quality measures such as international registration, sample size calculation, and multicentricity of clinical sciences are generally absent from articles. Our results suggest that doctoral schools are seriously lagging behind in both teaching and scholarly activity in terms of recent clinical research methodology. Innovation and new educational platforms are essential to improve the proportion of science-oriented physicians.

On the rare occasions when Japan's relations with Europe are examined, they tend to be fixed within a trilateral structure at whose apex is the United States. This triangular framework was established in the aftermath of World War II, as a result of direct American involvement in the socio-economic reconstruction of Japan and the major countries of Western Europe. The current article examines how the very nature of the triangular relationship has changed over time, with the result that the trilateralism of the 1990s – in contrast to its earlier form – has served to facilitate the development of bilateral relations between Japan and the European Union and its member states.

For the architecture theorist Charles Jencks, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin are architectural replies to the question of the cultural outgrowths of ‘complexity science’. In the light of new technologies being used in architecture, it seems necessary to explore Jencks’s position from new perspectives and to ask: in the context of architectural production, is it possible to discuss complexity not only as an artistic-aesthetic category, but also as a fundamental technical-constructive idea? Contemporary information technologies confront architectural-theoretical discourses with developments that call for an expanded theoretical instrumentarium. It remains unclear which architectural language might be used best to approach the concept of complexity associated with information technologies.

This article confronts two films about the request for a European passport by a Latin American citizen: Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport, 2001) and El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2003). Both films deal with memory of the Jewish-Latin American migration that took place within the context of the Holocaust, and both gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary, stories of displacement. It is argued that this multidirectional quality operates in two ways in relation to the concept of nationality: whereas one film puts it to work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation (centrifugal logic), the other uses it to opposite effect: to reaffirm and rebuild it (centripetal logic).