Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re-emerged at different historical junctures. On their way down, European empires have produced what could be labelled a post-imperial stress syndrome, very much like a PTSD, producing certain defensive ideological configurations of parochialism, xenophobia and nostalgic illusions, binding them to a past they have left, but are still chained to, mentally and ideologically. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process, which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens. Such frictions anticipating a future reality can only be caught by imagination. This article will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fact is generally recognized, both concerning the dissolution of the British Empire. It can be argued that, with Brexit, Britain is still trying to come to terms with its post-imperial reality. One such prefiguration will be seen through the eyes of the centre, J.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), the other from the periphery, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).

Complex dynamic behaviour in terms of chaotic motion, catastrophic events or other seemingly irregular and unexpected features of and in theoretical economic models – aimed at describing real-world phenomena – are nowadays known as a common property of many nonlinear approaches to an understanding of the motion of actual time series, such as inflation rates, unemployment figures, and many other – mainly macroeconomic – economic variables. Since most existing models in economic dynamics are constructed in the tradition of classical mechanics, this result does not appear as a real surprise. However, the real ‘complexity challenge’ for economic theory still persists in identifying the complex structure of economic reality, which cannot be satisfactorily represented by simple deterministic laws of motion, although such ‘laws’ might possess the possibility of very complicated dynamic motion.

Approaching the 21st century, humankind faces a paradox: the ocean covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface and has a core role in providing living and non-living resources for the world's population, but it is much less understood than the terrestrial part of our planet.

Archaeological sites can be excellent alternative museums. They need appropriate enclosures and an imaginative arrangement of archaeological objects or replicas.

In recent years large global programmes on the environment have been developed in which geography provides an essential component. This article outlines the main programmes in progress.

The decolonization of Indonesia is far from being a peripheral issue for Dutch national identity. Since the 1970s, but especially in 1995, public debate has erupted in an attempt to come to terms with this part of national history. The protestant ethic is still so strong that discussions revolve in particular around morality and a final verdict. Opinion leaders and historians have, however, not been able to solve the issue, so that the way in which the Netherlands lost their Southeast-Asian colony continues to trouble the Dutch self-image.

The article gives, first of all, a general presentation of the European Space Agency (ESA), followed by a more detailed outline of the ESA's Science Programme, its content, resources, organization, advisory structure and decision procedures. The various types of missions and the place they occupy in the programme are described. From a scientific point of view, these missions fit into four main themes of research, which are also potential ‘roadmaps’ for international collaboration. In the second part of the article, an outline is given of most of the projects that have been already undertaken, are in process or are being planned at the present time.

This paper discusses the explanations for the causes and features of earthquakes in the works of philosopher and scientist Avicenna (980–1037) and in the theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1209), who was deeply familiar with the work of Avicenna and who criticized him sharply on many occasions. The aim of this paper is to check the well-known hypothesis according to which Muslim theologians sometimes set out doctrines that were much more innovative from a scientific point of view than those of philosophers, strictly linked to Aristotle. This paper thus contributes to the history of Graeco-Arabic translations and the history of science. Avicenna's and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's doctrines are compared with Aristotle and the Arabic tradition of the Meteorologica.

A defining feature of new nationalisms, with their right-wing populist rhetoric, is the way they exploit the regime of truth prevalent in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. Despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse consistently advances demands framed in terms of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). By using the Pussy Riot case as an empirical example, this article argues that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’ unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, is how to navigate between the totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

This article discusses how Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, has become a target of right-wing populist discourse, locating her at the centre of the landscape of hate. The features of the affective landscape of hate are discussed from the phenomenological and constructivist perspective. The author argues that the landscape of hate constitutes an important part of right-wing populism based on the narrative of national emergency and the language of war and exclusion (othering).

Most discussions on mediality and intermediality take their point of departure as contemporary digital media, social media included. Hence, earlier periods in cultural history are often regarded as simple forerunners for the highly complex situation in today’s globalized media culture based on digital technologies. It is true that electronic media technology and its social effects now have reached an unprecedented and accelerated technological complexity. However, this perspective tends to ignore the fact that from ancient times up to the late nineteenth century, a wealth of media innovations exercised an impact in their contemporary cultures and societies; innovations that equal the influence of digital media today: the introduction of writing, book printing, the printed press and its technologies, visual reproduction technologies, the telegraph, photography, film, the telephone and other innovations in the media world. The focus of this article is a few specific media innovations and the radical changes they generated over the last few hundred years in literature and art as well as in their cultural and societal contexts. Such innovations are steps in the long process that leads to recent media developments and their influence on experiences, knowledge, ideologies and human self-understanding.

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.

The definition of the term culture has become so vague as to be almost synonymous with human life; as an analytic term it has become nearly valueless. Of course, it can be used as a description of artistic activity, but this also becomes dubious when applied to popular mass culture. Culture often carries a sense of superior ethical values, but this too declines into confusion when multiculturism is opposed to culture as a whole.

The studies of human behaviour that foreground the explanatory role of exogenously given incentives and constraints give short shrift to the role of agency, or the behaviour(s) of actors, in attempting to shed light on both policy and behaviour. This article reverses the emphasis – with the example of ethnic politics in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia with respect to the preservation and/or erection of German-language and Slovenian-language inscriptions – by arguing that the behavioural strategies of vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, such as national minorities, can carry significant political consequences – and thus are worthy of study. Specifically, the article looks into a politics of consensus and a politics of (political) realism, as the latter are advocated by Carinthian Slovenes in Austria. The findings serve as a wake-up call for West European states in particular, which, arguably, have grown complacent about their own minority rights records.

In this paper we propose a methodological critique of the History of Early Modern Journalism. Our proposal recommends a review of the ‘micro’ concept applied to research in The History of Early Modern Journalism. The current study on the Gazeta de Roma in Valencia (1618–1620) is a sample of this microscopic procedure, and is an important and revealing example that enables us to reinterpret the concept of periodicity. We will discuss the value of periodicity as a demarcation. The contemporaries of the first European newspapers applied characteristics and criteria other than periodicity: a ‘newspaper’ was then a serial document that informed progressively about the news from a certain area at that time, the continuity of which was recognizable thanks to certain typographical resources, in the absence of the header concept.

The aim of this article is to analyse the TV series Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans (Senke nad Balkanom, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić), understood as a reflection of the ways in which diverse imperial legacies, persisting differences and contrasting pasts shaped the (ambivalent) post-imperial traumatic history of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The burden of imperial legacy – mostly manifested in ethnic, political, cultural and economic tensions among diverse nations in the new multi-ethnic state – kept brewing under the surface and came to represent a constant threat of balkanization i.e. further fragmentation of the multicultural kingdom. In this article I claim that the same danger of balkanization – traced back to the years after the Great War – continued to haunt all successor states of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and Yugoslavias ensuing from 1943 until 1992) eventually resulting in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992. The irreconcilable differences and competing ambitions of different national, social and geopolitical identities define the structure, characters and their relations in the TV narrative, and are also reflected in the cityscape of Belgrade – the capital of the Kingdom and paradigmatic Balkan metropolis – in the late 1920s. The series is read against the theories of Dominique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotions (2010) and La géopolitique des séries/Geopolitics of TV Series (2016), and his assertion that TV series have become crucial in understanding our world in its many aspects – from domestic politics to geopolitics. The story of Belgrade between the two World Wars reveals the traumatic imperial legacy as determining the emergence of a ‘culture of fear, hope and humiliation’, tensions of balkanization and search for identity in the city suspended between an Ottoman casaba and a European metropolis. On the other side – in terms of narrative, genre, and visual style – the series itself is seen as the acculturated version of both the novel Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007) and the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017), illustrating the rise of cultural imperialism in post-imperial times.

The introduction of the euro has led to three dominant currencies in the financial markets, namely the euro, dollar and yen. The use of the euro as the single currency is a key element for economic and political unification in the EU (European Union). While some of the criteria for achieving monetary integration between the European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries in the euro area have been satisfied, some problems still remain. As the euro is not the currency of a single country like the dollar, the dollar still retains its dominant position in the international markets. After the Brexit referendum, apprehension regarding the collapse of the EU has reached a peak. Originally introduced in 12 EU member countries, and since extended to 19, the euro may potentially embrace 27 member countries. In this study, the economic impacts of the euro on the per capita income, inflation rate and foreign direct investment are analysed. The analysis will be performed on three countries participating in the EMU, namely, Germany, France and Italy.

Memories are stored in the brain in the form of changes in synaptic connectivity brought about through a cascade of molecular processes. Transient synaptic changes result in alterations in gene expression and, ultimately, the synthesis of a family of cell adhesion molecules which are responsible for holding the synapse in a new configuration. However, memory remains a dynamic property of the brain system as a whole, rather than ‘residing’ in any particular small region.

The various meanings of the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ are traced; in various European languages these mean different things. Postmodernist discussion in the various arts is not synchronous. Postmodernism can be seen as the cultural expression of the times we supposedly live in, but are the achievements of modernity gone for ever?

In the first years after World War I there was a strong reaction against science and technology in Germany that was backed by the Lebensphilosophie and Anthroposophie movements. This sudden change in public opinion was not the result of new concepts and convictions that did not exist before; rather, the spectrum of opinions in the Weimar Republic continued those of the Wilhelminian period. However, the strength of critical voices was increased substantially as a result of the defeat in the war and its consequences. It may be that the enfranchisement of women in Germany in 1918 at least indirectly influenced the substantial shift in opinion after 1918. The continuity of a critical attitude towards science and technology from 1870 to 1933 seems deeply rooted in the German educational system and among the leaders of society, stemming from the so-called Bildungsbürgertum.