Presentation summary by Monika Ewa Kaminska

I believe that Europe can do without immigration. We do not need it to solve our problems. It does not help our national income. We should not push for immigration.

This article studies the different scenarios for the fiscal union in the Eurozone beyond 2019. It explains the different alternatives that the literature has explored to ensure fiscal transfers within Eurozone states as well as for common debt issuance. It also describes the role that monetary policy has played as a backstop for sovereign defaults and highlights the limits that inflation and an anti-euro backlash impose on public debt sustainability.

While demographers have long been concerned with population increases, recent significant declines in fertility also warrant concern. So far, however, most researchers have focused on the causes of lower fertility rather than its consequences. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a new conceptual framework, which suggests that growing up with fewer siblings is associated with more participation in voluntary associations. Using General Social Survey (GSS) from the US, the relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations is empirically tested. It is found that there is a negative relationship between sibship size and participation in voluntary associations among American adults who have at least four siblings. These findings have implications for researchers who seek a better understanding of the consequences of declining sibship size, not only in the US but also in Europe. Specifically, these results have implications for several countries in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, regions that have experienced ‘the lowest-low fertility’ in the last two decades.

By virtue of its outspoken multidisciplinarity, robotics is an extremely popular research field, but is not always exercised by researchers with the broad scientific view required to make breakthroughs. This leads to a very fragmentary research landscape. Robots have their roots in fiction (the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein, Golem, RUR). Their first appearance in the real world came in the early 1960s when Unimation sold their first industrial robots. However, only recently are robots invading people’s daily lives, as service robots, and in health care, as surgery robots, intelligent wheelchairs, and rehabilitation robots, for example. This migration from structured factory environments to cluttered homes is a tremendous step, requiring much more intelligent behaviour. In this paper, the major research questions to be answered will be outlined and illustrated with partial solutions, mainly taken from the author’s own research experience at KU Leuven.

The 25 years of the post-Mao era of Chinese fiction is divided into two distinct stages: the pre-1989 period, and the post-1989 period. If this division is true about almost everything else in China, it is especially true with literature. This is because literature had been used as a lethal weapon for political struggle by Mao before and during his regime, and this tradition, though strongly challenged in the post-Mao era, still lingers, though in very different forms now and much watered down. Even the recent trends of art for art's sake, or for the sake of entertainment, or for the sake of religious consciousness, could also be read as political gestures, and are indeed treated as such by Chinese literary officialdom, and also by Western China experts. Despite the fact that Chinese fiction has been highly politicized, this paper will examine, as much as possible, the development of fiction as an art. Only the artistic quality can support my argument that recent novels from China deserve not only more scholarly attention but also more reader appreciation than they have hitherto received around the world.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a specific type of games took place in the Roman Academy of Arcadia. These games were a major cultural event in the academy and were a type of poetry competition which, in many aspects, was similar to the ancient Olympic Games. Therefore, they are a perfect example of the heritage of the Olympic spirit of the given era.

Based on a close study of the Sino-Japanese collaboration in Kunqu Opera The Peony Pavilion (2008), this article proposes a different conception of interculturalism onstage in East Asia in comparison with the prevailing East–West paradigm of intercultural performance and theatre. Some of the interesting questions that are raised and discussed in this paper are: How does the Japanese actor Bando Tamasaburo impersonate a young lady Du Liniang in the Chinese classical play without speaking the Chinese language? In what ways does the Sino-Japanese co-production connect and interweave Kunqu Opera and Kabuki? How has the intercultural performance been mediatized, received as well as perceived in China, Japan and elsewhere? The Sino-Japanese co-production features such important notions of interculturalism as connecting instead of othering, sharing instead of influencing, and complementing instead of exploiting.

Present changes in scientific publishing, especially those summarised by the term ‘Open Access’ (OA), may ultimately lead to the complete replacement of a reader-paid to an author, or funding-paid, publication system. This transformation would shift the financial burden for scientific publishing from the Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), particularly from scientific libraries, universities, etc, to the Research Funding Organisations (RFOs). The transition phase is difficult; it leads to double funding of OA publications (by subscriptions and author-sponsored OA) and may thus increase the overall costs of scientific publishing. This may explain why – with a few exceptions – RFOs have not been at the forefront of the OA paradigm in the past. In 2008, the General Assembly of EUROHORCs, the European organisation of the heads of research councils, agreed to recommend to its member organisations at least a minimal standard of Open Access based on the Berlin Declaration of 2003 (green way of OA). In the long run, the publishing system needs some fundamental changes to reduce the present costs and to keep up its potential. In order to design a new system, all players have to cooperate and be ready to throw overboard some old traditions, lovable as they may be.

We apply nonlinear Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL)-based methodologies to examine the nature of the effects of changes in R&D (intensity) on the employment rates of ‘high-skill’, ‘medium-skill’ and ‘low-skill’ labour and also whether or not these effects are symmetric. The empirical results based on the annual data for the period of 1991–2017 have suggested that while increased R&D has favourable effects on the employment rate of ‘high-skill’ labour in France, it has a negative impact on this type of labour in the UK. On the other hand, while the given increase in R&D has been found to be negatively affecting the employment rates of both ‘low-skill’ and ‘medium-skill’ labour in France, it has no impact on the employment rates of these two types of labour in the UK. These results may suggest that the dominant form of technological change in France is possibly a combination of ‘low-skill automation’ and ‘task-based’ whereby new technologies are simultaneously leading to replacement of ‘low-skill’ and ‘medium-skill’ labour by machines and the creation of new tasks (jobs) in which ‘high-skill’ labour has a comparative advantage. In the UK, the dominant form of new technologies resulting from additional R&D efforts seems to be in the form of ‘high-skill automation’ whereby ‘Robotics and Artificial Intelligence’ kind of new technologies might be causing replacement of ‘high-skill’ labour with machines. These results suggest that new technologies might be exerting adverse effects on income distribution in different ways in the UK and France.

Globalization has accelerated international and intercultural exchange in almost all aspects of life and every discipline of study has to take a global perspective for its development. This paper discusses some current issues in China’s ‘foreign language/literature’ sector, at the tertiary level of human and social sciences, and it does so in terms of localized concepts and diverse fields of study, administrative intervention, institutional organization, professional recognition, academic dilemmas, and problems and prospects of development in view of the international context of sociocultural globalization.

This article deals with the age-old problem of the literary canon, from a perspective that tries to supersede the still dominating questions of nation building or mainstream versus minorities culture. Taking stock from the observation that recent debates have moved the question to the field of the creative industries as well as that of cultural policy, it asks instead questions on the actual use and use-value of the canon, which is here reframed from the point of view of both writers and policy makers.

‘Progress is shaped by the ability to question, to criticize and to enquire. Ensuring progress is one of the responsibilities of Academia’. Could there be any future for non-conformist, heterodox, non-marketable knowledge, next to transforming truth value into the market truth value of knowledge, as was the tendency over the last decades? And what will be its impact upon criteria of excellence? The enjoyment of academic freedom requires the autonomy of the university. European countries have witnessed exciting developments in achieving a common space of convergence in higher education and research. But to encourage creativity there is definitely a need for more differentiation among universities, rather than uniformity. Autonomy is that degree of self-governance necessary for effective decision-making by universities in relation to their academic profile, work and standards. However, self-governance must be consistent with systems of public accountability. Universities must show that they are responding to the needs of society and they must perform according to standards of excellence and creativity in teaching and research. However, the balance, if there is any, has to be questioned. Should a shift of the role of the State be envisaged and should different types of governance be developed in order to counter the statement that academic freedom of higher education staff has decreased? Does a new relationship between government and university require the establishment of a modest set of ‘principles of good governance’ to reduce the overdetailed university regulations? And how to ensure that the search for creativity will also strengthen academic integrity? These questions are decisive for the future mission of the University.

This article supports the belief that transnational and glocal mechanisms have drastically affected identity and memory formation processes; thus, very diverse memories regarding complex episodes of migration or trauma are currently regarded as connected through multidirectional and cross-cultural patterns. Drawing on the fields of Trauma and Memory Studies, which consider the therapeutic role of art to represent and abreact troubled individual and collective experiences, the new hybrid identities born from this exchange and relationality have proved to demand new forms of representation. In particular, numerous groups of transitional women have recently fostered transnational engagements of womanhood through their creative works. Thus, some contemporary examples will be provided to show how art can be an empowering tool for contemporary transitional women to acquire a voice as well as a promoter of empathy for the modern glocal subject.

The importance of Africa for Europe was highlighted in the 1950 Schuman Declaration. Although the overarching framework for relations between the European Union and Africa is embedded in the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, cooperation between the European Union and Africa became increasingly institutionalized through the European Union–Africa Summits of 2000, 2007, 2010 and 2014, during which political leaders from both sides made strong rhetorical commitments to a strategic partnership. Yet, for the wider public, the relationship between the European Union and Africa appears to be both obscure and complex. The fifth European Union–Africa Summit is scheduled to take place in Ivory Coast in November 2017. This article will provide an overview of the development of European Union–Africa relations that coincided with the emergence of the African Union, the successor of the Organisation of African Unity. The so-called ‘strategic partnership’ between the European Union and the African Union represents the most comprehensive partnership the African Union has with any non-African actor. By highlighting current challenges affecting both, such as irregular migration, this article will, however, demonstrate that cooperation between the two is limited and somewhat lacking in strategic direction.

Playing cards were introduced into Europe from the Islamic world in the second half of the 14th century, forming packs with essentially the same structure as now, but with different suit-signs and court figures. Trick-taking games were certainly among those games which were introduced with the cards used to play them; but trumps and bidding were later European inventions. The former of these ideas derives from the games played with the Tarot pack (which was not associated with fortune-telling or the occult until the late 18th century); the latter from the Spanish game of Ombre, once fashionable all over Europe.

Applying a comparative and cross-national approach, this article is based on case studies of four representative European Atlantic port cities, namely Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz, and their socio-economic relations with Hamburg, one of Central Europe’s most important marketplaces. Based on quantitative data of commodity flows towards and from the Atlantic basin, it also analyses the role of German and German-speaking merchant communities that were established in these metropolitan port cities. The article will show how these foreigners circumvented the respective monopolies that excluded them from direct trade with French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies. These monopolies crumbled only during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions and the disintegration of the respective empires.

The paper discusses policies aimed at reducing the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea. Discharges of two nutrients—phosphorus and nitrogen—can be mitigated by measures ranging from sewage treatment to creating or enhancing natural ‘nutrient sinks’ such as coastal wetlands. The latter have been identified as low-cost alternatives to removing nitrogen through traditional, end-of-pipe technologies. Implementation of such projects yields additional benefits through enhancing biological diversity by recovering valuable habitats typical of wetland ecosystems. The paper offers several recommendations regarding policy instruments likely to enhance the cost-effectiveness of the Baltic-wide environmental recovery programme now under way.

Surface tension effects, due to the accumulation of minor components in the surface, play an important part in the processing and properties of materials. The ‘tears of wine’ is an example of such processes.

The significance of emotion and social experiences in young children's growing understanding of emotion and mind is discussed here. There is evidence for early mind-reading, and the role of emotional experience in these developments; differentiation of various aspects of social understanding is indicated from studies of discourse, and longitudinal research. The challenges to be addressed in research on links between affect and cognition include a focus on children at risk of relationship problems, on the relations between attachment and mind-reading, and on possible developmental changes in the connections between emotion and social understanding.