The enlargement of the European Union to new countries in 2004 introduced mechanisms to support the development of various social and economic areas, while also aiming to level the differences between the member states. The primary purpose of this study is to analyse the development and similarities of the insurance markets in the old and new member states of the EU after the enlargement in 2004. We examine the insurance sector of both groups of countries, i.e., those that were members before 2004 and those that joined in 2004, using Hellwig’s development measure, which takes into account several characteristics. Additionally, we analyse the similarity of these countries using three statistical methods of unsupervised classification: Ward’s method, the k-means method, and the Partitioning Among Medoids. Our results indicate that there was a significant variation in the insurance characteristics of these compared groups of EU members after 2004. In general, the insurance markets of the old and new EU countries developed differently. Since the enlargement in 2004, the insurance markets of the old and new EU countries have not yet aligned.

The quantitative understanding of processes operating in the earth system has advanced significantly over the last few decades. This has led to the realization that a close interaction between deep earth and surface processes is a key element in earth dynamics and its impact on geo-environment, geo-energy, geo-resources and geo-hazards in general. The European continent and its ocean-continent margins provide an excellent natural laboratory to examine the impact of geodynamics and climate on topography at the earth’s surface. The overview presented here demonstrates the need for a further understanding of the earth system across space and timescales. Cross-border scientific cooperation on a full pan-European scale, benefiting from funding opportunities offered by the European Commission and a pro-active role in bottom-up self-organization involving members of the Earth and Cosmic Sciences section of Academia Europaea, is needed more than ever.

We begin from the assumption that where scientific research will predictably be used to affect things of moral significance in the world, you have a special duty, a duty of care, to ‘get it right’. This, we argue, requires a special kind of objectivity, ‘objectivity to be found’. What is it that’s to be found? In any kind of scientific endeavour, you should make all reasonable efforts to find the right methods to get the right results to serve the purposes at stake and neither exaggerate nor underestimate the credibility of what you have done. That, we take it, is what in this context constitutes objectivity and intellectual humility. But where your results will affect the world, you have a more demanding duty: a duty to ‘get it right’ about the purposes the endeavour should serve. Often the most morally significant purposes are those that ‘go without saying’ and because they are not said, we can too easily overlook them, sometimes at the cost even of human lives. We illustrate this with the example of the Vajont dam design and the flawed modelling that resulted in the Hillsborough football disaster.

Following the analysis of the slow uptake of open science in Italy, we identify four main lessons learned that may be useful to scholars and research policy makers engaged in promoting the uptake of open science culture and practices in their own countries.

The COVID pandemic enforced unprecedented pressure upon the academic clinician workforce globally. While in some aspects this has been a time of opportunity for academic clinicians, it has also exposed the vulnerabilities of this career path and the challenges early-career academic clinicians face. These challenges include the lack of dedicated training programmes, obstacles to international recognition of their career paths, and the remuneration gap between academic clinicians and their clinical counterparts. Addressing these issues will require a concerted effort from policymakers, funding agencies, and the medical community. However, investing in increasing the pool of academic clinicians in the long term is essential to advancing medical knowledge and improving the wellbeing of all of society.

This article is a summary of a panel discussion entitled ‘Towards an inclusive and representative academic landscape’, held at the Building Bridges Meeting of Academia Europaea and the Young Academy of Europe on 26 October 2022. The panellists were Professor Yvonne Galligan, director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Comparative Politics at the Technological University Dublin, Dr Katalin Solymosi, plant biologist, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University and vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe, and Professor Stephen Curry, Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London. Dr Linn Leppert, Associate Professor of Computational Chemical Physics and board member of the Young Academy of Europe chaired the discussion.

An EU Fiscal Union is being discussed as a way to avoid future euro-crises and guarantee the stability of the euro. So far, however, it has proved politically impossible, as EU countries are unwilling to give up their sovereignty on fiscal policy. This article develops a bargaining model that sheds light on how fiscal pooling could become politically acceptable. The model differentiates between the ‘South’ (net beneficiaries) and the ‘North’ (net payers). We find that fiscal pooling should be done via a combination of the fiscal instruments with the highest fiscal multipliers. Instead of a single Fiscal Union, we therefore propose a combination of fiscal pooling instruments which, together, add up to the sufficient level of fiscal integration.

Empires usually operate on the premise that only imperial centres are carriers of the historical progress of humanity, whereas imperial peripheries are far removed from this progress’s blessing. According to John Maxwell Coetzee, the Dutch Empire considered South Africa as its own land, which deprived that country’s indigenous people of their citizen rights. Like the residents of European imperial peripheries who were relegated to similar zones of historical indistinction, they were doomed to the twilight of legal illegality. Unlike the regulated area of historical progress, their state of exception was ruled by the whims of imperial officials. ‘The security police could come in and out and blindfold and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified site and do what they wanted to you’, he wrote in Diary of a Bad Year (1977: 171). In his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee strategically ‘unmoors’ and ‘deterritorializes’ this peripheral state of exception, spreading its iconoclastic effects all over the ‘sacrosanct’ territory of history.

The earliest archaeological evidence of wine making in Southern France is dated 425 bce. Viticulture was present along the Mediterranean coast of France when the Romans arrived (second century bce) and flourished everywhere by the time they left (fifth century ce). For several centuries, long-distance trade virtually disappeared and the infrastructure fell apart. Profitable viticulture remained mostly local and was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy nobility and the Church. After the turn of the first Millennium, towns became cities and a middle-class emerged. In the twelfth century, the wine trade with England gained importance. Wines were shipped from Rouen, Nantes, La Rochelle, and later Bordeaux. Monastic orders controlled the most fertile land, especially in Champagne and Burgundy. In the thirteenth century, the Languedoc became a part of France. During the Avignon papacy, new vineyards were planted, in particular Châteauneuf-du-Pape. After the Renaissance, scientific studies gradually improved viticulture and wine-making. Ultimately, fermentation was understood. The Dutch greatly expanded the wine trade. Then, the first intentionally bubbly wines, distilled wines, and noble-rot wines were made. Informal rankings of Bordeaux wines led to the famous 1855 classification. In the late nineteenth century, nature-made catastrophes, especially phylloxera, transformed France into the largest wine-importing country in the world. Sub-standard and blended wines became common, hurting the reputation of all French wines. The two world wars, the Great Depression and Prohibition shrunk the market for wines. The way out involved strict quality-control measures and hard work. The next problem could well be global warming.

This article presents the results of many years of research on creative life orientations carried out in socially diverse groups – among secondary school students, university students, and teachers – as regards their socio-demographic characteristics. It describes the theoretical assumptions of analyses, being part of the author’s original concept of creative life orientations. It discusses the understanding of this category, its interdisciplinary sources, and the specificity of life orientations in the creative versus conservative dimension. The methodological basis for the field research is explained, including the description of the original research tool, the Creative Life Orientation Preference Scale. The article then presents the generalized results of research on the respondents’ preferences for creative life orientations obtained as part of several research projects. These analyses are the basis for conclusions from research concerning the respondents’ preferences for creative, ambivalent and conservative life orientations, as well as their determinants.

There are other forms of iconoclasm besides the destruction of idols. For example, an iconoclast can be considered one who, instead of eliminating a deified image, reveals the trick of a magician. The manipulator distracts attention with the gesture of one hand while the other acts. This action affects everyone when it is driven by political-economic power. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas aims to eliminate magic and reveal the hidden plot that seeks to dominate society. His first panel already announces this: at the top, a map of the zodiac constellations; in the middle, Europe; and below, a genealogical tree of the Medici-Tornabuoni banking family. The Renaissance elites accumulate wealth and influence because it is seemingly dictated by the stars from birth. It is an illusion they display on the roofs of their palaces in the same way that a war is justified by a prophecy. There are some coincidences between Giordano Bruno, Aby Warburg and Vilém Flusser, in their respective ways to explain the dual role of image: both as a weapon of propaganda and as a device to disclose the truth. This article aims to reveal two different types of montages: the persuasive one, controlled by people in power through the ages, which is dismantled by the other, the photographic Warburg Atlas. A mirror broken into fragments, therefore, breaks the mirage: a new iconoclastic way.

After a long quarrel scattered with persecutions, uprisings, dismissals and replacements of religious authorities, deaths, military expeditions, confiscations and attempts of assassinations in Greece, Italy and other European areas, the Council of Nicaea, in 787, imposed the victory of the iconodules in the Byzantine Empire. The West, especially the Kingdom of the Franks and the Lombards ruled by Charles, later known as Charlemagne, tried to take an official position in the synod of Frankfurt in 794 and in an odd and complex treatise, comprising four books, entitled Opus Caroli, or Libri Carolini, which were recently attributed by Ann Freeman to Theodulf of Orleans, one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. In this work, which we could call the first western treatise on images, the icon is freed from its ritual and cult value, and returned to its artistic use, thus determining, according to some scholars, the larger freedom of figurative representation that characterizes western religious art as compared with the Orthodox one. This stance is followed by a lively debate, involving many authors, the materials of which have not yet been translated and put into full circulation in historical-artistic research.

Two iconoclasms took place in twentieth-century Russian history: the iconoclasm after the October revolution, and the iconoclasm after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. These two (ideologically opposite) phases of iconoclastic actions (dismantling, destruction) were incited by programmes concerning the abolition of tsarist monuments of 1918 and met by controversial reactions to the removal of the statues of the former Soviet politicians in the 1990s. The revolutionary demolition of the symbols of the imperial past was executed in accordance with a clear-cut plan and included the erection of new monuments for outstanding communist activists. The official aim of the post-soviet removal of these monuments, to delete traces of a problematic past, was confronted with a revitalized communist ideology on the one hand and with the reaction of the Human Rights Organization Memorial on the other, which criticized the insufficient demolition of soviet symbols. This multifaceted situation is complicated by the reconstruction of destroyed pre-revolutionary monuments of Russian (predominantly religious) history.

This article examines the significance of some recent architecture and urban demolitions in Berlin. As an example of present-day iconoclasm in the heart of Europe, the relevance of these cases lies not only in the destruction of politically-charged artefacts, but also in their replacement with replicas of eighteenth-century architecture, thus materializing a Prussian revival and a nostalgia for the country’s royal past. In 2006, Berlin initiated the demolition of the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik). The Palast der Republik occupied the site of the original Berlin Palace, or Berliner Schloss, the residence of the Hohenzollern dynasty between 1701 and 1918. The demolition of the Palast has been followed by the construction of a replica of the eighteenth-century Schloss, but now intended to house the new Humboldt Forum, a museum dedicated to non-Western art. In recent years, both Berlin and neighbouring Potsdam have witnessed several integral reconstructions of historical buildings. This series of architecture demolitions and replicas therefore appears as a calculated and well-orchestrated operation to redefine the presence of the past through built artefacts, deserving to be examined from the broader perspective of iconoclastic precedents in art and architecture.

My point of departure is a conflict over images in the churches in Bergen, Norway in the 1560s, around 30 years after the Reformation. This introduced a brief period of iconoclasm in Denmark–Norway, inspired by Reformed theology. Soon, however, mainstream Lutheranism took over and statues and pictures were reintroduced. The different views on images in the two Protestant confessions – Lutheranism and Calvinism – are, of course, well known, as are also the various theological arguments in the debate between them. More interesting is the practical question of how it was possible to manage without images when addressing a largely illiterate audience. Here, Lutherans seemed to have basically the same attitude as Catholics, although they differed in the exact way the images were used. Both were ‘mass religions’, aiming at including the whole population and using whatever means necessary for this purpose. By contrast, Calvinism was an intellectual and elite religion, creating tight communities of true believers in accordance with the belief in Predestination. It has therefore been regarded as an important factor in modernization theories, from Weber’s explanation of capitalism to later theories of the link between Reformed Protestantism and modern science. Although there is little to indicate that pictures are an obstacle to science, the intellectual and elitist character of Reformed Protestantism may have contributed to the scientific revolution in the early modern period. Generally, the history of iconoclasm illustrates the fact that images are a powerful medium, particularly when most people are illiterate, and that a religion that abstains from this medium is faced with the challenge of finding a replacement for it.

Through comparative study, case and data analysis, this article summarizes the key points of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law, and analyses the expected practical significance. Meanwhile, this article also discusses the shortcomings of the new patent law after the fourth amendment, and puts forward some suggestions for further improvement and refinement. The purpose of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law is mainly to make the Chinese patent system more in line with the current technological and economic development in China as well as international cooperative innovation. The core points of the fourth amendment include: (1) strengthening patent enforcement by adopting punitive damages to intentional patent infringement, and increasing the patent protection duration extension for new pharmaceuticals, etc. (2) Promoting patent implementation by adding ‘Open Licence’ rules and improving employees’ invention regulations; (3) Improving design patent protection by expending protection duration and adopting protection for partial designs. (4) Increasing the provisions about the grace period for patent filings of inventions related to public interests. The new Patent Law 2020 will gradually show its significant practical effects. At the same time, however, there are still some regulations that need to be further clarified and refined for ensuring better implementation of the new law.

Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon to disappear out of sight. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a cumbersome process in which iconoclasm acts both as a singular event and as a moment in an ongoing historical process. The iconoclastic destruction in 1562 of the cathedral in Lyon opens a discussion of the interdependence of event and process in iconoclasm as an intervention in collective memory. Using re-naming to exemplify this cultural dynamic, the motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, serves as a brief illustration of how revolutionary iconoclasms were exploited later to redesign French history. To finish, post-colonial India sets the scene for a demonstration of the ambiguities embedded in iconoclastic processes in the short story ‘Lawley Road’ (1956) by R.K. Narayan, an ironic account of a back-and-forth process of re-naming of streets and places in the aftermath of Indian independence.

This article contributes to debates concerning slavery and slave museums, taking as inspiration historical novels and archives from the Schwarz-Bart Library in Goyave (Guadeloupe). I question, in particular, the passing over of black or mulatto female heroines, in sharp contrast with béké figures who, even if they have been temporarily(!) beheaded, remain the more famous icons in the collective mind of the French Caribbean and Caribbean population at large. I could indeed measure that Martinicans, in particular, are proud to have ‘given Napoléon’s wife’ and to have erected her beautiful body into white marble ‘posture’ at the Fort-de-France Savanah. My survey touches on the counter-example of ‘La mulâtresse Solitude’, a statue erected in Guadeloupe, but without any indication of its source: the best-selling novel La mulâtresse Solitude by André Schwarz-Bart. Why does Édouard Glissant’s project for a ‘Centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions’ on no occasion mention Solitude as the only female heroine such a Centre national could and should have staged? What does this tell us about the gender bias that continues to wreak havoc to the West Indies in all fields? Solitude remains a central, pivotal poteau mitan in Caribbean iconography. In spite of recent successful innovations, there is still much to sort out before leaving the dominant tendency to ‘statufier sur son sort’ and to promote male heroes instead of female ones.

Central to this reflection upon the interconnectedness between the destruction of a monument in Norway after the Second World War and iconoclasm will be work by Swiss art historian Dario Gamboni who, in The Destruction of Art (1997), argues that any understanding of modern and contemporary iconoclasm must be contextualized via the redefinition of art and its actual autonomy. In so doing, this article will open a twofold reflection concerning iconoclasm as an act of destruction, while also reflecting as to whether or not the very term ‘iconoclasm’ is perhaps best understood by what Dutch scholar Mieke Bal (2002) has called a ‘travelling concept’. The latter will hopefully allow for a consideration of iconoclasm through interdisciplinary cultural analysis, and, as such, enrich our understanding of the term and its practices in both historical and contemporary perspectives.

Historical interpretation of Portuguese Overseas Expansion has changed considerably from the late nineteenth century to the present. Ideological appropriations of historical events are commonplace. The propaganda of the regime of Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar extensively used the topic of Portuguese Overseas Expansion as a founding myth for justifying its own colonialism, even in times when decolonization processes were the common trend. Damnatio memoriae, on the one hand, and apologetics, on the other, were strategies spread from primary school textbooks to university programmes. They were responsible for the exclusion and even persecution of many Portuguese scholars, who had to ask for refuge in other European Universities. It created myths, for example around Henry the Navigator or the Nautical School of Sagres. Key-personalities, such as Magellan, were long defamed as anti-heroes. This article will show how these myths and twisted interpretations are still commonplace today. Even now, many Portuguese feel that, in times of crises, these fictions are used to create a sense of national identity and self-confidence.