This article charts and tries to explain the changing use of ‘minority’ languages in Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the 19th century. This period saw the beginnings of a decline in the use of certain dialects and separate languages, notably Irish and Scottish Gaelic, although some tongues such as Catalan and Welsh remained widely used. The article develops some models of the relationship between language and its social, economic and political context. That relationship was mediated through the availability of printed literature; the political (including military) relations between areas where different languages or dialects were spoken; the nature and relative level of economic development (including urbanization); the policy of the providers of formal education and that of the church on religious instruction and worship; and, finally, local social structures and power relationships. The focus is principally on western Europe, but material is also drawn from Scandinavia and from eastern and central Europe.

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.

The story goes that in the 1980s and 1990s no publisher in Paris was prepared to issue a historical study that did not have the word ‘memory’ in the title. Identity, a congener of memory, was equally popular in the same period. One of the experts in the field, John Gillis, claimed that identity has become no more than a cliché and that memory has lost a lot of its precision, but both terms have remained key concepts. ‘The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’. Memories and identities are anything but certain facts; they are `representations or constructions of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena. […] “Memory work” is, like any kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end”.

It has been suggested that the demise of the vainglorious future-orientated ideologies in the late 1980s brought about a shift in focus towards the past. However that may be, the wave of interest in memory did receive an enormous impulse from one of the most controversial studies in this field, the seven-volume series Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984–1992), published under the direction of the French historian Pierre Nora. In the last volume he argued that France had gradually disappeared as a ‘memory nation’; the national memory had been supplanted by a series of lieux de mémoire and the conflicting social identities that this entailed. La France, according to Nora, had entered the ‘era of commemoration’ as Les Frances as a result of what he called a ‘democratization of the commemorative spirit’.

The relation between national identity and collective memory is highlighted by the many commemorative events organised in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, the French, British and Brazilian governments had a Year of National Heritage, while in Israel a ‘memory industry’ specially devoted to the Holocaust got under way.

Journalists are often blamed for producing scare stories. It seems to have been forgotten that many, perhaps most, modern scare stories are based on scientific risk calculations, and that journalists are not trained in scaring the wits out of people in that particular way. A more precise accusation might be that journalists are eager, unthinking and unquestioning conveyors of results from scientific risk calculations. Calculation of risk has become an important research product; a product fitting nicely into conventional journalistic storytelling, but the concept of risk tends to dilute value disagreement and conflict of interests into seemingly purely factual issues, leaving little room for political debate. Moreover, the cargo attitude of journalism is in conflict with the journalistic ideal of critical investigation and analysis on behalf of the public to stimulate common deliberation in the public sphere. Apparently, the production of scientific knowledge is excluded from the public sphere. Regarding discussions on science and technology, journalists will have to enquire into aspects of facts, values and social interests to live up to the ideal of investigation on behalf of the public. Several obstacles along this path can be identified, one of them being the commercialization of journalism in the media-industry and of scientific research in the knowledge-industry. Universities, in the search for a meaning of life, might consider providing a home for independent, reflexive journalism on science in a social context.

France, Belgium and the Netherlands faced the same fundamental challenge in 1945. In spite of differences in institutional setting, chronology or demography, their experience of Nazi occupation had been traumatizing and humiliating. Their national reconstruction required a self-confident image of the recent past. Nonetheless, the contours of the policies of memory pursued in the three countries diverged in a striking measure. In the Netherlands, post-war governments deliberately constructed a forced national consensus around the myth of a unanimous resistance, at the expense of veterans’ movements and all forms of associative memory. However, the latter dominated the commemorations in France and Belgium, continuing a post-1918 tradition. The conflicts between different categories of war veterans and victims and between different political families characterized the conflicting memories in these two countries. Rather than a monolithic resistance myth, different memories of Nazi persecution were rivals for public attention. In France, neither de Gaulle nor the Communist party succeeded in monopolizing the heroic legacy of the resistance. In Belgium, the Royal question, the left–right divide and subsequently the regional tensions between French and Dutch speakers, estranged part of opinion from the memory of the resistance and even ended up favouring, in some quarters, the rehabilitation of collaboration with the Nazi occupier.

Post-Mao gender discourse readjusts a politicized vision of gender based on Maoist ethics. While rejecting revolutionary concepts of sex equality, contemporary Chinese women embrace a notion of femininity through the revision of a traditional conception of womanhood as well as the construction of new role models. Women poets participate in this construction process with a fresh, powerful voice to express their gender consciousness. In their efforts to (re-)define womanhood, they present by poetic means radically gendered perspectives.

Politicians are not expected to interfere with the judiciary. Parliament passes laws and the courts interpret and apply them. On the Continent, judicial freedom is restricted by codification, which was avoided in England where greater judicial flexibility survived. In the United States the Restatement of the Law was a move in the direction of codification. Also in that country, judicial review of the constitutionality of the laws gave the judges the power to declare statutes passed by the representatives of the people unconstitutional. No such power exists in England, but the courts have other means of reducing the impact of Acts of Parliament, such as the exclusionary rule and the convention that the lawgiver does not intend to change the common law, which is judge-made case law, governed by the doctrine of precedent. Those traditional elements of the English common law were recently eroded by modernizing trends: the rule of exclusion was given up in favour of the search for the intention of the lawgiver, and the force of stare decisis was reduced. The recent incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law has introduced a form of judicial review of the laws into the British system.

People need socially accredited but disinterested experts to give them reliable advice about risks. Traditionally, this role has been performed by academics, but academia is coming increasingly under the influence of commercial and political interests. How can ‘post-academic’ science be shaped to sustain its vital role as an independent organ of civil society?

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of the world's oldest medical systems, having a history of several thousands of years. It is a system of healing based upon the Chinese philosophy of the correspondence between nature and human beings. Its theories refer to yin and yang, the Five Elements, zang-fu, channels-collaterals, qi, blood, body fluid, methods of diagnosis, the differentiation of symptom-complexes, etc. TCM has two main features: a holistic point of view and treatment according to a differentiation of syndromes. The therapeutic methods of TCM involve different approaches, such as acupuncture, moxibustion, tuina bodywork, herbal medicine and qi gong, in order to allow the body to heal itself in a natural way. Western medicine was first introduced into China from the middle of the 17th century. During the first two centuries several different views, related to the future of TCM and the relation between TCM and Western medicine, emerged. Some advocated ‘complete westernization’ of Chinese medicine, others were in favour of keeping it intact, whereas again others recommended the ‘digestion and assimilation of TCM and Western medicine’. Nowadays, more and more people realize that each of the two medical traditions has its own merits and advise that the two systems should benefit from each other's strong points. We offer an argument for integrating Western medicine with TCM. In the 20th century China has maintained and developed three kinds of medical science, that is, TCM, Western medicine, and ‘integrated medicine’. Much has been achieved in clinical, experimental and theoretical research. The development of any science can be furthered by cross-fertilization based on absorption and fusion of whatever useful theory and experience. It is our dream that, in the future, diverse modalities – including TCM, Western medicine and possibly other variants – can work in conjunction with each other as part of a unified team rather than in competition. This integrated approach will ultimately lead to safer, faster and more effective health care.

Commonly, the second half of the 1960s is considered to be the period in which Western Germany actually started dealing with its National-Socialist past. The youth of that time is said to have opened the discussion and to have broken taboos by asking the elder generation probing questions and by exposing the careers of former National-Socialists in the politics and society of post-war Germany (the FRG). I make clear that this picture is very one-sided and I also give an overview on the different ways Western Germany coped with this past between 1945 and the end of the 1980s. Of course, these ways differed strongly over the years, but the ‘Third Reich’ has always remained present in German historical awareness and is branded into German identity – for better or for worse.

The human species is beset by ‘risks’; one of which is related to its exposed position on the Earth as it travels through cosmic space. An examination is made of the major risks – those associated with cometary impact, with solar emissions and with the explosions of nearby stars. Estimates are given of the risks associated with trying to avoid the effect of these phenomena. Not surprisingly it is concluded that more work is necessary.

The declining significance of national borders constitutes a challenge to the capacity of the nation-state to reach unilaterally its governance targets. Effective governance depends upon the spatial congruence of political regulations with socially integrated areas and the absence of significant externalities. As societal interconnectedness across borders increases with globalization, national governments are increasingly confronted with four specific challenges: efficiency pressures, externality and competitiveness problems, and representational deficits. The political responses to these challenges vary significantly. Although globalization is thus neither identical with, nor does it necessarily lead to, the rise of international institutions and governance beyond the nation-state, this article will show to what extent societal denationalization is accompanied by the rise of international institutions and how the myriad of international institutions existing today interact to produce global governance. Globalization also questions a cornerstone of any modern understanding of politics, which considers nation-states as the basis of all politics. As governance beyond the nation-state increases in significance, the separation of political issues into nationally defined territorial units must be conceptualized as a variable rather than a conceptual premise.

Countries with a low GDP per capita generally have a much lower fiscal quota than OECD countries, but many other factors push up the transaction costs in poor economies. High-tax societies provide more security, predictability and organizational discipline. The absence of such conditions is a powerful breeding-ground for corruption. If fiscal payments and bribes are added up to arrive at a composite measure of the ‘extraction burden’ in different countries, we might find that the costs of doing business do not diverge so much in various parts of the world.

We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan's war, developed and fostered over 15 years of conflict, and the overwhelming weight of more than three million war dead on the memories of the living forged a link between a desire to honour and cherish those lost and the ways the war is recalled in the public sphere. Enforced and encouraged by government policies and private associations, protecting the dead has become a means of avoiding a full discussion of the war. The memorials and monuments to the Dead that have been created throughout Japan, Asia, and the Pacific stand silent sentry to a Legend of the war. This must be challenged by the release into the public sphere of living memories of the War in all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction without which Japan’s Memory can have no historical veracity. Moreover, the memories of the Second World War of other peoples can never be complete without Japan’s story.

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.

Deterrence has been the prevalent strategy to enforce tax revenue both throughout history and in economic theory. This approach is, however, problematic because it is inconsistent with empirical reality. I wish to consider a new way of thinking about taxation, following psychological economics. I submit that individuals have a substantial amount of civic virtue and tax morale. Taxation is ‘quasi-voluntary’ and cannot reasonably be enforced by deterrence. Tax morale is lowered when the citizens have little trust in their state, and feel badly treated by the tax office. According to official surveys, the European Union is faced with a ‘democracy deficit’ and dwindling support from the citizens. At the EU-level, civic virtue and tax morale can be improved by offering more (direct) political participation rights and raising taxes in a decentralized way.

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.

All forms of terror seem to aim at the destruction of the individual experience and judgement of people. Part of our world is threatened by political terror (as represented first by Dostoevsky) or ethnic and cultural terror (as convincingly described by J. M. Coetzee), but it seems possible, at least in principle, to find an answer to these threats. Is religion the primary remedy against nihilism and, therefore, also against terrorism as Dostoevsky believes? Or is the quasi or semi-autonomous self the major antagonist of terrorism? The genetic manipulation of the human race, as sketched by Michel Houellebecq in his novel Les Particules élémentaires (1998), holds a threat that is irreversible. The cloning of human beings, which supposedly offers a solution to many of our problems, seems too high a risk to take.

The post Second World War period was a good time for modern science-driven technology; it had played a decisive part in the allied victory and now it was to be harnessed to the task of postwar reconstruction, promoting increased welfare, better health and improved security. But there were also misgivings related to the freedom in the conduct of science. Could science be freely pursued under the terms of a social contract so inextricably intertwined with national security concerns? After the end of the Cold War, new concerns emerged. The security element in the old contract had acquired a new meaning and was now understood in the sense of a protected environment, safe living conditions and future sustainability. Previously, science was the problem solver. Now science came to be seen as a major source of the problems. We have seen a shift from issues of freedom and trust to questions of responsibility and accountability. How should science respond?