The influence of the state on the trajectory of human lives is more comprehensive and sustained than that of any other organizational construct. We provide a definition of the modern nation-state in four intersecting dimensions – resources, law, legitimacy, and welfare – and review the history and status of each dimension, focusing on the fusion of nation and state in the 19th century, and the development of the ‘national constellation’ of institutions in the 20th. We then assess the fate of the nation-state after the Second World War and, with western OECD countries as our sample, track the rise and decline of its Golden Age through its prime in the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, we identify the challenges confronting the nation-state of the 21st century, and use the analyses in the following eight essays to produce some working hypotheses about its current and future trajectory – namely, that the changes over the past 40 years are not merely creases in the fabric of the nation-state, but rather an unravelling of the finely woven national constellation of its Golden Age. Nor does there appear to be any standard, interwoven development of its four dimensions on the horizon. However, although an era of structural uncertainty awaits us, it is not uniformly chaotic. Rather, we see structured, but asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. In general, nation-states are clinging to tax revenues and monopolies on the use of force, such that the resource dimension may change slowly if at all; the rule of law appears to be moving consistently into the international arena; the welfare dimension is headed in every direction, with privatization, internationalization, supra-nationalization, and defence of the national status quo, occurring at various rates for healthcare, pensions, public utilities, consumer protection, etc. in different countries. How, and whether, the democratic legitimacy of political processes will be ensured in such an incongruent, if not incoherent and paradoxical state is still unclear.

In 1831, a French administrative official of the name Alexis de Tocqueville went to the United States to study the American prison system as a model for the planned penitentiary reform in France. He came back with a book that brought him fame and lasting position as a classic of political science and sociology: La democratie en Amerique (1835–1840). America at that time was seen as far ahead of Europe in the development of its institutions and quintessential principles of Western modernity: democratic government, capitalist market and free thought. Tocqueville became fascinated with America, but did not limit his story to the description of American institutions and ways of life. He dug deeper, toward hidden axiological, mental and cultural premises which he labelled ‘habits of the heart’, and which later came to be known as the ‘American Dream’. This he believed to be the secret of American success and the emerging American hegemony in the world. His view was vindicated by the history of the 20th century. But times change.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the American social critic Jeremy Rifkin came to Europe to serve as an adviser to the head of European Commission, Romano Prodi. And he came back with a book that may easily become a bestseller, if not necessary a classic, entitled The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York 2004: Penguin Group, USA). This comes as a follow up to a series of books in which American writers indulge in self-flagellation, drawing doomsday scenarios of the ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘collapse’ of American greatness, with Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival (New York 2003: Henry Holt) as a prime example. This climate settled in earlier than the excesses of Bush administration, and has only been spreading wider in the intellectual community as a reaction to current policies. At a recent convention of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in San Francisco in August 2004, I was absolutely amazed by the intensiveness of anti-American feelings among my American colleagues. Presenting a paper provocatively titled ‘American Hegemony as Seen from Eastern Europe: Twenty Reasons why we Still Admire America’, I was feeling a complete deviant, evoking paternalistic reprimands for my short-sightedness and naivety, which can only be excused by an outsider's perspective. Well, I believe that self-criticism, or what sociologists now call ‘reflexiveness’ is a great asset in every society, but American intellectuals seem to me to go a bit too far.

Shakespeare's history plays have been taken as a grand epic of the English nation, especially in the period after World War II when they were performed in marathon cycles in the English theatre. As a group, these works investigate and question the meaning of authority, kingship, and nation in an unparalleled way. Shakespeare is the world's most popular playwright, his work staged and filmed in a huge variety of locations around the globe, yet the history plays have traditionally not spoken as directly to other nations as do the comedies and tragedies. Using the analogy oftrans-national sport, this essay looks at the changing position of the history plays in contemporary Europe and in the larger world.

Whether there is or has ever been such a thing as a European identity of some real substance and what changes that identity, if found to exist, has undergone in the course of history; at what time and why it was lost, if it no longer exists, and why it cannot be said ever to have existed at all, are questions which are among the favourite subjects of a certain kind of after-dinner speech and the welcoming or concluding addresses at academic – and indeed, of late, also political – gatherings. The fact that these questions are thus frequently dealt with in a branch of oral literature that is not above suspicion does not mean that they are devoid of importance or should be avoided in serious contexts. It seems clear, on the other hand, that they can be treated with intellectual honesty only if formulated in such a way that the answers can be determined, in the first place, by a clear choice of criteria for establishing identity and difference, but also by an equally explicit and clear choice of the geographical and chronological perspectives in which the application of these criteria is to take place.

It is obvious that the broader the chosen historical perspective, the narrower in range are those elements of European life and history that can be said to have retained a minimum of identity over time. If you adopt a truly multi-secular perspective, one which still has room for what a French thinker has aptly called les grands récits, ‘the great tales’, the myths of peoples and tribes engaged in founding, migration, conquest and defeat, it must be admitted that a very modest identifiable identity remains. Likewise, the observer who insists on referring to the whole area, which is today called Europe, and also on contemporaneousness, is likely to find a meagre catch in his nets, were it only because time and change travel – or at least, travelled, in a not too distant past – at very different speeds over that vast area.

When the grandfather of modern economics, Adam Smith, was preparing his Wealth of Nations almost a quarter of a millennium ago, the workforce of businesses would typically be counted in single or double figures. Now the world's biggest firms, such as Wal-Mart, have a payroll of well over a million, bigger than the population of some entire nations. This paper reviews some of the reasons for this growth, and considers whether it might continue forever. Powerful evidence exists of potential scale economies, in business functions from R&D to finance, and industries from pin production to pharmaceuticals. And these do indeed translate into remarkable performance records for some industrial giants. But surprisingly, on average, bigger firms do not enjoy above average profitability and, on the whole, giant firms are not gaining on the world economy. This paper reviews some of the market and managerial constraints on size, and considers innovative efforts – ranging from the New Zealand dairy industry to the McDonald's chain – to reconcile global-level scale economies in some functions with local autonomy in others. In passing, the paper notes a disturbing array of incentives tempting some managers to expand their empire, even when that is not in the shareholders' interest.

These papers resulted from the first workshop in a series exploring concepts that are of central importance to all of the sciences. The series will bring together the perspectives of natural and social sciences and the humanities in intimate, cross-disciplinary dialogue. The intention is to improve our understanding of the concepts discussed by emphasizing their different uses in the many different disciplines, while at the same time focusing on shared concerns and structural commonalities. And this is the peculiarity of the concepts to be examined here – they do not get defined in just one discipline, so that they only form part of the basic concepts of that discipline, as distinguished from the basic concepts of other disciplines. Rather, their unique character derives from the fact that they have different uses in different disciplines, and all of them in the foundations of the respective sciences. The concepts of natural law, causality, of complexity and truth, scientific truth, are of this kind, and so is the concept of symmetry, with which we will start this series.

As we all know, this concept has many different (scientific) meanings, while the basic meaning remains stable. In geometry, for instance, mirroring, rotation and periodicity prove to be symmetry-properties, that is, self-copies (automorphisms) of spaces, which leave the structure of figures and bodies unchanged (invariant). In natural philosophy, symmetry is the property of natural objects to remain invariant under certain operations, namely symmetry-operations. In logic, a two-place relation R is symmetric on a set S, if for any two elements x and y from that set, the following is the case: if the relation R holds between x and y, then it also holds between y and x.

The study of the European integration process offers a serious challenge for the social sciences. It is easy to understand why the disciplines of law, economics, and political science have made the most relevant contributions to the study of the Europeanization of our societies. From the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community in May 1951 to the establishment a few years later of Euratom, from the treaty of Rome to the European Economic Community (EEC), from the European Single Act to the Maastricht treaty and the Monetary Union, from the treaties of Amsterdam and Nice to the recent Convention that resulted in the proposal for a European Constitution, all of these historical events during the second half of the twentieth century mark a process of transferring sovereignty rights from nation-states to European institutions. The Council, the Commission, the Parliament, and the European Court of Justice are substantial innovations from the point of view of public law. They are not ‘state institutions’, nor are they intergovernmental agencies. In many domains, the influence of European regulations on national legislation is impressive. The amount of literature in all languages on the legal aspects of European integration is astonishing.

The concept of symmetry is omnipresent, although originally, in Greek antiquity, distinctly different from the modern logical notion. In logic a binary relation R is called symmetric if xRy implies yRx. In Greek, ‘being symmetric’ in general usage is synonymous with ‘being harmonious’, and in technical usage, as in Euclid's Elements, it is synonymous with ‘commensurable’. Due to the second meaning, which is close to the etymology of συ´μμετρoς, ‘with measure’ has likewise to be read as ‘being [in] rational [ratios]’ and displays the origin of the concept of rationality of establishing a proportion. Heraclitus can be read as a master of such connections. Exercising rationality is a case of simultaneously finding and inventing symmetries. On that basis a proposal is made of how to relate the modern logical notion of symmetry, a second-order concept, on the one hand with modern first-order usages of the term symmetric in geometry and other fields, and on the other hand with the notion of balance that derives from the ancient usage of symmetric. It is argued that symmetries as states of balance exist only in theory, in practice they function as norms vis-à-vis broken symmetries.

The rejection of the symbolically rather than institutionally innovative Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands as well as the show of disunity in the European Council of mid June 2005 signal the end of a long cycle, culminating in the 1990s, in which the transformation of the European Union into a full-fledged political actor seemed to be possible. For decades ahead there will be no European polity capable of powerfully co-determining the governance of globalization. This was made possible by the rarely debated democratic deficit that makes one people or government decide on issues of general European interest and uncritically glorifies direct democracy, thus opening the door to populism.

The comedy of errors which saw a majority of French citizens voting for domestic motivations, instead of focusing on the actual European issues go back to underlying troubles in contemporary democracy, but also to the contradiction inherent to the attempt to give the functional-bureaucratic EU of ‘Brussels’ a broad democratic legitimization. Rather than the now dead Constitution, it is the experience of the Europeans with common high-political acts of economic and security policy that may in the future foster their political identity in the framework of cultural diversity.

As Max Weber and many others in his tradition have argued, the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is the core of the modern state. What counts here is not the frequency of the actual use of force but the fact that only the state has the legitimate right to use such force. The military and the police are the most concrete expressions of this monopoly. In recent decades, the use of the military and the police has been subject to external challenges – ‘globalization’ – and new ideas about police and military intervention. Although at an operational level the state retains full control over the actions of the police and military, the conditions for their use are increasingly shaped by institutionalized legitimating ideas.

The health status of populations of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union underwent major changes after the fall of communism. While mortality started declining in Central Europe, mortality in Russia and most other countries of the former Soviet Union rose dramatically and has yet to improve. In terms of the socioeconomic changes, some countries (mainly Central Europe) were able to contain the fall in income and rise in income inequalities, but across the former Soviet Union gross domestic product plummeted and income inequality grew rapidly. This led to two types of inequality: first, the widening gap in mortality between countries, and second, the increasing social gradient in health and disease within countries. The thrust of our argument is that the disadvantages in health in Eastern Europe, and the growing social inequalities in health in the region, are direct results of the social changes, and that psychosocial factors played a pivotal role in the health pattern seen in Central and Eastern Europe.

During the first half of the 20th century, it was quite common among philosophers – ranging from the logical empiricists to existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger – to regard ethics as beyond rational justification. These tendencies are found even today, mostly among scientists who have not followed the developments in philosophy, but also among postmodernists and some other philosophers who seem to be unaware of what is going on in philosophy today. This paper outlines how the picture has changed from the early part of the century to now. Central figures in this development have been Nelson Goodman, Israel Scheffler and John Rawls. However, many of their ideas were interestingly anticipated by earlier philosophers, notably Edmund Husserl. This essay focuses on the issues rather than on the people. Its aim is to give a fairly accurate picture of the present situation with regard to justification in ethics.

Why is it that the foreign policy of Germany's Red/Green government differs so remarkably from that of earlier German administrations – and what promises and dangers does this hold for the future? A careful analysis of the biographical background of today's German leaders, Chancellor Schröder and foreign minister Fischer in particular, explains the leftist and anti-American twist of current German policy. As children of the radical movement of 1968, these leaders hold a distorted view of Germany's history that ails their foreign policy decision-making. Instead of cultivating the success, the style, and the smoothness of German foreign policy until reunification, they try to distance the new ‘Berlin Republic’ from the old ‘Bonn Republic.’ Moralizing rhetoric and the divide between ambitions (permanent membership of the UN security council, for instance) and capabilities (especially regarding the chronically underfunded military) characterize Schröder's ‘German Way’ – with disastrous consequences. While containment of the Soviet Union was the overarching principle of the Cold War, German leaders today seem determined to contain American influence and to counter the American arrogance of power with the German arrogance of impotence. Thus, they fail to deliver any of the much-needed coherence and clarity about Germany's role in the world.

Putting the big bang in its historical perspective makes it appear as the result of a succession of random thinking, animated by new observations – although constrained by their reference frame – and that of concepts often frozen. It appeared first as the only solution able to account for the existing observations; with newer observations, it appears now just like the old Ptolemaïc system, to which Aristotelians, Platonians or Pythagorean of the Renaissance worked hard to add epicycles, and again new epicycles, against all the principles of simplicity claimed in their beginnings, in order to save the basic principles of the model.

Cities, and especially capital cities, have always offered a stage for political ceremonies, festivals, processions, triumphs and struggles. The built mass in the centre, the axial streets and the accesses of capital cities consisting for a considerable part of public buildings and open spaces which have practical and symbolic functions for the state. By their shape, location and decoration, the buildings express the vision of political power as the rulers wanted it to be disseminated. This paper focuses on the changes introduced in existing cityscapes by rulers representing new ideologies, especially in Istanbul, Moscow and Berlin.

Fusion, which powers the sun and stars, is potentially an environmentally responsible and intrinsically safe source of essentially limitless energy on earth. The potential of fusion has been recognized for over 65 years, but mastering fusion on earth has proved to be an enormous scientific and technical challenge. It involves heating a large volume of dilute gas, containing equal parts of deuterium and tritium, to over 100M°C (M°C=one million degrees celsius) while preventing it from being cooled by touching the walls, from which it must be isolated using a ‘magnetic bottle’. This has now been done, and the Joint European Torus (JET) – which is the world's leading fusion research facility – has produced 16 MW of fusion power. The next step, which is to build a power station sized device called ITER, will be taken by a global collaboration. ITER will be twice as big as JET in linear dimensions, and will integrate all the technologies needed in a fusion power station. ITER should produce at least 500 MW of fusion power, ten times more than needed to heat the gas, and confirm that it is possible to build a fusion power station. Time is, however, needed to further develop the technology in order to ensure that it would be reliable and economical, and to test in power station conditions the materials that will be used in its construction, which will have to stand up to intense bombardment by the neutrons that carry the energy out of the magnetic bottle. Up to now, fusion has not been developed with any sense of urgency: since devices called tokamaks emerged in 1969 as the best candidates for bottling hot gases, at least 15 years have been lost due to delays in decision making and inadequate funding. In view of the urgent need for new, large-scale, emission-free sources of energy, and given the fact that – assuming it can be made to work reliably – the economics of fusion power look reasonable, the time has come to develop fusion on the so-called Fast Track. This involves: building ITER and the essential International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility in parallel, which will take ten years; using the results to finalize the design of a prototype fusion power station (generally called DEMO for Demonstrator); and then constructing DEMO, which will take another ten years. Assuming adequate funding, and that there are no major surprises, DEMO could be putting electricity into the grid within 30 years.

How does globalization affect taxation? The academic wisdom is split on this question. Some argue that globalization spells the beginning of the end of the national tax state, while others maintain that it hardly constrains tax policy choices at all. This paper comes down in the middle. It finds no indication that globalization will fatally undermine the national tax state, but still maintains that national tax policy is affected in a major way. The effect is not so much to force change upon the tax state as to reduce its freedom for change. Comparing the first three decades of the 20th century to the last three decades, it is remarkable how much change and innovation there was then and how much incrementalism and stasis there is today.

Our modern representation of elementary processes considers that all physical phenomena result from the interplay of four fundamental interactions: the gravitational attraction, the electromagnetic force, the strong interaction and the weak interaction. Formally, the quantum mechanical description of elementary processes introduces the concept of discrete symmetry, illustrated for instance by space and time inversions. Discrete symmetries play a central role in the elaboration of theories and models, and have profound consequences in the predictions of these theories. For nearly 50 years, it has been observed that, of the four fundamental interactions, only the weak interaction violates mirror symmetry, and all observations so far indicate that it does so in a so-called maximal way. Despite overwhelming evidence of mirror-symmetry breaking, the search for a possibly underlying left–right symmetry has been pursued for many years by dedicated experiments. In this paper we review the context of mirror symmetry breaking in the weak interaction, we describe its interpretation in the framework of the standard model of particle physics and describe current efforts to identify the restoration of the left–right symmetry.

Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) offers a comparison between two types of answers to the same social problems: unemployment, poverty and crime. In the earlier centuries exclusion was the answer. The French Hopital General (1656) replaced it by containment. The institution was a combination of a hospital and jail and offered a solution by isolating insane, unemployed and criminal people at the expense of the society. The 20th century welfare state has a different answer to the same questions. This is, however, challenged by financial limitations. Foucault offers a solution by combining social security and individual autonomy, which was not considered to be important before.

Historically, static symmetric bodies and ornaments are geometric idealizations in the Platonic tradition. Actually, symmetries are locally and globally broken by phase transitions of instability in dynamical systems generating a variety of new order and partial symmetries with increasing complexity. The states of complex dynamical systems can refer to, for example, atomic clusters, crystals, biomolecules, organisms and brains, social and economic systems. The paper discusses dynamical balance as dynamical symmetry in dynamical systems, which can be simulated by computational systems. Its emergence is an interdisciplinary challenge of nonlinear systems science. The philosophy of science analyses the common methodological framework of symmetry and complexity.