An international rule of law complementing modern states' domestic rule of law seems to be emerging. At least in the four issue areas of international law considered here – international trade, security, labour, and environmental law – empirical evidence suggests that relevant dispute settlement procedures have been judicialized and their use by complainants as well as their acceptance by defendants have increased in practice. Albeit still far from what we are used to from the domestic rule of law, the emergence of an international rule of law can be regarded as indicative of a fundamental transformation of modern states.

Change in European cultural history has, for a long period, been discussed through two interrelated notions, that of science and that of history. This paper traces the various stages of this discussion from Antiquity to the present day from the point of view of history. Two reoccurring and paradigmatic characters of mythological descent, Odysseus and Prometheus, illustrate how history as a realm for human responsibility and future planning has established itself as a specific European construct, with the 18th century as its final breakthrough in practical and ideological terms. A close analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing the Vitruvian Man, in statu nascendi, shows how the individual human being carrying the obligations and the promises of this history, is envisioned. The final remarks underline the importance of scientific knowledge in the concrete shaping of this responsibility and a plea for an increased cooperation across the disciplines.

As a scientist whose primary passion is art and graphics I have, for as long as I can remember, sought to find a satisfactory bridge between Art and Science. I have invariably found the attempts that I have come across are, at best, unsatisfactory and, at worst, specious. Books purporting to find ‘Art’ in the ‘Sciences’, or vice versa, usually consist of collections of photographs that reveal some previously hidden worlds (often taken by electron microscopes) or elegant images, which are some sort of visual representation of some theoretical/mathematical results. Modern computer-graphics packages have resulted in a plethora of elegant images. But are they art? Maybe, maybe not, perhaps it is just semantics and, anyway, perhaps it does not matter in general. I would have the board from a computer and other elegant flotsam dropped overboard from our technologically advanced world, which produces so much unusable obsolete technology. It is as elegant as a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bridget Riley Op Art creation, but is it art? As always in these cases, I seek not the answer but to understand the question.

The artist Allen Jones contacted me last year about an imaginative idea for the 2004 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in London. The idea that he and David Hockney had come up with, was to organize an exhibition of drawings that people who were not practising artists produced and used during their work. This was not be an exhibition of art by people who paint or draw as a sideline or hobby, but an exhibition of ‘artwork’ – in particular, drawings that had played a crucial role in their work. In the case of scientists, their drawings made by hand rather than by computer, and which had formed part of the research process. In response to this initiative, I collected together some drawings made during the period 1985 to 1987 when the field of Fullerene Science was born.

Conformity to observations takes on a particular significance in relation to weather prediction. Day-to-day weather changes constitute the temporal evolution of a complex and highly chaotic system, and yet the accuracy of weather forecasts can be, and are, readily and regularly assessed by both practitioners and the general public. Here, the development of weather prediction is portrayed against the backcloth of the role played by the criterion of ‘conformity to observations’ in regulating progress. It has served as a crude banner for castigating an early attempt at forecasting, sustaining an empirically-based but theoretically unsupported approach, summarily dismissing some attempts and yet ignored in another. In more recent developments the criterion has been both deliberately and justifiably weakened, and even turned on its head.

Much of the rich urban culture of Central and Eastern Europe was abruptly interrupted in the course of the 20th century, leaving towns and cities literally disconnected from the international urban network. Many cities also became border cities in a metaphorical sense, because their geographic position and the prestige of their institutions as well as their cityscape made them a focus of both affinity and resistance against national and supra-national political power systems. Successive wars and the ensuing changes on the political map of Central and Eastern Europe led to cities being systematically devastated for political-military and ideological reasons. However, they have demonstrated a striking capacity for recovery and revival.

Free Trade has always been highly contested, but both the arguments about it and the treaties that regulate it have changed dramatically since the Second World War. Under the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime, objections to free trade were essentially economic, and tariffs were a nation state's primary means of protecting its interests. However, by the early 1970s, tariffs had been substantially reduced, and the imposition and removal of non-tariff barriers that reflected a wide range of domestic concerns about the protection of health, safety, and the environment have since come to dominate trade agreements and their implementation. The expanding scope of these international treaties, and their effect on domestic regulatory objectives, has created new challenges for the nation-state, and for the international trade system as a whole. Domestic regulatory objectives that are generally embedded in a nation state's legal system or even in its constitution, are now negotiable and are susceptible to adjudication at the international level where they may, or may not, be used to camouflage unrelated economic interests. The international trade system adapted to this situation in 1994 by transforming the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has more effective means for dispute resolution and includes a number of special agreements – such as the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) – with rules for balancing the economic concerns of free trade with the social concerns of regulatory objectives. These developments have generated legal queries about the general legitimacy of transnational governance arrangements and their ‘constitutionalization’, i.e. the quest for transnational governance that is mediated by law and not only accepted de facto but considered deserving of acceptance.

Fully adequate high-level cross-cultural communication is not feasible, whereas advanced high-level cross-cultural communication is both possible and necessary. In this spirit, four important areas relating to literature, language, research, and religion are discussed. To the extent that cross-cultural communication does not work satisfactorily, as with respect to EU languages and large-scale religious relations, we are dealing with an ignited cultural fuse.

Turkey is about to start accession negotiations with the European Union. The question of whether Turkey qualified as a European country in terms of history and culture, was put on the European agenda by conservative European politicians in the mid-1990s and seemed to have been solved in Turkey's favour at the Helsinki summit of 1999, but it was hotly debated again throughout 2004. At the same time, a parallel debate developed among those who accepted Turkey's European credentials in principle (or felt they had to accept them). This was the debate about Turkey's state of preparedness and the degree to which the country fulfilled the so-called ‘Copenhagen Criteria’, which stipulated that candidates for membership of the EU should have a stable democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and a functioning market economy. In the end, as we know, the attempts of the ‘fundamentalist’ opposition to Turkey's candidature on the part of people like former Eurocommissioner Bolkestein, German CDU/CSU leaders Merkel and Stoiber or ex-president Giscard d'Estaing failed. Turkey's progress towards fulfilment of the Copenhagen Criteria was deemed sufficient by the European Commission, and on 17 December 2004 the momentous decision to start the accession process was taken unanimously at the summit in The Hague.

Interest in the question of Turkey's candidature has meant that an extraordinary number of studies, reports, papers have appeared, analysing the current situation and drawing scenarios for the future. The authors of this Focus have not intended to add to this, or to investigate the chequered history of Turkish-European relations since the signing of the accession treaty in 1963.

‘Philosophical anthropology’ was initiated in the late 1920s as an alternative to abstract philosophical definitions of human nature (‘animal rationale’) and to the exclusively empirical, physical study of anthropology. Philosophical anthropology focused upon what it meant to be a human being. Its founders concentrated upon the situated existence of human beings and their ability to think beyond and to deny even what was actually vitally important to them. For Cassirer, these efforts remained too abstract because they failed to take the breadth of human cultural activity into account. The decisive feature of human life is neither reason nor language. These are derivative from symbolism, not the other way around. Human beings are best described as ‘animal symbolicum’. The error of earlier anthropological conceptions was not that they venerated reason, but that they ignored the body and so separated reason from emotion. The concept of symbolism, as Cassirer conceived it, overcame this dualism. His philosophical anthropology has been vindicated today in many areas of empirical research, but replacing the concept of ‘reason’ with that of ‘symbolism’ was no minor revision to the Western philosophical tradition, and the amplification and application of this new outlook has barely begun.

It seems to be well known that life cannot arise in a racemic mixture of molecules (L=D). The various physical mechanisms that could influence the homochirality of the molecules responsible for life are reviewed together with a model where these molecules might be produced in the galaxy prior to the formation of the earth. The focus is on the influence of a powerful supernovae explosion to affect the homochirality of these molecules. Possible tests of this concept with meteorites and future space missions are described.

‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘postcolonial’ are fashionable terms in literary studies these days. Henk Wesseling, in his ‘Editorial’ in the European Review (12(3): 267–271, 2004), with regard to another fashionable term, ‘empire,’ warned that the same word may mean different things to different people. So too it is with ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’.

To begin with, there is the matter of orthography. I have used unhyphenated ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism.’ In fact, the hyphenated forms are the older and more conventional. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin use them in their 1989 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, still a landmark publication in the field, as does John Thieme in his 1996 Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Both restrict the use of ‘post-colonial’ to ‘writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain’ (Ref. 1, p. 1) and ‘the anglophone literatures of countries other than Britain and the United States’ (Ref. 2, p. 1). Both spurn chronology, reaching back to the 19th and early 20th centuries for examples of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Ashcroft et al. and Thieme thoroughly differ, though, as to the term's precise charge. Ashcroft et al. see ‘post-colonialism’ as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,’ and this because they find there to be ‘a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’ (Ref. 1, p. 2). Thieme finds this use of the term problematic, because of its association with ‘writing and other forms of cultural production which display an oppositional attitude towards colonialism, which are to a greater or lesser degree anti-colonial in orientation’ (Ref. 2, p. 1-2).

It is widely accepted that internationalization and the increasing loss of parliamentary control over political power challenge the legitimacy of national democratic systems and their core institutions. We first present results from a study of public communication, which, when examined in the context of theories of legitimation, indicate that these processes do not necessarily lead to the erosion or breakdown of popular support for the nation state. The idea that there is a linear cause-and-effect relationship is overly simple, and a more detailed analysis is called for. Legitimation of a political system through public communication is a back-and-forth process which is determined by the system's specific institutional arrangements and by the fortuitous twists and turns of public debate. Nation states have more extensive, diverse and deeply rooted sources of legitimation than is often assumed.

The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923. In the first 20 years of its existence, the political leadership of the republic embarked on a process of nation building in Anatolia and at the same time changed the face of Turkish society, stamping on it a particular brand of secular modernity. This article tries to find out what were the common characteristics of the small band of men who made up the leadership of the republic and to what extent their shared background and experience can help explain the course they charted for Turkey after its creation. One of the conclusions is that Turkey, although located geographically for more than 90% in Asia, is in fact a creation of Europeans, who shaped the country after their own image.

There are cities that lie on a border, and others that accommodate borders and are formed by these. Political events have robbed these cities of a part of their reality, such as their hinterland, their tight bond with the rest of the national territory. History has torn deep gashes in their fabric and made a world stage of their everyday life, turning them into a theatre of the absurd. In these cities, one experiences, in an extraordinary manner, the duality of the border and its positive and negative effects in accordance with whether the borders are open or closed, rigid or flexible, anachronistic, protective or destructive.

Tobacco use was well established among the inhabitants of the Americas when Columbus made his epic voyage. They smoked it in pipes and as cigars and also used it as snuff; it played an important role in social and religious practices. By 1550 pipe smoking was well established in Europe, to be largely supplanted by snuff in the 18th century and by cigarettes in the latter part of the 19th century. It was only proven in the 1950s that smoking was the major cause of lung cancer, which in turn, was responsible for an increasing proportion of deaths. Efforts to reduce smoking have had a limited success so far, but the overall incidence of lung cancer in the UK is now falling. Patterns across Europe are generally similar.

Symmetry and chemistry have been in a fruitful interplay, initially in spectroscopy and crystallography, lately in more traditional domains of chemistry, such as reactivity and conformational analysis. A simple phenomenological approach suffices to get an idea about the symmetries of molecules whereas group theoretical approach greatly facilitates the understanding of molecular vibrations, electronic structure, and the mechanism of chemical reactions. In our discussion, the multi-level relationship between symmetry and chemistry is demonstrated by a sampler of examples, including the variations of symmetry of free molecules and molecular packing in crystals. Symmetry considerations continue to assist chemistry in systematizing and interpreting observations and also in discovering new reactions, molecules, and other materials.

Crime fiction is currently one of the most globalized, most popular, and biggest-selling of commercial genres, but there has been almost no attempt to study it in relation to other kinds of post-colonial literature. There is no bibliography of crime writers as ‘post-colonial’, and no attempt to generalize about a body of fiction. This paper is a brief extract from work in progress, based on the books of over fifty Anglophone or Francophone authors who might be categorized as ‘post-colonial’ by birth or residence. I test post-colonial theory against crime fiction, to argue that strong generic conventions call into question some of that theory's received ideas. I consider two linked problems: first, so-called ‘colonial mimicry’ and its obverse, ‘ventriloquism’, because it seems to me a wrong turning in 20th-century criticism; and, second, the demand for new literatures which would create ‘national identities’. I argue that ‘mimicry’ makes no sense in the context of a strong popular genre, and that accusations of ‘colonial mimicry’ reinscribe the asymmetries of judgement they appear to attack. The possibility of imagined geopolitical units as identity-forming, especially in genres which are informed by social criticism, calls into question the demand for literature as a source of national identity.

While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. Public information and debate are essential ingredients of democracy, and their confinement to the individual national public sphere threatens the democratic aspirations and legitimacy of transnational institutions. Therefore, it is often argued that the European Union can only achieve greater legitimacy if there is a Europeanization of national public spheres. Has public discourse in fact Europeanized in the last decades? Here we present results from a study of major national newspapers from five European countries. Europeanization is defined in three dimensions: Europeanization of contents, Europeanization of public identities, and Europeanization of communication flows. Our results show that national public spheres are, in fact, quite resilient and that change is slow or halting. We discuss several possible explanations for this resilience, and go on to question the assumption that the legitimacy of European institutions depends on Europeanization of public discourse.

From the start, Turkey's aspirations to join the European Union aroused considerable opposition. Recently, the debate has focused increasingly on supposed disparities in the spheres of culture, politics or mentality, implying that this Muslim country would not be able to comply with European norms and values. Supporters of Turkey's candidacy, on the other hand, have pointed out that Turkey has always been an important element of the European balance of power and was, in the nineteenth century, even a member of the Concert of Europe. Both sides invoke history to justify their arguments. The present paper examines the evolution of the European state system and the major stages in the history of the Turkish–European relationship, with a view to arriving at a more balanced judgement. It can be shown that new concepts, such as state interest and balance of power, had already begun in the sixteenth century to undermine the old theological worldview and, beginning with the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was treated – at least de facto – as an actor that observed fully the norms of European public law (jus publicum Europeum). However, a de jure recognition of the Empire's status had to wait until the Treaty of Paris (1856), but even then it did not include an effective guarantee of Ottoman territorial integrity.

In 1953, Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Half a year later, I attended a course in English at a British university. We were a group of students from various countries, and we met for social evenings once a week. There were discussions and mutual entertainment as well as just getting together. On one of these occasions, I asked a question relating to the literary aspect of the course: ‘What was the reaction in this country when Winston Churchill got the Nobel Prize in Literature?’ There was complete silence. The main teacher was clearly embarrassed and looked at the other teachers, but not a word was uttered. Finally, he turned to me and said: ‘There was evidently no reaction.’ He looked around once more and added: ‘I think they were glad the old chap got something.’ The man referred to as ‘the old chap’ was about 80 years old at the time, a legend in his own lifetime, the receiver of heaps of distinctions including literary prizes.

Everything that has to do with the Nobel Prize – nominations, reports, discussions – is subject to secrecy for 50 years. This is a blessing for us who are in charge of the Prize. The other side of the coin is that, as far as Churchill is concerned, I am now in a position to account for things that have been hidden so far. Let us see what the archives of the Academy can tell us, bearing in mind that one of the interesting aspects of the Prize is its function in cultural communication.