The 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which aimed to excise the spatial remnants of Francoism from the Spanish landscape, and to recognise Republican victimhood, was blatantly inadequate, and left victims in the same legal position as before.1 In the immediate aftermath of the law, the Spanish state institutionally divorced itself from the recuperation of Republican memory by closing down the Office for Victims of the War and Dictatorship,2 and reducing the funding devoted to historical memory from 6.5 to 2.5 million in 2011. This article will examine the subsequent transnationalisation of Republican memory, in the form of its Argentinisation, and economic protest movements’ appropriation of the memory of the Second Republic. Relatedly, it seeks to answer overarching questions concerning the reach and scope of global memory edicts in national memory debates.

Research with human embryonic stem cells (HESC) is very much disputed from an ethical point of view as it requires the destruction of the embryo to derive the stem cells. The legal situation in Europe is heterogeneous. This article gives an overview of the current debate on this topic by outlining the international regulations and the national legislation in the European Union. It is shown that the different legal positions are like an in vivo experiment for contrasting solutions. Furthermore, the legal situation in Germany is examined in more detail and with it the effectiveness and the constitutionality of the requirements.

Open-space labs and research environments are increasingly common worldwide. They are supposed to facilitate interactions among researchers, but can be disruptive to those who need to be in a quiet environment in order to concentrate. This problem is increasingly felt across the natural, medical and social sciences, has a clear interdisciplinary and cross-cultural relevance, but has been the focus of limited attention. We propose some simple suggestions for researchers struggling in an open-space lab, based on a literature review and our experience in open spaces in various labs and countries (Australia, China, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the USA) as undergrads, PhD students, postdocs, researchers and (W. van der Werf) professors. Our aim is to help researchers working in open-space offices and labs with some straightforward solutions that will make their lives and work easier.

Imagining a future scenario where human beings have evolved in ways so that they are no longer human but post- or transhuman has been a recurrent trope in science fiction literature since the very inception of the genre. More recently, the possibility of a future including posthumans has received significant philosophical attention due to the emergence of activist ‘transhumanism’. This paper will analyse some of the philosophical problems in evaluating whether a posthuman future is a good future that we ought to pursue. It will first briefly describe the transhumanist conception of the posthuman, and the different routes envisaged from the current human condition to the future posthuman condition. The second part will then present and analyse some fundamental philosophical problems we encounter when we try to assess whether and to what extent the posthuman future is good and/or desirable; and it will be concluded that assessing the ethical desirability of the posthuman future is close to impossible.

The earth, a futility in space, is the only home for all humans and, at present, the theatre of the globalization of our society. Humanity has always been wondering about the origin of our blue planet. This is rather irrelevant for everyday life however. What really matters is that all of us can live in harmony and diversity on ‘Mother Earth’ and preserve our environment for future generations. Our planet is inhabited by an amazing variety of living creatures, among which at present are 7 billion humans. This number has risen at an alarming rate for more than a century and will reach the 10 billion mark around the year 2100. But whether the earth resources can cope with the growing demands is most uncertain. What will be our common future? This global issue has been the focus of the Reports of the so-called Club of Rome,1 the Brundtland Report,2 etc, but the responses of society are as yet inadequate. Science and technology can now unravel the many subtle interrelations between geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere and monitor the worldwide growing impact of human activities on the environment.3 Earth observation from aerospace and geo-information systems have opened new vistas in this field. It is evident that there are limits to growth and that the present ‘rape of the earth’ should be stopped and a master plan for global sustainability be made. This plan should not be imposed top-down but be rooted in our free will and thus have a polycentric structure. The political agenda for globalization should not be a flywheel for economic growth but be oriented to the tripartite: sustainability–social balance–economic requirements. Can we make this happen?

This article empirically examines the relationship between alternative measures of financial development and the unemployment rate in a selected group of ten EU countries. Using annual data for the sample period of 1991–2012, we first perform different panel regressions (using averaged and non-averaged versions of data) for unemployment rate. These panel regressions are based on a regression equation that includes inflation rate and growth rate of GDP, in addition to the level of financial development, as explanatory variables. Secondly, we apply Granger causality tests to investigate the nature of the causality between financial development and the unemployment rate for each country in our sample. The empirical findings suggest that unemployment rate and financial development are negatively correlated, and there is a statistically significant causal effect of financial development on unemployment in certain countries. However, the results are not robust to the choice of proxy measure for financial development.

Humans and technology are not in symbiosis. They are one species, not two. Humans, enveloped in artefacts of many kinds and ages (from writing, to airplanes), are evolving as one species, the ‘human & machine species’. This evolution is visible and recorded in our lifetime. Here, I illustrate the evolution of the human & machine species by focusing on commercial aircraft, the cooling of electronics, and modern athletics, which is a special laboratory for witnessing the evolution of animal locomotion. I show that these evolutionary forms of flow organization are in accord with, and can be predicted based on the law of physics that governs evolution in nature, bio and non-bio: the constructal law. Evolution, life and the human & machine species are physics.

This article argues that the effects of high-level corruption scandals on the future of a dominant party depend on the existence of a rule of law system based on the separation of powers. The article will study two examples from a comparative perspective to concretise its theoretical claims: the Christian Democracy Party in Italy, which was the dominant party from 1948 to 1992, and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey. The comparison will be based on an institutionalist perspective. The first part tries to provide a theoretical clarification of the concepts of predominant party systems and corruption. The second part discusses whether the Turkish and Italian party systems can be classified as predominant and the characteristics of these systems. The final section seeks to draw out similarities and differences between these two systems and the effects corruption has on them.

The number, scale and variety of threats to the safety of the contemporary world are forcing multilateral cooperation to tighten. The United Nations is the main forum of such cooperation and has a vast spectrum of powers. In addition the European Union tries to act in a similar way, although on a much smaller scale. Both organizations, then, seem to have much in common and appear to be mutual partners. Is this cooperation really going as well as one would expect? Do they treat each other as equal partners? This article tries to answer these questions and more.

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero’s oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction’s indeterminacy to Surrealism’s fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.

This article studies the formation of the European Union as a technological discourse. It traces the technological narrative from the origins of the Community until the current debates around the internet and the future of the Union. In search of a renewed telos, the European rhetoric of an open internet could express the commitment of the EU to re-link its popular legitimacy away from liberal abstractions and closer to the concrete, subjective experience of individuals, actively sharing a peaceful, dense and diverse democratic life.