This paper deals with the Institutions of the European Union in the draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (hereinafter: ‘the draft Constitution’) submitted to the European Council meeting in Thessaloniki on 20 June 2003. It describes these institutions and their task from a perspective of the Union's democratic legitimacy. The paper is based on a book entitled The European Union: a Polity of States and Peoples, which will be published by Stanford University Press and Hart Publishing, Oxford. In this book, I examine the democratic legitimacy of the European Union as a whole. The book parts from the proposition that the Union is a ‘body politic’ which develops into a federal system, however not a State, with a parliamentary consensual (non-majoritarian) form of government. In the meantime, the draft Treaty has been amended by the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) held in Brussels on 17/18 June 2004. In so far as the amendments relate to the subject of this paper, they are mentioned below in the text or the endnotes.

On 1 May 2004, Europe changed. This date marks both a beginning and an end. The enlargement of the European Union signals the beginning of a new phase in the history of Western Europe, and, for the new members from Eastern Europe, the end of a long period of exclusion and separation. Commentaries on this epochal event usually focus on ‘hard’ institutional factors such as political rearrangements, legal coordination and economic readjustments, etc. I will focus more on the ‘soft’ cultural and human factors; what I consider to be the intangibles and imponderables of a new, emerging Europe. I am convinced that culture really matters in social life.

In this article, I examine how defeat in war has shaped intellectual discourse in postwar Japan, particularly intellectual debates on war guilt. Known as ‘war responsibility debates’ in Japanese, the disconnection that is imposed on national identity by defeat has led to a number of different responses from Japanese opinion leaders and scholars. Implicit in these responses is a desire to restore fundamental continuity, either by revising the appraisal of war, or by making guilt the unifying element in a transwar national identity. Defeat is the crux of the issue around which intellectuals have had to navigate in their quest for a continuous history for postwar Japan. This article considers the contributions made to this debate by Maruyama Masao, a pioneering thinker on political thought in postwar Japan; by the scholars in the Science of Thought Research Group in their study of political apostasy (tenkō) and the more recent advent of revisionist historians in the ‘Liberal School of History’ group. I conclude that this ongoing debate should itself be regarded as a positive phenomenon, as it continues to presume a basic link between the war and accountability that is fundamental to the integrity of Japan's postwar democracy.

Cannabis is the most widely used illegal recreational drug in Europe; up to 5% of the total population are regular users in some countries. Smoking cannabis can damage the lungs, and some users may become psychologically dependent on the drug. Heavy cannabis use may also be associated with an increased risk of psychiatric illness — although no cause and effect relationship has been established. Nevertheless, there is a general consensus among medical and scientific experts that the health hazards of cannabis have been exaggerated. European countries differ widely in their attitude to enforcing the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which declared cannabis to be an illegal narcotic. In the Netherlands the so-called ‘Dutch Experiment’ has decriminalized cannabis use for almost 30 years without any serious adverse social or public health consequences. On the other hand, most Scandinavian countries maintain a fiercely punitive legal regime, while other countries in Europe are moving towards a relaxation of the criminal penalties for possession and use. There is an urgent need for more debate about the need to reform the cannabis laws and for more consistency across Europe.

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were created, probably in the second half of the 9th century BC, in the framework of the Greek epic tradition of oral formulaic poetry, which started in the Peloponnese in proto-Mycenaean times (c. 1600 BC). The epic verse, the dactylic hexameter, must have been taken over from the Minoan Cretans. Whereas most 19th century scholars were analysts, considering Homer's epics' conflations of older and more recent epic poems, most modern scholars are unitarians, recognizing the unity of both epics, thanks to modern insights in the nature of oral traditional poetry and to modern narratology. Although many modern scholars ascribe the Odyssey to a later poet than that of the Iliad, there are no convincing arguments against the Ancients' opinion that both epics are the work of one single poet called Homer. Both Iliad and Odyssey are characterized by the principle of ‘unity of action’, a principle not found in other ancient epic poetry. There are reasons to suppose that Homer learnt the art of epic versification in Smyrna, his native city, by listening to performances of Aeolic singers. Driven by Ionic self-consciousness he transposed the epic Aeolic Kunstsprache into Ionic, thus creating the so-called Homeric dialect. He could perform his monumental epics at great religious festivals and at the courts of princes. There is evidence that he gave performances in the island of Euboea, the only prosperous region of the contemporary Greek world, and that there his epics were eventually written down. Thus, Homer's epics are the end-point of the oral epic tradition and the starting point of written Greek and European literature.

During the second half of the 19th century, the psychology of language was invented as a discipline for the sole purpose of explaining the evolution of spoken language. These efforts culminated in Wilhelm Wundt's monumental Die Sprache of 1900, which outlined the psychological mechanisms involved in producing utterances and considered how these mechanisms could have evolved. Wundt assumes that articulatory movements were originally rather arbitrary concomitants of larger, meaningful expressive bodily gestures. The sounds such articulations happened to produce slowly acquired the meaning of the gesture as a whole, ultimately making the gesture superfluous. Over a century later, gestural theories of language origins still abound. I argue that such theories are unlikely and wasteful, given the biological, neurological and genetic evidence.

Human language is qualitatively different from animal communication systems in at least two separate ways. Human languages contain tens of thousands of arbitrary learned symbols (mainly words). No other animal communication system involves learning the component symbolic elements afresh in each individual's lifetime, and certainly not in such vast numbers. Human language also has complex compositional syntax. The meanings of our sentences are composed from the meanings of the constituent parts (e.g. the words). This is obvious to us, but no other animal communication system (with honeybees as an odd but distracting exception) puts messages together in this way. A recent theoretical claim that the sole distinguishing feature of human language is recursion is discussed, and related to these features of learned symbols and compositional syntax. It is argued that recursive thought could have existed in prelinguistic hominids, and that the key step to language was the innovative disposition to learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols

It is a recurrent theme in sociolinguistics that besides fully documenting endangered languages, it is important to ensure somehow that they will continue to be used. The basic trope is that of ‘language death’, analogous to the extinction of species. But the analogy fails: languages do not die, although their users may abandon them, usually in favour of a more widely spoken language. Nor does linguistic diversity increase cultural diversity — or the equal treatment of language groups mitigate inequality between and within groups. In addition, promoting minority, local and immigrant languages, which are all too often ill-equipped for modern life, actually strengthens the position of the dominant language as the only common language of communication: the more languages are spoken, the sooner English will take over. This process can be seen at work both in post-Apartheid South Africa and in the European Union as it undergoes enlargement.

Noam Chomsky is an enigma. To many, he is — and has been for 50 years — the most prominent and courageous academic opponent of his country's militarist ambitions around the globe. Yet among those who admire him on that score, few find it easy to relate to his seemingly obscure theories about language. The academic community acclaims Chomsky as the principal inspiration behind the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and related sciences — an intellectual development reflecting corporate pressures and initially sponsored by the United States military. This article investigates the paradoxical relationship between Chomsky's political activism and his science.

My aim is to show how the principal notions of cognitive linguistics, namely metaphor and metonymy are helpful in the analysis of the ancient Indian poetical text, the Rigveda. Their use enables us to reconstruct aspects of thinking of the Rigvedic poets and to explain some obscure metaphors. The basic way of conceptualization of desire in the Rigveda is presented.