The fear of refugees and migrants that has flooded Europe in the last few years emphasises the threat posed to contemporary European culture by the supposedly radically different Islamic culture. However, the roots of European Islamophobia reach far beyond that, all the way back to the Crusades; while Central and parts of Eastern Europe have mostly been feeding these roots with memories of Ottoman invasions. After inspecting these roots, this article sheds light on the irrefutable Christian sources of European culture, but also exposes other influences without which the culture would not exist today – especially the antecedent Greco-Roman antiquity, and the subsequent Renaissance, Humanism and Enlightenment. This outlines modern European and Western culture, characterised mainly by secularity, which is the precondition for religious freedom of non-Christian, alternative, and ‘non-native’ religions as well. This article emphasises that it would be difficult to include Islam amongst these latter religions since it has been an important contribution to the shaping of European culture for centuries. The old antagonisms between European and Islamic cultures therefore do not stem from their irreconcilable differences but from their resemblances – in other words: in the West, we are not afraid of Muslims because they are so radically different but because they are strikingly similar. The real threat to European and Western culture is therefore not Muslim migrants but a demagogic fuelling of the fears of the supposed Islamic threat.

TOPO-EUROPE is a multidisciplinary international research program that addresses the interaction of processes inherent to the deep Earth (lithosphere, mantle) with surface processes (erosion, climate, sea level), which together shaped the topography of Europe. The objective of the TOPO-EUROPE project is to assess neotectonic deformation rates and to quantify related geo-risks, such as earthquakes, flooding, landslides, rock falls and volcanism. Research, incorporating iterative data interactive modelling, focuses on the lithosphere memory and neotectonics, with special attention on the thermo-mechanical structure of the lithosphere, mechanisms controlling large-scale plate boundary and intraplate deformations, anomalous subsidence and uplift, and links with surface processes and topography evolution. The TOPO-EUROPE natural laboratories, in which these processes are analysed, cover a wide range of geodynamic settings. These include the post-collisional Alpine/Carpathian/Pannonian-Basin system, the very active Aegean-Anatolian and Apennines-Tyrrhenian orogens and back-arc basins, the Caucasus-Levant area in the Arabia-Europe collision zone, the Iberian Peninsula caught up between Alpine orogens, the meta-stable West and Central European Platform, the stable East-European Platform and the seismically active and elevated Scandinavian continental margin. The TOPO-EUROPE project is a component of the International Lithosphere Program and was initiated with the support of Academia Europaea. A European Science Foundation EUROCORES project provides funding for part of the TOPO-EUROPE research. Other parts of TOPO-EUROPE require support by participating organizations.

We live in an age where the extinction of languages has become a topic of discussion in many different circles. Opinions on whether the process should be stopped or considered profitable differ widely even in the field of linguistics, let alone in the public domain. A rational attitude presupposes the recognition that a language may constitute a value for some and that value judgements are controlled by more or less outspoken and divergent interests. In the case of a language, interest is taken in its maintenance (or suppression) at all the levels from the individual via the speech community and the scientific community up to mankind. These interests have to be made explicit before the value of a language can be assessed. Ultimately, such an evaluation must even be confronted with the costs that arise in the maintenance of a minority language or in the revitalization of a dying language.

We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on descriptive statistical analysis, we argue that both PT and AKP failed to build multi-class bases and thus had to mobilize the poor by using various strategies, most importantly expanding social assistance policies, which accelerated the emergence of a new welfare state.

The literature about global democracy deals with two different types of democratization: Type 1 is about spreading democracy across sovereign states as the basis for good governance. It focuses on the quality of the state/society-nexus: the balance between coercion, reward and identity. Type 2 is about democratizing world politics as such. In its most concrete expressions it focuses on the relationship between international society (a community of states) and world society (a community of people). The contemporary structure of multilevel governance provides the rationale behind this: national democracies are ineffective in controlling essential centres of power. This implies a need to scale up democracy to global proportions. However, in Type 1 considerations the term democracy often is an empty shell. This blinds observers for checks and balances and types of pluralism in non-democratic states. It also blinds them for misuse of democratic claims in democratic states. Aspiring global democracy in terms of Type 2 ignores that the presence of a central authority is a precondition inherent to the concept of democracy. Democratic theory cannot escape and is consequently caught up in its preconditions of a people (demos) and a government (cratos).

This article discusses religion in public space and the case study is Muslim minorities in Sweden. The discussion deals with secularisation trends within Muslim communities in Swedish society in view of the notion of counter-secularisation as a fixed and unchanged form of religious expressions in contemporary public life. What happens in Muslim communities as Muslims of various cultural backgrounds and religious orientations meet and interact in a new secular context? The article argues that, similar to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christian reform movements opened up for a relativisation of faith and thus to a certain extent initiated a secularisation process, a relativisation of faith is at present an ongoing process in Muslim communities in Sweden. Of the three definitions on secularisation, promoted by Jose Casanova, secularisation as ‘differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms’, ‘marginalisation of religion to a privatised sphere’, and ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, Muslim practices in Sweden indicate an adherence to these two first notions of the relation between ‘church and state’. As for the last definition of secularisation; ‘the decline of religious belief and practices’, which has to do with private religious practices, many Muslims would regard themselves as religious without claiming a public role for religion, similar to many Christians in Sweden. Furthermore, many of the traits considered to be ‘religious’, might well be attempts to protect a particular cultural context rather than being signs on increased religion as such.

John Rawls construed the Theory of Justice as central to political philosophy, and defended a series of purportedly egalitarian versions of such a theory. This essay points out that Rawls' philosophy became increasingly influential during precisely that period in recent history – the last quarter of the 20th century – in which global inequality increased most dramatically, and explores some possible explanations of this peculiar fact. It concludes by arguing that methodological defects make his approach fundamentally misguided: early versions of his theory are too abstract to be of relevance to understanding politics or as guides to action, and later ones too parochial.

The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two challengers is twice as large as the average support in the pre-election polls (a comparable difference was never registered in post-communist Romania). Our quantitative analysis uses election results from the past two decades and aggregated poll data from 2009 and reveals that a large share of the Romanian electorate avoids wasting votes and casts them for candidates with real winning chances. This article argues that polls presented to the voters, by the media during the elections, made the difference. They were used as electoral strategies to trigger strategic voting and thus promote specific candidates.

The discourse on ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ often implicitly or explicitly suggests that the natural sciences are at the forefront of the development towards worldwide mobility, communication and cooperation in the world of knowledge, while the humanities and social sciences look more frequently at the specifics of certain cultures and countries or lag behind in their intention to internationalize. On dits can be persistent in the domain, among other things, because systematic information on mobility and migration of scholars, as well as on their international activities is scarce. This contribution tries to extract what can be found on mobility and migration of scholars in Europe. The available information suggests that differences by disciplinary groups are unexpectedly small.

In many countries, we have seen an increase in economic inequality over the past 20 to 25 years. The populations might therefore have changed their attitude about how and how much different countries should intervene to reduce the extent of economic inequality. A question is whether there is any connection between changes in redistribution preferences and trends in economic inequality in the prosperous Nordic welfare states. This article contributes by examining whether there are differences in redistribution attitude and changes herein based upon socio-economic criteria, which might include self-interest arguments. Nordic countries are interesting because there have been differences in development, and even strong growth in economic inequality, especially in Sweden and Denmark, although these countries in the literature have been seen as highly equal societies. The analysis shows that support for redistribution is relatively stable over time in each country, but also that there are major differences between countries, with support being much higher in Finland compared with Denmark. Females, discriminated groups and the unemployed generally support redistribution to a higher degree. Ageing generally increases redistributional support, while more education reduces support for government redistribution in Finland. In all four countries, the highest income groups are less supportive of redistribution of income.

Basic scientific research is largely limited to the West. Original scientific contributions by the rest of the world are extremely limited, though China, South Korea and India are beginning to make their presence felt. This absence of scientific research is largely due to the undeveloped state of scientific culture. To counter this, systematic and rigorous theoretical training of talented minds is crucial. That requires close interaction with the West. The author suggests various ways to do so.

The processes of research proposals and evaluation have become ever more elaborate, but the system remains primitive. This paper argues for a fresh look at existing practices, with a view to developing less onerous and more efficient systems.

This article explores issues of visual representations and the interaction between fiction and reality in the making of the ‘idea of Europe’. It specifically focuses on David Černý's installation Entropa, exhibited at the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in 2009. The article argues that, despite the use of national stereotypes as the most characteristic representational element of the installation, Entropa does not limit itself to a sardonic critique of a political institution and a ridicule of national identities. Rather, it unveils the uneasiness of facing European identity as fiction. Entropa challenges the boundary between theatricality and reality, because it is exhibited in a political institution. The installation is addressed as a narrative of confusion, where fiction and fact interact in the construction of ideas on Europe, its history, politics, and culture. Therefore, the article concludes, such interaction potentially accommodates a critical standpoint towards the idea of Europe itself.

The involvement of Western citizens in jihadist activities bears important epistemological consequences: presented as a clash of civilizations, Islamic terrorism brings to the fore the issue of civil war. This article, after underlining that both terrorism and holy wars have a long pedigree in Western history, traces the interplay of religious and political tropes and semantics in the origin of terrorism, in the West in general and in Spain in particular. Highlighting the overlap of traditional faithful/unfaithful cleavages into modern friend/enemy political dichotomies, it summarizes the history of modern Spain as a sequence of civil wars in which political and meta-political discourses and practices of exclusion evolved towards extermination solutions in the twentieth century. This account allows for a reflection on the crisis of the regime of memory established after Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.

Jürgen Habermas’ recent work attempts to find ‘inspiring energy’ in the religious traditions, but without disturbing the rationality and freedoms of enlightenment modernity. Rather, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger, but not losing its hard-won advantage. For Habermas, the post-secular problem lies in how best to preserve the secular democratic institutions, and keep them from being ‘violated’ through religiously motivated politics. Habermas criticizes Nicholas Wolterstorff, who would allow the religious to overrun the political, potentially violating vulnerable democratic institutions such as the parliament. Habermas suggests use of an ‘institutional filter’ to protect parliament from violation. Throughout his post-secular writings, he persistently employs Victorian-like innuendo bestowing masculine ‘inspiring energy’, ‘vitality’, and danger onto religion, which runs the risk of ‘violating’ effeminate democratic institutions symbolized by the parliament; thus the prophylactic device, the ‘filter’, which protects her virtue. One is reminded of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’: in contrast to the Bundestag of today, with its glass dome (representing transparency) open to the public, we find in Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's work an enclosed, protective environment, a filter or prophylactic. In this vein, this paper will attempt to tease out from the language, word-choice, metaphors, and discourse of Habermas’ (post)secular dialectics that the religious enters solely on terms set by the secular, and plurality solely on terms set by stability/security.

To investigate the identity attributes of Turkish people living in France it is necessary to consider ‘Turkish identity’, determine the stage of their identity building, and understand the role religion plays in this quest for identity. Considering the complex structure of Ottoman society and the multiple and dynamic properties of loyalty criteria, it is difficult to ascertain the definition of ‘Turkishness’ even in Turkey. It is probably not necessary to explain that this is even more difficult for Turks who are in the minority.

Social and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1960s have had a major impact, in particular on the lives of young adults, but they have also affected the living conditions and opportunities of older adults. The presentation of a selection of relevant data about elderly people's demographic position in different countries of Europe is central in the second section. In the final section results of a Dutch survey are provided and information about new flexible forms of living arrangements when starting a new partner relationship after the age of fifty, are presented and discussed

In spite of all their assets and resources, global cities (to be understood as a concentration of global capital players along with a large diversity of other presences) have disorder wired into the urban space itself. There are contrasted understandings of public disorder and of its links with globalization. Some disorder is a necessary step in the adjustment of change. Urban space is then a political resource for all kinds of grievances, given coverage by the media and by the internet. The police are an essential piece in their own interaction with protesters. The ritualized nature of public confrontations should be underlined. France offers a good illustration of this phenomenon with its approach to order maintenance. Police officers’ ability to use or not use force, to distribute social status and to categorize their opponents in dealing with order reveals that the police’s role lies at the root of political order and the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms. Recent uprisings unveil the role played by urban space and by the empowerment it provides for people assembled together to make claims. Civil societies’ capacity of resistance to decisions or processes perceived as harmful should not be downplayed. New forms of religious terrorism however mark a new chapter in the links of globalization and disorder. Lots of unknowns emerge and we need to understand and accept unpredictability and even embrace it in order to make sense of it in the future. My assumption is that some current forms of public disorder are not just a repetition of past disorder and that we see new patterns emerging.