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

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.

Linguistic obstacles to common European Union action are overcome by a system of official languages (currently 11) for translation of official texts and interpretation at meetings. In practice, flexibility in language use is frequently required. Here, political tensions arise because of the onward march of English as a language of European Union dialogue; some Member States feel the status of their language is being threatened. In this context, education, culture and other programmes having language provisions can have a compensatory role: their multilingual approach reinforces the cohesion of the Union. Their significance will be even greater if enlargement brings 11 further languages into the Union.

This introduction gives a brief account of the conceptual framework and the topics of the case studies, especially the connection between the psychological concept of trauma applied in the social sciences and the characteristics of the historical analysis of traumatic events or processes, the link between the patterns of consolidation and the regimes of memory, and the context of the chosen case studies of this focus.

Post-humanism has recently come to China and challenges traditional humanism and the humanities. The author first offers a reflection on the evolution of humanism in modern Chinese intellectual history. To the author, we are now in a ‘post-theoretical era’, in which the function of theory is no longer so powerful and ubiquitous as it used to be. It is then argued that the rise of the ‘post-humanist’ trend in the West during the past decades indicates that, in the present era, humankind is only one of many species on earth, whose existence and development, to a large extent, depend on natural law. At the same time, post-humanism tells us that humankind may no longer be able to control some of its own creations. The author concludes by calling for digital humanities to bridge the gap between science and humanities and to establish a new relationship between the two.

In this article, we develop a framework for a comparative analysis of policy-making in the EU pre- and post-accession CEE countries (CEECs) in order to create generalized knowledge in some particular areas, such as quality infrastructure (QI). In order to find how public policy-makers perceive QI, we employ a triangulation methodology. The results show that policy-makers are not fully familiar with national QI concepts and seldom rely on experts’ opinion. Moreover, QI legislation is uncritically transferred from the EU.

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.

The present state of the study of philosophy in China cannot be understood if the introduction of Western philosophy, including Marxism, in the early decades of the 20th century is ignored. During the first half of the past century, philosophy flourished at Peking University with a heavy emphasis on social and political theory, as well as at Tsinghua University, which focused more on professionalization of the discipline, logic, epistemology and the history of philosophy. From 1957 to 1979, philosophical studies suffered severely under an increasingly unfavourable political climate. It is only recently that departments of philosophy have been reconstructed, not only in Beijing but also in all major universities. Like their colleagues in other disciplines, many philosophers are nowadays struggling with the dichotomy between the old and the new, the Chinese and the Western tradition, and resisting an uncritical absorption of Western ideas. Finally, some observations are made on the lectures that Jürgen Habermas gave in China in 2001.

In this paper I would like to draw on some of the European Science Foundation's past and present initiatives to illustrate how we might build on its strengths – and overcome its weaknesses – in order to capitalize on European scientific potential during one of the most important periods in Europe's recent history. In effect, I would like to set out my personal vision for the European Science Foundation (ESF). This is certainly a fitting time to be looking forward. We are not only on the brink of a new millennium, the ESF is also celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and should take stock of its past achievements and assess how these can be used to enhance European science over the next two and half decades. More crucially, Europe's social, political and economic landscape is undergoing one of its most radical upheavals, spearheaded by the euro and other facets of European union. These developments will inevitably have a major impact on how science is organized, funded and conducted. Like it or not, science is inextricably linked to Europe's socio-economic environment. The challenge is to develop a strategy, and the associated structures and resources, to place science at the heart of the ‘new Europe’.

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.

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.

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.

The importance of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been queried in recent years and this paper attempts to show why the notion is still essential to a proper understanding of the twin advance in scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the sixteenth century and led through such figures as Galileo to the new world view of Isaac Newton. The significance of the scholastic tradition, hermeticism and alchemy is not denied, but the major breakthrough that catapulted Europe into the modern age was the outcome of new conceptual tools and a fresh outlook on nature.

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.

We are beginning to understand how the brain is organized and works, how it evolved in the remote past and how it continually forms during the embryonic development of individual organisms. The study of the brain and its activity has recently advanced at an accelerating pace thanks to the convergence of a number of research strategies. At least three research lines occupy a particular position among these strategies: genetics and the molecular biology of neural cells and the central nervous system; cognitive science; and brain imaging. If the brain is the subject of biological studies at the cellular, intercellular and circuitry levels, the approach to the study of mind should be more subtle. Nonetheless, science has progressed a long way in this direction. Some recent advances in this field are briefly reviewed here, with particular emphasis on brain evolution and development, the role of sensory organs, coding and the processing of sensorial information, memory, rationality, meaning and consciousness.

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.

Against the background of over a hundred years, during which national farming lobbies became ever more resilient, this article examines the processes leading to the creation of the European Union's common agricultural policy. It demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the agricultural issue acquired an international dimension. It argues further, that this coincided with an increasing penetration of governments by the farming lobby. Finally, it describes the protectionist factors that determined the form of the Rome Treaty's articles on agriculture and the forces that ensured their implementation.