Words can be confusing and titles can be misleading, particularly if titles consist of one simple word. Two titles suffice to illustrate this phenomenon. In 2000, a book appeared with the title Empire and in 2002 another book appeared with exactly the same title. In the first Empire, Michael Hardt, an American literary theorist, and Antonio Negri, an Italian political philosopher, argued that although classical imperialism is over, Empire is alive and well, albeit in a new form. For them ‘Empire’ means the following: ‘Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’ This is a rather special definition of Empire because what one usually has in mind when using that word is something very different. It is the Empire that the other book, written by the British historian Niall Ferguson, is about. This book describes, as the subtitle indicates, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. But it is also about something more, as is apparent from the rest of the subtitle: and the Lessons for Global Power. These lessons are intended for the rulers of the Empire of today, the Americans. While the first Empire is the Bible for anti-globalists, Ferguson's book can be considered as the New Testament of the advocates of America's imperial ambitions.

Every society produces its own concept of otherness. It is a universal fact, necessary for the social cohesion of the majority group. In recent decades, along with the development of a European consciousness and citizenship, the concept of ‘other’ relating to immigration is largely imposed on Muslims in Western Europe. There are historical reasons for this social enmity that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and to nineteenth century colonialism. However, other contemporary reasons have reinforced these mind-sets; some of which are international events (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution, the wars in Iraq and Syria, international terror of Islamic inspiration, and so on). These facts have – at least since 11 September 2001 – made the expression of Islamophobic opinions politically and morally more acceptable in Europe.

Assisted reproduction has been carried out within the Danish health care system since the beginning of the 1980s. The first independent act on artificial reproduction was adopted in Denmark 15 years later, in 1997. The issue of assisted reproduction is still a subject of debate in Denmark. The main driving forces in Danish society when establishing legal regulation in this area are existential, social and cultural/religious. The involvement of both scientific and lay voices and the timing of the ethical debate are important factors in the creation of the Danish legislation on assisted reproduction.

‘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.

Postcolonialism is briefly presented as an academic approach in contemporary literary studies, with two opposite currents as far as the study of Latin American literature is concerned. The first constructs the relationship between Latin American and European literature as oppositional, whereas the second focuses in a more harmonious way on their interrelationship. It is argued that both currents cluster around a divergent reading of the ‘cannibal’ metaphor. The article then centres on the position of the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who covers both postcolonial tendencies. This is shown by focusing upon a specific case, his early novella Aura. Attention is paid to the tension between Europe and Latin America, both on a literary level (intertextuality) and on a historical level (colonization and nation-building).

This article reads the German writer Jenny Erpenbeckʼs influential novel Go, Went, Gone (2015) as a significant contribution to connecting the current refugee problematic to the decolonization discourse in the German and European public sphere. Along with the public discussions about looted art objects during German colonialism in existing German museums and the emerging Humboldt Forum, the novel registers a shift in the culture of collective memory from a singular focus on the holocaust toward a more inclusive and more connected memory of multiple pasts of violence and atrocity, including German colonialism. This multilayered memory reveals the refugee problem not as something external and unexpected but as something that is deeply connected to German and European history. The novelʼs protagonist Richard, an educated former East German, is the novelistʼs experiment to articulate the urgent need for decolonization as a possible solution toward the refugee problematic. The novel depicts the reality and imagines a decolonized world in which less discrimination, less exclusion, more hospitality, and more acceptance might be possible.

The Mediterranean Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development (MSESD) Report reveals that the Mediterranean is an exceptional eco-region not only due to its geographical characteristics, but also its heterogeneous economic structure, in which education is regarded as a key driver of sustainable development. Given this importance, this study attempts to investigate the impact of education as a channel for human capital accumulation on two different growth concepts in a panel group of eight Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) countries. We utilize an endogenous growth model using annual observations spanning from 2000 to 2017 by employing the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator. Empirical results obtained from the Augmented Mean Group estimator indicate a positive impact of education, regardless of the growth proxy. In addition, empirical findings reveal that the impact of education on inclusive growth is five times higher than that on output growth. We also find that capital is the main driver of growth while inclusive growth is primarily triggered by education. One of the main policy implications raised in this study is that education reforms that attempt to improve educational quality will assist policymakers to achieve sustainable development goals. Extensive policy discussions related to the experiential findings are also provided.

In the post-imperial East Central Europe after the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, disappointment was commonplace. The imperial successor states were involved in revengeful animosities with neighbouring states, torn by their majority population’s hatred of domestic minorities, bereft of tens of millions of their co-nationals who had remained in now foreign nation-states, exposed to huge influxes of refugees, and embittered by the territorial concessions that they were forced to make. By contrast, the newly established nation-states were plagued by miserable social and economic conditions, poor infrastructures, unemployment, inflation, rigid and immobile social stratification, and corrupt and inefficient administrations. Such developments gave rise to huge and traumatic deportations and migrations of populations, which, paradoxically, simultaneously immensely increased the mobility of their imagination. Using the technique of ‘subversive mimicry’, these nationally indistinct elements established cross-national transborder communities as the zones of ‘national indifference’ within the new nation-states. Carried by the energy of their longing, these communities introduced imbalances, fissures, and divisions into the nation-state communities, which determined their belonging.

The common opinion that the history of Greek medicine can be characterized as the triumph of a rational, Hippocratic medicine, has been strongly attacked over the last 30 years. Instead of a single dominant theory of humoral medicine, scholars now point to the great variety of theories current in the time of Hippocrates, 450–350 BC, and to the great variety and number of those who offered healing in the medical marketplace. They are best described as craftsman, with similar behaviour and status to the local carpenter. Others sought the aid of the gods in temple medicine. The resulting picture emphasizes a dynamic situation.

Whether history as a discipline is of any practical use, is a question that is open to debate. That many people find pleasure in ‘doing’ history however, is an undeniable fact. Professional historians find pleasure in writing history and even more so in working in archives and thus getting immediately in touch with the past. Many others find pleasure in reading history. Increasingly, professional historians also succeed in reaching a wide readership.

The idea of continuous progress for mankind is no longer unquestioned. Problems of equality, rationality and emotion are unsolved. Conflict exists between cultural conformity and the threat of internationalism. In particular, modern rationalism is in conflict with traditional beliefs.

Generalizing between postmodernity and postmodernism is of doubtful value. The shift from communism to postcommunism has led to a decline, or different significance, of postmodernism in Eastern Europe.

Early in 2020, while we were preparing for the Chinese lunar calendar’s New Year’s Day and Spring Festival on 25 January, the Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province and one of China’s biggest cities. The virus quickly spread through the entire country, causing thousands of people to lose their lives and many more to be hospitalized or quarantined. As a natural disaster suddenly appearing in the present world, the virus is a kind of revenge of nature upon human beings, who have exhausted the earth’s natural resources, ill-treated nature, and sometimes continued eating wild animals during the past few decades, as the grand project of modernity led to a process of globalization. The Butterfly Effect of this Black Swan, the coronavirus, set off a global upheaval. In China itself, through the joint efforts of ordinary people and medical personnel as well as central and local government intervention, the virus was effectively contained. Cases imported from abroad still flare up now and again though, and the epidemic escalates globally. Since this is a global health emergency, it should be contained by global governance.