Innovation has become a leading slogan for world economies, politicians and science policy-makers alike. It is the driving force of Western consumer societies, which have come to expect the new to be replaced by the newest. However, in contrast to mere fads and fashions, the consequences of relentless innovation are real. They manifest themselves in changes in lifestyle, in the ways societies function and in profound changes in outlook and perception. This paper will ask how innovation became so central and which mechanisms sustain it in science and technology, art and individual life. One consequence to be further explored is the relative loss in importance of the individual creative act, with implications on how we view creativity, knowledge production and even the concept of the individual. Another question to be raised is that of the multiplicity of the new: despite the seeming diversity and multiplicity of option, is there also convergence or a process of synchronization at work?

Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, discovered the mechanical equivalent of heat. He was also soldier, administrator, founder of the Royal Institution in London and the English Garden in Munich. Fellow of the Royal Society and Membre de l'Institut, his career embraced rural New England, London society, service to the Elector of Bavaria and an unhappy marriage in Paris to the widow of Antoine Lavoisier.

The idea of nation has been created in Holland and Britain, in the United States and France, as a community of citizens, as a political society which gives a practical expression to universal rights by transforming freedom, equality and justice, into laws and reforms.

But, even if the claim for national independence has often associated universalistic principles with the defense of a concrete, historically and culturally defined community, from the second half of the XIXth Century on, aggressive nationalism has been more and more predominant as the defense of the specificity and even of the superiority of a given Volk or Narod, to mention German and Russian notions. We reached extreme points of anti-liberalism, both with a racial or ethnic definition of the nation and with a cultural or a religious one.

It is inaccurate to think that economic globalization overcomes and limits nationalism. On the contrary, our world is dominated by the growing separation between ‘open’ economies and ‘closed’ cultures, dissociation which entails a basic crisis or even a decomposition of all social and political mediations.

We feel the necessity to reassert the role of political, national or local institutions not as instruments of legitimation of the State but as mediations between globalized economies and identity-obsessed cultures.

The end of the cold war exposed the tendency in the European state system for those ‘great powers’ which might have been expected to manage the system to become steadily more reluctant to accept the commitment this requires, in terms of responsibility for the security of other states. The West had not sought the collapse of European communism and was, in many ways, comfortable with the stable framework provided by the cold war.

The ‘contract of 1990’ is identified as the means of managing the transition, as Moscow was persuaded to tolerate German unification within NATO and retreat from its Empire in return for reassurances from the West that these changes would not be exploited. Many recent problems can be understood in terms of the need to renegotiate this contract.

In recent decades, psychologists have become increasingly interested in our ability to speak. This paper sketches the present theoretical perspective on this most complex skill of homo sapiens. The generation of fluent speech is based on the interaction of various processing components. These mechanisms are highly specialized, dedicated to performing specific subroutines, such as retrieving appropriate words, generating morpho-syntactic structure, computing the phonological target shape of syllables, words, phrases and whole utterances, and creating and executing articulatory programmes. As in any complex skill, there is a self-monitoring mechanism that checks the output. These component processes are targets of increasingly sophisticated experimental research, of which this paper presents a few salient examples.

Manipulations with isolated plant cells represent a powerful technology for the genetic engineering of plants.

Learning from the Swiss experience, this article argues that federalism and direct democracy are effective mechanisms for dealing with the diversity of interests, languages, cultures and religions in Europe. These institutions only partly harmonize economic, social and cultural politics. By far more important is that federalism and referenda foster competition between the various interests, but do so within a well-defined basic constitutional design so that competition produces beneficial effects. Federalism is not an alternative to referenda but rather a prerequisite for the effective working of a direct democracy. In small communities, the information cost of voters deciding on issues or judging representatives' performance are much lower than in a large jurisdiction. The more fiscal equivalence is guaranteed, the better the benefits of publicly supplied goods can be acknowledged and the corresponding costs be attributed to the relevant political programmes or actors. Thus, while federalism provides for cheaper information, referenda enable citizens to use this knowledge effectively in the political process. The interdependence of federalism and referenda also works the other way around: referenda improve the working of federalism. Besides the possibility of voting with their feet, citizens may also vote directly. This represents a double incentive for politicians to take their citizens' preferences into account; otherwise, they may lose their tax base to another jurisdiction or may be forced by referenda and initiatives to meet the demands of the voters.

The ethical justification, not the juridic legitimacy of trading in art and cultural property is explored. The reflection is limited to matters of principle, the major aim being to erect a normative basis providing criteria and arguments for the debate concerning our dealing with cultural property. The terms of cultural property or cultural witness are explained. Cultural goods are considered expressions of human dignity. Accordingly, their use as a mere means contradicts the ethical responsibility of rational beings, whereas preservation and exchange of cultural goods become an ethical obligation. The traditional distinction between persons and things appears not appropriate for deciding the particular status of cultural goods, cultural property being an indispensable precondition of dignified human existence. It ought to be handed down to future generations. Restitution of cultural property is a further, though not absolute obligation. Ownership rights and the freedom to conduct trade and business do not automatically outweigh it. The buyer's claim to good faith will not necessarily protect him against the demand of restitution. With all this, the normative frame of the 1970 UNESCO Convention for preventing illicit trading in cultural property can be reconstructed: The ultimate goal of respectfully dealing with cultural property is the individual in his or her dignity as a human being, and his or her responsibility to society. Since the collective is a precondition of individual existence, it must be allowed to maintain and strengthen its identity. Cultural property is essential to that end. The respect of human dignity is thus the source of the obligation to respect cultural property.

Interdisciplinary studies on ‘Text and Image’, which began in the 1970s, have now taken on a position of some importance. They pick up and develop those theories which, from the 15th to the 17th centuries, considered the association of the arts in terms of the Horatian ‘Ut pictura poesis’. These studies, however, confront a major theoretical difficulty, inherent in the retention of Euclidean categories in our conception of vision and painting. A comparison with cultures in which the ideogram flourishes—in particular those of China and Japan—should allow this difficulty to be resolved.

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.

Scientific research is unpredictable and may produce results that change the world—for better or for worse, it is impossible to say. Views and attitudes towards the benefits and dangers arising from the development of science have altered during the author's lifetime. Some questions are posed, but none are answered.

This article discusses the concept of ‘Enlightenment’. Many historians of ideas use it in such a vague way that it loses its meaning, for instance to characterize an oppositional attitude no matter when it occurred, or just as a chronological epoch (meaning the whole 18th century). Therefore, it is preferable to have a more distinct definition, based on the French Enlightenment as the main movement. The question of a Swedish Enlightenment is discussed within this framework.

Cultures may be viewed as systems of elements constituted through the selection, interpretation and internalization of traditions by individuals and groups. Group identities may be viewed as cores of living tradition systems based on a limited number of key symbols and tales of identity. The cultural identities of Finno-Ugrian minorities in present-day Russia are at risk and uncertainty prevails concerning the strategies to be adopted in their defence. What are the cultural resources for ethnic survival and what principles may be discerned in a basic strategy that should be flexible enough to be modified according to thousands of different minority situations?

Memories are stored in the brain in the form of changes in synaptic connectivity brought about through a cascade of molecular processes. Transient synaptic changes result in alterations in gene expression and, ultimately, the synthesis of a family of cell adhesion molecules which are responsible for holding the synapse in a new configuration. However, memory remains a dynamic property of the brain system as a whole, rather than ‘residing’ in any particular small region.

If information enters memory under the influence of a memory-enhancing substance, for about 16 hours thereafter the recollection of that information is no better than if it had been acquired without any treatment. Later tests of retention, however, performed one or more days, or even weeks, after the experience, show a drug-induced improvement of memory. Memory-enhancing compounds thus appear to facilitate the formation of the long-term memory trace. On the assumption that differences between treated and untreated animals emerge from that moment on when memory is based on the products of the processes modulated by the drugs, it can be postulated that long-term memory comes into play after about 16–20 hours.

In the Hohenheim tree-ring laboratory, two long tree-ring chronologies have been built, spanning the past 11 600 years. This is the world's longest continuous tree-ring calendar. It has become the backbone of the calibration of the radiocarbon time scale, offering absolute and accurate dates for archaeology, vegetation history and paleoclimate studies. 14C analyses of the tree-ring chronologies provide insight into the process controlling the production of cosmogenic nuclides, i.e. mainly the geomagnetic dipole moment and solar variability. They also set geochemical constraints to variations in the carbon cycle during a major climatic excursion.

A review of market structure and firm conduct in European food processing industries, as well as the policies of Member State governments toward the movement of goods across borders, suggests that the pace of market integration in this section of the EU economy will be slower than sometimes predicted.

Plant gene engineering has become a promising sector of biotechnology. Recently, genetically engineered tomato and pumpkin varieties have been put on the market in the US. Many other crops are undergoing field tests and will soon be commercially available. The development of pest-resistant varieties may provide a substantial contribution to a sustainable agriculture. Pest resistance and higher yield are important in the face of the growing world population. There are also major industrial applications, such as engineering a desired oil or starch composition and increasing the level of certain valuable secondary metabolites.

The history of the modern world has been dominated by two major events: the industrial revolution and the expansion of Europe. These two processes were interrelated. Their combination made it possible for Europe and, eventually, for the West to dominate the world. Science and technology played a major role in this. The relations between these processes are discussed in this paper.