The current euro crisis, considered by the IMF to be the new heart of the international economic crisis, has its historical roots in the process of construction of the European Monetary Union (EMU). The resulting architecture of economic governance in the EU has revealed itself to contain serious shortcomings in both ideological terms (design of a coherent exit strategy) and institutional terms (procedures, irreversibility and implementation times of the decisions made). As a result, the responses made by Europe have been late, hesitant, sometimes lacking in intensity and inconsistent in their attempts to manage the crisis.

The concept of cotransmission, including sympathetic nerve release of noradrenaline and ATP, was formalised in 1976, which challenged the accepted view known as ‘Dale's Principle’ that one nerve released only one transmitter. ATP was also shown to be a cotransmitter with acetylcholine in parasympathetic nerves supplying the urinary bladder and as a cotransmitter with nitric oxide in non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic inhibitory nerves supplying the intestine. It is now recognised that ATP is a cotransmitter in most, if not all, nerves in the peripheral and central nervous systems. The physiological significance of cotransmission will be considered. In pathophysiology, the role of ATP as a cotransmitter appears to increase as shown, for example, in the parasympathetic nerves supplying the diseased human bladder and in sympathetic nerves in spontaneously hypertensive rats. ATP is likely to be involved in sympathetic pain, causalgia and reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Purinergic signalling also appears to be enhanced in inflammatory and stress conditions.

The concept of ‘nihilism’ is ambiguous and has had and continues to be attached to several different usages. This special Focus primarily looks at the ways in which ‘nihilism’, in and following the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, has been understood as specifically tied to a crisis of European culture or civilisation, and has come to be politicised in conjunction with the National Socialist and Fascist movements in Germany and Italy during the twentieth century. Specifically, the individual articles deal with the connection between an understanding of nihilism and what it entails for the question concerning political responsibility. This introductory article presents this thematic, introduces the other contributions, and attempts to situate these debates on nihilism in the context of processes of secularisation. The article retrieves three major themes in relation to the critiques surveyed in this special Focus: nihilism as a crisis of beliefs and values, as an appropriation of religious elements into ideological grand narratives, and as the unshackling of an instrumental approach towards reality, and argues that all of them remain relevant to contemporary debates.

In the last few decades several computing models using powerful tools from Nature have been developed (because of this, they are known as bio-inspired models). Commonly, the space-time trade-off method is used to develop efficient solutions to computationally hard problems. According to this, implementation of such models (in biological, electronic, or any other substrate) would provide a significant advance in the practical resolution of hard problems. Membrane Computing is a young branch of Natural Computing initiated by Gh. Păun at the end of 1998. It is inspired by the structure and functioning of living cells, as well as from the organization of cells in tissues, organs, and other higher order structures. The devices of this paradigm, called P systems or membrane systems, constitute models for distributed, parallel and non-deterministic computing. In this paper, a computational complexity theory within the framework of Membrane Computing is introduced. Polynomial complexity classes associated with different models of cell-like and tissue-like membrane systems are defined and the most relevant results obtained so far are presented. Different borderlines between efficiency and non-efficiency are shown, and many attractive characterizations of the P ≠ NP conjecture within the framework of this bio-inspired and non-conventional computing model are studied.

In the classical tradition, natural laws were considered as eternal truths of the world. Galileo and Newton even proclaimed them as ‘thoughts of God’ represented by mathematical equations. In Kantian tradition, they became categories of the human mind. David Hume criticized their ontological status and demanded their reduction to habituations of sentiments and statistical correlations of observations. In mainstream twentieth-century century science, laws were often understood as convenient instruments only, or even deconstructed in Feyerabend's ‘anything goes’. However, the Newtonian paradigm of mathematical laws and models seems also to be extended to the life sciences (e.g. systems biology). Parallel to the developments in the natural sciences, a change of public meaning regarding laws in society can be observed over the last few centuries. In economics, experimental, statistical, and behavioural approaches are favoured. In any case, the ontological basis of laws, sometimes blamed as ‘Platonism’, seems to be lost. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the question arises: Are laws still important concepts of science? What is their contemporary meaning and task in different disciplines? Are there already alternative concepts or do laws remain an essential concept of science? In the following, we consider (1) the universal concept of laws; (2) the dynamical concept of laws; (3) their applications in natural and technical systems; (4) their applications in social and economic systems; and finally (5), we emphasize the instrumental concept of laws.

The financial and economic crises of the last few years in many Southern Eurozone countries are generally studied individually, without reference to other such crises in the region. In this note, we argue that they may also be approached as symptoms of an underlying structural challenge facing the EU economy. In many ways the relationship between northern and southern Eurozone countries seems remarkably similar to typical economic centre–periphery relations, yet without the harmonizing role that a national government could play. The occurrence and combination of crises seems to be indicative of what one would expect from the adverse effects of centre–periphery relations among countries. Unfortunately, this would imply that the crises we are currently seeing are likely to continuously reoccur in the near future to the detriment of sustainable economic growth and political-economic stability in Europe.

In Nietzsche, ‘European nihilism’ has at its core valuelessness, meaninglessness and senselessness. This article argues that Nietzsche is not replacing God with the nothing, but rather that he regards ‘European nihilism’ as an ‘in-between state’ that is necessary for getting beyond Christian morality. An important characteristic of a Nietzschean philosopher is his ‘will to responsibility’. One of his responsibilities consists of the creation of the values and the concepts that are needed in order to overcome the intermediate state of nihilism. For prevailing over nihilism in science, Nietzsche suggests drawing on philosophy for the creation of values and drawing on art in order to create beautiful surfaces that are based on these values. He regards science as a cultural system that rests on contingent grounds. Therefore, his work is concerned with the responsible construction of the narratives of science in such a way that they enhance agency and promote a life-affirming future.

The ‘transnational turn’, which is challenging bounded views on national belonging, also opens up promising perspectives for memory studies. It fosters a rethinking and reconfiguring of national memories in the context of transnational connectedness. My sketch of seven types of transnational memories points to different empirical contexts in which states, politicians, jurists, activists, artists and scholars go beyond national borders and interests to conceptualise new forms of belonging, solidarity and cultural identification in a world characterised by streams of migration and the lingering impact of traumatic and entangled pasts.

This article traces the evolution in the discourses and representations of victimhood, citing a range of examples from across Europe. Beginning with a macro approach to the question of memory groups, which examines the representation of the victim via collective memory, the article then goes on to discuss how these groups, which are related to historical violence, have presented themselves in the public realm from the 1950s to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which different memories work together within systems of representation, the function of analogy, metaphor and allegory as rhetorical devices and how one memory often serves as a ‘screen’ or a prism via which to approach another.

The aim of this article is to describe the connection of the concepts of nihilism and responsibility in the writings of Karl Jaspers. The article starts with his early writings in the late 1910s and traces his use of nihilism until the late 1950s. Jaspers first defines nihilism in a general, anthropological sense. It is essential to the human condition, which involves questioning everything. However, as his critique of contemporary society evolves, nihilism is treated as the impetus behind concrete threats such as National Socialism and the Second World War, as well as the post-war nuclear arms race.

The free movement of workers has been a cornerstone of the European Union since it was founded in 1957. A gradual improvement of rights to groups other than workers has implied that rights related to free movement have already had an impact on universal welfare states’ social security arrangements, especially in the area of pensions. Given the enlargement of the past 10 years and a strong increase in inter-EU migration this impact might even increase. This article, using Denmark as a case study, looks at how, over time, free movement may lead towards convergence and thereby Europeanization of welfare states in Europe. It focuses especially on the pressures brought to bear on the universality of the Danish welfare state, thereby moving it away from one of the distinctive characteristics of the Nordic welfare state model: the universal access to benefits. It also raises the question of whether or not recent developments are once again opening the debate on social dumping in Europe.

Along the West-Scandinavian coast, agrarian settlements, which are found along fjords and in valleys, are separated from each other and from the lands to the east by high mountains. Thus, seafaring was the main mode of communication from the Stone Age onwards. Unlike the coasts of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, this 1000 km long coastline is littered with thousands of islands, islets and reefs, which create a protected coastal sailing route – the Norðvegr – from which the kingdom took its name. The author discusses this sailing-route's significance for the creation of the kingdom as well as for the Viking incursions in Britain, Ireland and the Continent c. 790–1050.

Even though none of the recent reference works on Holocaust literature mentions the Mexican output on this topic, there exists a substantial tradition of literary works in Mexico that address the Holocaust. This essay offers a survey of this tradition, with a focus on how the authors of these works relate the Holocaust to the Mexican context from which they are writing. I argue that most of the Mexican authors I study treat the Holocaust as part of a shared history, rather than a history towards which they adopt an outsider’s perspective.

Medieval sagas of Icelanders are considered one of the most significant ‘contributions made by Nordic culture’,1 among ‘the great marvels of world literature […] so timelessly up-to-date’ and characterised by ‘a supreme, undistorted sense of actuality’.2 ‘We will never comprehend’, the famous novelist Milan Kundera said, ‘the significance of the fact that the first grand, enormous body of prose composed in a European national language sprang from the genius of a very small nation, perhaps the smallest in Europe … the glory of the sagas is indisputable’.1,2 What follows is an attempt to make comprehensible some of the aesthetic mechanisms through which the sagas attain their remarkable representational complexity. This is not in order to diminish the glory of the genius that Kundera refers to – the genius of the people and the many geniuses from among the people – but rather to appreciate it even more, as usually results from a deeper understanding of the workings of things.

This paper critically discusses different philosophical conceptions of laws of nature by examining how putative laws are treated in physical theorizing. These different conceptions are, first, views that take laws to be metaphysically basic; second, Humean views, which take laws to be reducible to patterns of instantiations of non-modal properties; and, third, a cluster of conventionalist or instrumentalist views that understand laws as part of the epistemic toolkit for building models and a reflection of a particular perspective of investigation. I argue that scientific practice best supports a moderate version of the third view: while the laws of physics do not form a single tightly organized axiomatic structure and there exists a multiplicity of frameworks in which putative laws are justified by their predictive use and relevance in a particular context, general overarching principles nevertheless play an important role in physics and provide some integration of different domains.

This essay discusses the philosopher Karl Löwith’s critique of the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Friedrich Gogarten. My aim is twofold: first, I want to reconstruct Löwith’s thesis in his 1935 article on Schmitt’s ‘occasional decisionism’ (updated to include a critique of Gogarten in 1960), together with a reading of some central texts by Schmitt and Gogarten; second, I want to raise some critical points regarding Löwith’s claims through these readings. While I agree with Löwith that aspects of Schmitt’s and Gogarten’s thought helped hastening the nihilistic tendencies they themselves claimed to counter, I believe that his diagnosis of their decisionism as nihilism misses important nuances in their work, nuances crucial to the problematization, historicization and philosophical analysis of nihilism. Ultimately, I find that the main point of contestation between Löwith and Schmitt/Gogarten is not whether the latter two affirm modern meaninglessness, but rather whether history can and should be invested with meaning in the first place.