Nowadays China and EU share close investment relations. However, concerns have been raised over FDIs (Foreign Direct Investments) aimed at sensitive sectors, especially those from Chinese state-owned companies. In light of this, the European Commission in late 2017 proposed a FDI Screening Regulation. This proposal contains certain features, including cooperation mechanisms between Member States and the Commission to notify and give comments on FDIs, direct monitoring of FDIs by the Commission on the grounds of Union interests, and the illustration of instances to be considered when screening FDIs. However, the success of this proposal is in doubt. Its fate regarding being adopted as law through the EU’s legislative process is uncertain, due to the Member States’ divided attitude towards FDI screening. Its provision contains a lethal loophole, undermining the cooperation and exchange of information between the Member States and the Commission. The non-binding nature of the opinions and comments addressed to the FDI receiving Member State renders the mechanisms practically unenforceable. To establish an effective FDI screening framework for the EU, this proposal needs to be revised and amended.

Starting with the third decade of post-communism, the political landscape of the world that once belonged to the Soviet bloc or its satellites has been marked by important transformations at institutional and individual levels. So far, relatively little is known about how political parties respond to recent challenges and developments in politics and societies. This Focus seeks to address this gap in the literature and pursues theoretical, empirical and methodological objectives. The collection of articles seeks to outline a few theoretical models of adaptation to the political realities, to identify and explain various ways in which political parties respond to challenges and continue to perform their function of representation, and to measure variables and concepts that were previously approached only from a normative or descriptive perspective.

Why are the rankings of universities not changing? Why is the demographic composition of top universities the same? In this review, these questions are addressed based on physics. Although size matters, higher ranks do not correlate with bigger sizes. The higher ranks belong to universities that have more authors who receive more citations. Citations are a record of how ideas spread from the source to the whole globe, in accordance with the physics of the logistics S-curve phenomenon. The spreading occurs in three periods – slow, fast, slow – and the population served by each idea during its lifetime depends on the size of the first big channel that carries the idea. An idea from a famous university has a larger spreading territory around it than an idea from a lesser-known university. Creativity is key: rankings come from visibility through citations, and, in turn, visibility for an author is aided by the higher visibility of the university. The demographic composition of the top universities is the same: for instance, the percentage of female authors and authors of East Asian origin among the 200 most cited authors does not vary significantly over the 20 highest ranked universities.

Stem cells build our bodies during development, starting from a fertilized oocyte. Subsequently, they maintain and repair our organs for a lifetime. Thus, stem cells hold the promise of eternal life. While this may still be in the distant future, stem cells are rapidly changing the face of biomedical science and are finding applications in the clinic. In this article, I discuss the principles of stem cell biology and the mini-organs that can be grown from stem cells in a petri dish.

Global climate change, migration waves, Brexit, Trump’s presidency, the politics of Putin’s Russia, the narrow-minded technocratic executive leadership of the EU, and the constitutional crisis in Spain, present old, reborn, and new challenges to the integrative and cohesive forces of the diversity and openness of Europe. The current autocratic breakthroughs in Hungary and Poland are part of these phenomena. This introductory article focuses on the common preconditions of autocratic breakthroughs, especially on the uncertainties, anxieties and fears rooted in unprocessed traumatic experiences. They have created the possibility of pitting the case of the community against the case of liberty, producing powder-kegs of political hysteria in which the political language of national egotism and regimes of memory strongly connect with each other.

Cultural borders play a significant part in modern European history as well as in the present. This Focus has been chosen in order to enhance reflections on the transcendence of cultural borders; how the crossing is conducted, why we want to move beyond cultural borders, and what actually lies beyond them. The individual articles investigate ways to transcend borders, primarily those of the European nation state, in different genres from the nineteenth century onward. This editorial article introduces the theme of thinking beyond borders and presents the contributions to this Focus. It attempts to situate the issue of Europe´s cultural borders within European history by delving into three relevant themes: the cultural construction of borders, the growing number of recognized nationalities, and the practices of Europeanization.

Translating party pledges into coalition agreements is a crucial goal of after-election coalition negotiations. Full adoption is the best result for the bargaining party, while limited adoption is a kind of compromise forced by coalition partners, and non-adoption can be seen as a defeat. The question of what undermines the compromise and defeat in coalition agreements is, however, rarely answered. This article formulates hypotheses concerning the effect of consensual pledges among coalition parties, and party and voter-issue salience on parties’ ability to adopt their pledges and adopt them fully or partially. The effect of party level characteristics is considered. The analysis is provided on a new dataset of narrow Czech coalition party pledges in three governments established after elections in 2006, 2010 and 2013. Multinomial logit regression is used for the statistical analysis.

The studies of human behaviour that foreground the explanatory role of exogenously given incentives and constraints give short shrift to the role of agency, or the behaviour(s) of actors, in attempting to shed light on both policy and behaviour. This article reverses the emphasis – with the example of ethnic politics in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia with respect to the preservation and/or erection of German-language and Slovenian-language inscriptions – by arguing that the behavioural strategies of vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, such as national minorities, can carry significant political consequences – and thus are worthy of study. Specifically, the article looks into a politics of consensus and a politics of (political) realism, as the latter are advocated by Carinthian Slovenes in Austria. The findings serve as a wake-up call for West European states in particular, which, arguably, have grown complacent about their own minority rights records.

This article deals with the age-old problem of the literary canon, from a perspective that tries to supersede the still dominating questions of nation building or mainstream versus minorities culture. Taking stock from the observation that recent debates have moved the question to the field of the creative industries as well as that of cultural policy, it asks instead questions on the actual use and use-value of the canon, which is here reframed from the point of view of both writers and policy makers.

The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is greatly honoured by receiving the Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea. On this occasion, it might be appropriate to talk about the role of academies in science-based policy advice. The authors would like to address the question: what general aims should the academies achieve – particularly in respect to biomedicine and the life sciences?

This article discusses the gaps in the cognitive demands of education as higher levels of education became socially and culturally necessary. These gaps are related to major transitions between education levels, such as the transition from preschool to primary school, from primary to secondary, or from secondary to tertiary education. Gaps reflect deviations between the concepts and skills prescribed for learning by a specific population and the readiness of this population to cope with the demands of the task within the time frame prescribed. The history and the cognitive developmental profile of the gaps is outlined. This article focuses on the gap between secondary and tertiary education. It is explained that a major reason for the gap is the vast expansion in the population of youth attending university studies. We outline a programme for bridging this gap, which extends from primary to university education. We emphasize changes in principle-based and critical thought that are needed by many students if they are be able to grasp science as intended by universities.

This article explores the absence of a consistent longer historical narrative about gender relations in European history, as the latter is presented in the recently opened House of European History in Brussels and, to some extent, in the European Parliament’s visitor centre, Parlamentarium. It is argued that gender equality is presented as part of a modern European identity, but that it is a phenomenon that isn’t given such a problematic history as many other phenomena – gender inequality is not construed as a part of European history in the way that, for example, totalitarianism and colonialism are. Gender inequality isn’t seen and constructed as a previous challenge to European unification and integration, and therefore gender equality can’t be perceived as a solution to a relevant problem in the narratives at hand.

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities’ rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory.

This article paper aims to investigate the EU’s strategic partners using both theoretical and empirical analysis. Applying the technique of cluster analysis has allowed us, first, to demonstrate that not all of the EU’s ‘special ten’ are strategically sound for the EU; second, to investigate which regional organizations represent the best interest of the EU from a strategic standpoint; third, to find out the true potential of the EU’s strategic partners; and, finally, to prove empirically that the EU’s strategic partners are so heterogeneous as to represent a collective response to multilateralism and that a bilateral approach should be applied instead, taking into consideration the specific character of every strategic partner.

Female artists and performers are at the top of the scale of precarious work relations in post-Fordist society. Their work is undervalued and seldom paid. This article deals with the issues arising from the controversial relations between the cultural, social and economic value of their work. How to re-valorize artistic work performed by women? In providing the answer to this central question, the value of artworks will be defined in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and in the context of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. The article argues that a contemporary alternative can be sought in the new chain of value accumulation, in which the surplus-value of the artwork is created by shifting its symbolic value into a direct relationship to the material resources. This point will be illustrated with the art projects presented at City of Women, an international festival of contemporary arts based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

In this article I will share some reflections on my own experience as a historian. However, I will refrain from proposing my own case as a model. I dislike preaching; moreover, I regard ego-centred preaching as a ridiculous posture. So please: note what I will say, and then follow a completely different path.

In certain contingencies, traumatic events intervene in breaking the continuity of the life of social communities or whole societies. Such events include natural catastrophes but also wars or revolutions. This article looks in particular at recollections of the Second World War.

Populist parties participate in the process of political representation through elections. Little is known about how they conceptualize this process since their statements refer to a direct involvement of citizens in decision-making and disapprove of representatives. This article addresses this issue and presents an empirical study about how Lithuanian populist political parties define political representation. The data come from the 2016 election manifestos and from party websites between April 2016 and September 2017. The qualitative content analysis reveals that populists define representation by referencing common moral values and constant communication with citizens. This helps them create a political identity common to themselves as representatives and the represented.

This article will analyse the rather uniform ways in which developed countries, and notably those of Europe, have moved from systems in which tiny numbers of young people attended university to systems of mass and still expanding higher education. Although there are some surface differences between countries in organisation and levels of participation, these have actually decreased in recent decades, and convergence is continuing. This convergence reflects a general move towards a dominant model of tertiary education which gives priority and prestige to academic certification. The economic and policy drivers have been very similar. In the first instance, a changing labour market and growing middle class expanded demand for tertiary provision. Governments then became convinced that expanding higher education was an effective supply-side policy to promote growth and productivity, and an effective way to promote social mobility and equality; and so educational expansion and spending were privileged. However, in recent years, there has been a growing mismatch between the labour market and tertiary provision, which it is very hard to correct, partly because of politicians’ beliefs but also because the ‘signalling’ function of academic education has become paramount, and families quite rationally pursue high-prestige (but zero-sum) options for their children. Although there may be some degree of self-correction in the system, this is by no means assured and governments need to consider, actively, how to promote attractive alternatives to university study.