Nowadays it seems that the notion of cultures as petrified monoliths has largely become outdated. The boundaries between cultures are blurred and vague, due to migration, transnational communities and diaspora, education and socialization. Folk culture is often declared to be archaic, whereas high culture is declared to be universal in terms of its meanings and values; mass culture and postmodern life are based on the media and electronic communications as vectors of meaning, notions, beliefs. This paper focuses on the issues of relations between cultures that retain their uniqueness, the mutual permeation of cultures that constitute the world’s cultural heritage. It also deals with the interpretation of the widely accepted phrase ‘mythology of the open road’, which is linked to mastering information and its transformation from the manuscript through the printed to the digital format. It is an expression of recognition of broad and diverse possibilities of providing information on cultural heritage. At the same time, it represents an ironic statement, since access to knowledge is conditioned by technological, economic, ethnic, political, legal, geographical and linguistic barriers.

Large quoted corporations have become increasingly visible through the media. As a result, such corporations have become role models for other types of organizations. Even universities face pressures to act like these corporations. This paper demonstrates that there are fundamental differences between corporations and universities, particularly in terms of history, products, objectives, and principals. These differences, it is argued, have significant implications for the leadership of universities.

Almost ten years after the first production of cold antimatter at CERN, the confinement of antihydrogen has recently been achieved for the first time. Several experiments installed at the Antiproton Decelerator intend to test the symmetry between matter and antimatter by means of trapped anti-atoms. In addition, in the coming years it is planned to study the effect of gravity on antiparticles for the first time. Meanwhile, evidence from the Large Hadron Collider hinting at a violation of charge–parity symmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to be confirmed. A violation of the discrete symmetries that describe the relation between matter and antimatter could explain the excess of ordinary matter in the Universe.

The People’s Republic of China’s dramatic transformation has not only benefited its people, but has also led it to become a major player in the world. Here we examine how deeply perceptions of China have penetrated into the public’s perceptions in a wide variety of nations around the world – the US, 11 nations in East Asia, and 22 in Latin America. We ask a series of questions: how much do people know? How do Americans evaluate China? And how do publics in East Asia and Latin America view China’s influence in their nations and around the world? We also examine some of the ways in which perceptions vary, both across nations and within nations, such as by partisanship. In addition, we report the results of an experiment using an advertisement the PRC ran in the US to assess how successful they were in shaping public opinion about China. We conclude that our studies, and those of others, provide a strong baseline for assessing the effect of an emerging superpower on citizens around the world.

International mobility of academics has risen over the last few decades, especially among PhD students and post-docs. This may be the result of deliberate policies to stimulate such mobility on the one hand and of growing imbalances in academic career opportunities on the other. The general belief that attracting international talents helps to ensure that a country plays a leading role in research and innovation, stimulates countries to develop initiatives to attract international students to doctoral programmes or to attract researchers who emigrated back to the country of origin. More traditional intercontinental mobility patterns from the south to the north and the east to the west, are now paralleled within Europe, where the disparities between countries in terms of R&D investment and skills shortages increase, related to the economic crisis. Consequently, brain circulation may easily turn into brain drain, and cultural diversity may decline. Related policy questions are whether this will unavoidably result in a (further) concentration of the minds in a limited number of regions or hubs and how this should be considered from the point of view of quality, competitiveness, diversity, and the future of the comprehensive research university in Europe.

The role of creative arts for tertiary education has been recognized for many years. Yet it is not clear to what extent the institutes of higher education take the required measures to facilitate the access to cultural activities for students. In the current study we examine this issue by means of a survey. An electronic questionnaire was filled out by 26 European universities, examining their state of affairs in the field of creative arts. The results of this survey show a mixed picture as far as the institutions are really concerned about this issue. This concern materializes for example in a large number of activities organized by the institutions or in cooperation with the regional partners. However, most universities still need to take some extra measures in order to achieve a more focused policy that guarantees a well-balanced cultural programme.

The European Research Council has provided substantial research grants across all disciplines during the period 2007–2013. An analysis of the distribution of the ERC (IDEAS) Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants shows substantial differences by country. On the one hand, the UK excels in the relative number of awards, in its share among the top receiving institutions, in a high proportion of inwards mobile scholars and in the overall financial gain through ERC as compared with the UK’s contribution to the EU budget. In addition, the Netherlands is among the winners in these respects. On the other hand, Italy fares unfavourably according to these measures. In the search for an explanation of the Italian situation, a comparison is undertaken with other European countries of a similar size. The article arrives at the conclusion that low Italian success in efforts to raise such ERC funds is not due to the low average quality of the Italian education and research system, but rather due to low funding, e.g. to a low proportion of the GDP spent on research.

The essay discusses the public opinion surveys on the rise of China in the United States, Asia and Latin America since 2010, conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Duke University’s collaborative research team headed by the author. It examines the world public recognition of China’s growing influence, their attitudes toward China’s influence, and reactions to the ‘China Model’ and impressions of China’s political, economic, social, and cultural development. These assessments of China’s domestic issues or internal behavior show not only the amount of information and knowledge that the people in various countries know about China, but the intrinsic value judgments and ideological biases that influence their perceptions of China. The essay argues that the rise of China is a complicated phenomenon with a multifarious nature, including material dimensions, such as military power, economic development, and technological innovation, as well as ideational dimensions, such as perception, understanding, or prejudice. Public opinion, attitudes and perceptions of China’s rise are the outcome of dynamic interactions and assemblage of factors, a synergy of material interests, ideational and emotional reactions, and values, ideologies, principles, unraveling themselves against a highly volatile, precarious and contentious geopolitical backdrop, in which the interests of nation-states and individuals became all intertwined and inseparable.

Cultural actions are among the best tools for ministries of foreign affairs worldwide. Many countries who choose to work with cultural actions could potentially reach millions of citizens, inclusive of those living in remote areas. One of these cultural actions is that of establishing and opening cultural centres. This paper presents libraries as providing outstanding service in all these centres. Through a historical and numerical analysis of the libraries of The British Council, the Alliance Française’s Institut Français, the Goethe Institut and the Cervantes Institute, it can be shown that libraries are a real tool for public diplomacy that can exceed its remit of social assistance, social services and education. To conclude, this paper will also look at actions that could be undertaken to improve and cater for network libraries.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the highest energy machine for particle physics research ever built. In the years 2010–2012 this accelerator has collided protons to a centre-mass-energy up to 8 TeV (note that 1 TeV corresponds to the energy of about 1000 protons at rest; the mass of one proton is about 1.67×10–24 g). The events delivered by the LHC have been collected and analysed by four apparatuses placed alongside this machine. The search for the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model and the search for new particles and fields beyond this theory represent the most important points of the scientific programme of the LHC. In July 2012, the international collaborations ATLAS and CMS, consisting of more than 3000 physicists, announced the discovery of a new neutral particle with a mass of about 125 GeV, whose physics properties are compatible, within present experimental and theoretical uncertainties, to the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. This discovery represents a major milestone for particle physics, since it indicates that the hypothesized Higgs mechanism seems to be responsible for the masses of elementary particles, in particular W± and Z0 bosons, as well as fermions (leptons and quarks). The 2013 Physics Nobel Prize has been assigned to F. Englert and P. Higgs, ‘for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider’.

The paper examines the implications of the extensive and increasingly significant Chinese knowledge diaspora for the Europe of Knowledge. Based on extensive fieldwork, the paper examines the size, significance and key issues surrounding the growth of the Chinese Knowledge Diaspora. A portrait is developed of a highly-skilled group (bi-lingual and bi-cultural) who have the capacity to contribute to teaching and research both in China and their host nations, and who are often willing and eager to act as a bridge between both sides. Reference is also made to China’s numerous Overseas Talent Recruitment Schemes, which often target such individuals, and to the significance of this group to China’s dramatic, and ongoing, scientific rise. Key issues are discussed, as well as some limitations and the prospects for the future. Based on available information, data on PRC students and academics in Europe are presented and an assessment made of both the potential, and of the relatively limited impact, compared with major English-language countries of migration, such as the US, Canada and Australia. The analysis concludes with an assessment of prospects for a new epistemic Silk Road, and some of the barriers to its development.

Since its formation in 1950s as the economic community, the EU has created the monetary union and is increasingly evolving also into a political union – part of which is also a union or Europe of citizens. This article explores the development and the existing EU legislation and case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) on Union citizenship. The article emphasises the importance of the case law of the CJEU for the development of this concept, focusing especially on the case law pertaining to access to social security benefits in another Member State, the rights of students, tax relief, and personal rights such as the right to write a name in a certain way and the right to family life. Case law of the CJEU has, inter alia, confirmed that even economically inactive Union citizens lawfully residing in another Member State have a right to access to social benefits under the same conditions as the Member State’s own nationals. The concept of the Union citizenship is of key importance in the development of EU law, as it expands the scope of the applicability of the provisions on free movement of persons and other fundamental freedoms. New challenges and questions linked to Union citizenship are arising over time, which should also be regulated at the EU level in the future. Therefore, further development of this concept can still be expected in the EU.

The main purpose of this article is to present the activities of local DMOs (destination management organizations) in the context of the development of the tourist education sector in Poland. The article provides the results of the authors’ research on the collaboration between DMOs and the representatives of the educational sector in Poland, especially in the area of the training of professionally prepared personnel for the operation of the market of tourist services.

In our quest of a new paradigm for cultural or cross-cultural understanding, we must first take a look at the very concept of a paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn expounded in his celebrated book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the related concepts of incommensurability and untranslatability. Kuhn’s concepts have a significant influence on social sciences and the humanities, and they put an overemphasis on the difference and the impossibility of communication among different groups and cultures. Such a tendency has led to the fragmentization of the social fabric and the resurgence of a most tenacious tribalism. This essay launches a critique of such concepts and argues for the possibility and validity of cross-cultural understanding, and proposes world literature as an opportunity to embrace cross-cultural translatability as the first step towards a new paradigm in the study of different cultures in our globalized world today.

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009 and the merging of the two leaders into Chairman Obamao or Comrade Maobama, which can be read as the end of ideological contrast between the two countries for the sake of creating a system of political interdependence for the 21st century, a postmodern prefiguration of a coming ChinAmerica.

The philtrum – the small groove above the upper lip of every human being – is, according to Hebrew myth, the mark of an angel’s touch. The fullness and beauty of this myth does not prevent us from almost having forgotten it, while the difficulty of talking about something so human and common to all of mankind as the philtrum, within the framework of academia, provides clear evidence of the alienation of cultural discourse from its essence – the achievement of intimate, unmediated connection between cultures and nations. Likewise, despite the literary-theoretical oblivion of important ideas of literariness and the ontological cognitive power of literature, literary works, such as those of Meša Selimović, are still able to teach us about the beauty of (mutual) existence and the importance of cultural dialogue. In a sense, literature is a reservoir of humanity and a reminder of the importance of intimate human contact through cultural dialogue in the age of globalization and mechanization.

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systemic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, and so on). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project ‘The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis’, which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyses data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between ‘spaces in literature’ and ‘literature in spaces’ has historically established a nationalized and aesthetically differentiated literary field.

The essay first describes the Chinese intellectual condition in the age of globalization and the necessity of liberal arts or humanities education, and then deals with the function of humanities education in China’s institutions of higher learning with Tsinghua University as the particular case. Since current Chinese universities are divided into three types: (1) research universities; (2) teaching-research universities; and (3) teaching-oriented universities, liberal arts education always plays an important part in students’ comprehensive schooling although in most of the research universities priority is given to science and technology. As China has a long tradition of humanities education, even long before the establishment of those Western type universities, offering humanities education to all the university students as a major educational task has never changed. Even during the Cultural Revolution when all the universities stopped teaching and research work, students and faculty members were still educated with Mao’s instructions. Along with the rapid development of Chinese economy, traditional humanities are suffering more or less. But the author argues that no matter how rapidly the Chinese economy has been developing and how well Chinese people are pursuing the so-called Chinese Dream, it is necessary to pay attention to the humanities and to offer humanities education to young students. The author also offers his reconstruction of Neo-Confucianism as an alternative discourse to various postmodern discourses in the new framework of global culture.

Five major themes are often addressed in the discourse of mobility in science: the definition and classification of the persons in mind (scholars, academics, researchers, etc); the frequency and the configuration of mobility; the roles mobility and migration play for the individuals; the roles they play for institutions (universities, research institutes, enterprises, etc); and finally the relevance of mobility and migration for the overall international activities within higher education and research in a ‘globalized world’. This article summarizes the concepts and findings presented as regards these themes in all of the articles in this special issue of European Review. The discourse both on concepts and findings suggests that mobility and migration are often viewed in isolation rather than in a wider context of features of internationalization. Moreover, attention often focuses on mobility and migration at the apex of the prestige and quality pyramid, notably in the countries most strongly involved; differences by country, sector and position in the reputational hierarchy would be viewed as more relevant if European policies aimed at a balance between market developments and cohesion across Europe and for keeping inequalities between European countries within limits.

The Treaty of Lisbon (TL) altered the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) not only in its institutional structure, but also in its function and decision making processes. These changes affected the competences of member states, other authorities, and their relationships. They also influenced the prospects for intergovernmental cooperation and the evolutionary development of communitisation phenomena within this policy.