Volume 6 Issue 2

More than 40 librarians, academics, technology specialists, and policy makers gathered in the Karolinum at Charles University last February to discuss how the new technologies are, in their wake, also creating new meanings and new thinking.

'The modern notion of the humanities begins, or rather is rediscovered, by the great Italian intellectual Petrarch, who was born in 1304, and whose 7th centenary was celebrated last year, in what seems like 700 conferences in Italy alone. One of the two speeches that Petrarch discovered in Liège around 1330, during what sounds like the 14th-century equivalent of an Erasmus year (Petrarch was based in Avignon at the time), was a brief speech by Cicero, Pro Archia, in defence of the poet Archias, that had been unknown since antiquity.

'At this late moment in the evening, I will confine myself to a few basic points. At first, I want to look back 40 years. I was involved in a major government review of higher education in Britain. Its outcome was the historic Robbins Committee on Higher Education, linked to the name of the Chairman, Lord Robbins, a professor at the London School of Economics and one of the country's leading economists.

An unknown first novel by Rebecca West has recently been published by the European Humanities Research Centre in Oxford, which was originally conceived under the broad umbrella of the Europeaeum in the 1990s.

Even Petrarch, alleged founder of European Humanities when he unearthed the Cicero speeches, would have been proud, when the unknown first novel, The Sentinel, was brilliantly unearthed and edited by Kathy Laing last year and published by Legenda, the EHRC imprint.

Tags:

• Godfrey Hodgson
• Europe and the USA

Like analysis in an individual life, an election can be an act of introspection, and perhaps even a orm of therapy. Certainly it is an opportunity for a society to thrash out the answers to such questions as: What sort of people are we? What sort of people do we want to be? What are our priorities? Are we happy about what has happened in our recent past? Do we contemplate our immediate future with confidence? Is it time, on the contrary, for a new start? Should we ‚'throw the rascals out'? Or is it a time for, in nautical idiom, ‚'steady as she goes'?

'Up to six Jenkins scholarships are to be awarded each year for at least the next five years: four for scholars from Europaeum partner universities to study at Oxford, and two for Oxford graduates to go on study at other Europaeum universities.

The Roy Jenkins Memorial Fund was founded in 2003, to create scholarships to bring students from the countries of the European Union to study at the University of Oxford, and now also to support Oxford
students going on to further study in Europe.

Tags:

• Europe and the USA

Current differences between Europe and the United States have raised the question of whether Europeanisation and Americanisation are different, even rival projects, in terms of what they propose in terms of society, law, culture, welfare, capitalism and, of course, international relations.

Europe must face and overcome the triple challenge in the coming years if it is to achieve its goals and become the most competitive and dynamic zone in the world.

That was the view of Wim Duisenberg, former President of the European Central Bank, expressed at a one-day symposium on Europe: Shaping the Future, organised, with Europaeum backing, at Leiden University in June.

Tags:

• Geoffrey Lewis
• Islam in Europe

My first international meeting about Turkey and Europe was in Brussels a good many years ago; it was organized not by the EU, but by the EEC. We had serious discussions of such diverse matters as Ottoman history, GNP, agriculture, the military and so on. In the final session, the chairman, an EEC official, put an end to our debating by calmly saying, "Europe is a Christian community.

More than 200 people crowded into St Antony's College, Oxford, to hear Dr Grigory Yavlinsky, the main democratic Opposition leader in Russia, give an impassioned lecture about the future for Russia.

Dr Yavlinsky, Chairman of the Yabloko Party, argued that President Putin had embarked on a political programme that was in effect "the opposite of whatever Gorbachev did" and was bent on isolating Russia to reduce lilberal political influences. He was Russia's Pinochet, he claimed.

Tags:

• Asma Mustafa
• Marije Stam
• Islam in Europe

Debates about Islam in Europe have gained significance mainly through the enlargement of the European Union, as southern borders expand towards Muslim states. Islam in Europe is also a hot topic due to discussion surrounding the possible accession of Turkey to the EU, and increasing migration of Muslims to Europe.

For centuries, Islam has challenged European ways of thinking and thus was the ideal debate for this year's Europaeum summer school.

'The University of Helsinki is the oldest and largest university in Finland, making it among the oldest in Europe. It was founded in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Turku, counting then as a Swedish university.

'The past is another country, L.P. Hartley once quipped. This rather captures a widespread view that the past is somehow being lost, that history is being eclipsed in schools, that even politicians do not look back when planning invasions or creating new world orders.

History of course remains popular in television documentaries and through books, but for too many it has become a question of retrieving data and facts from the Internet or interacting with CD Roms.

Tags:

• Chris Patten
• Europe and the USA

The worst shambles to have overwhelmed us in the last five years has, of course, been the row over Iraq. I don't want to go back over old arguments. If we needed reminding that you cannot have a common policy if the larger member states are deeply divided, then here was the evidence. Other evidence also speaks eloquently for itself. As someone once said, "stuff happens."