European briefing

The objective of this article is to shed light on the main financial elements related to the last enlargement of the European Union (EU), which is the largest in its history. In their methodological assessment and analysis the authors identify the main financial impacts, in terms of trade flows, and also expenditures and contributions to the EU budget, while they make estimations for financing needs of main EU policies in the light of the next financial framework. Negotiations of the next financial framework for the EU, are going to be difficult, especially with ten new Member States joining in 2004. The authors are of the opinion that the financial pressures and also the need to sufficiently finance EU policies constitute the main factors which will determine the functions of the EU financial system in future. Enlargement poses also a severe challenge for EU structural and cohesion policies, the implications of which should be considered in designing the actions of the new financial framework from 2007 onwards.     

欧洲的中石器时代

中石器时代是旧石器向新石器时代的过渡,美洲这一阶段被称为古代期(the Archaic Period)。但是,中石器时代概念在中国仍未被普遍接受,可能是由于以下原因:(1)意识形态倾向,选择西方学术概念有时犹如选择党派和信仰。(2)习用的类型学、地层学、年代学和文化面貌上难以对这一时段做统一界定和比较研究。(3)我国旧石器和新石器时代分属不同的研究机构和领域,使得这一重要的转变时期被忽视。(4)新旧两个石器时代"成就"可观,文化特征鲜明,而中石器文化则乏善可陈。结果,全新世初的所有遗址都被归入"新石器时代"。中石器时代是考古学三大战略性课题之一——农业起源研究的关键时段,近来见证了我国学界对这一"过渡期"关注的升温。不管我们对中石器时代这个术语是否认同,但是国际学界研究的进展可以为我们提供诸多启示:(1)过去这一时代以细石器、弓箭和狗的驯养为标志,但目前只是一个时间概念,是指冰后期全新世开始到和农业引入之间的一段渔猎采集适应,表现为一种与新旧石器时代十分不同的广谱革命。(2)柴尔德早就用农业革命来定义新石器时代,并被国际学界一致认同。因此我国新石器时代的开始也应采取经济学而非器物学的标准。(3)该时代是冰后期人类对环境巨变的重新适应,各地气候环境差异极大,适应方式也极其多样,文化面貌复杂,发展极不平衡,因此单靠类型学的器物分析已不能胜任这一课题的研究。(4)各地从狩猎采集向农业的过渡差异很大,时间的长短也各不相同。黄河与长江中下游可能是旱地作物和稻作起源的主要区域,过渡期可能较短,而北方寒冷地带(农作物难以生长)和华南热带地区(野生资源丰富)农业可能出现很迟。(5)应该重视文化生态学的生计适应和人地互动研究,探究不同地区是如何从狩猎采集向农业经济转变的。(6)农业起源是一个漫长的过程,贯穿着人类在整个中石器时代的适应性调节,我们应该设法了解不同地区的先民是如何根据当地的不同生态环境条件,慢慢驯化或引入动物和农作物,进而完成经济转型的。     

Teaching European Identities

Under fiscal pressure and grappling with technological transformations, more and more universities are attempting to re-invent themselves as technologically facilitated educational institutions, fast and flexible enough for networking times. The adoption of new instructional technologies poses challenges to universities and education as we know it. This paper considers the educational challenges and opportunities offered by sociotechnical networks such as the Internet. Using the case of a second-year undergraduate course on globalisation, it outlines some practical educational possibilities for using the Internet that might facilitate, instead of compromise, critical thinking. It suggests that geography educators need to begin developing a critical technoliteracy that will respond to our informationally mediated world, a literacy not merely of technical competence but one which contextualises the Internet within a political economy of globalisation and continuously deconstructs, destablises and displaces its presentation as a spectacle and cyber-utopia.     

The European Difference: Karl Heinz Bohrer's Critique of the European Project

Literary critic and essayist Karl Heinz Bohrer offers a Eurosceptic perspective on the German commitment to a united Europe. This article is a reconstruction of Bohrer's argument. It identifies two distinct critiques. The first is a somewhat prosaic observation that the differences between the national traditions of Europe are simply too great for a united Europe to be viable. The other is a more complex reflection on “European decadence”: Europeans lack the will that is required to project power, and power is a precondition for cultural achievements. Protestantism—the “Protestant mind”—plays a central role in this second critique. The two critiques are connected through Bohrer's conception of the nation-state as an entity that integrates in an agonistic way legal and cultural power.     

European Insiders Inside Washington

Pascaline Winand. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe . New York: St. Martin's Press.
D iplomatic H istory , Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 1996).     

混搭更美! 欧式建筑在中国

<正>闲逛澳门街头,细品葡式建筑风格"当音乐和传说都已沉默时,建筑却还在歌唱。"建筑,可能是文化传承的最好见证和整饬。澳门作为一个被葡萄牙统治110余年之久的中国地域,虽然已回归祖国10余年,但是一幢幢风格各异的经典建筑,依然矗立街头。澳门建筑随处体现了葡式建筑的风情,体现了东西方建筑艺术的完美结合和异国风情的文化景致。澳门建筑风情无处可比。     

History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.