The idea of nation has been created in Holland and Britain, in the United States and France, as a community of citizens, as a political society which gives a practical expression to universal rights by transforming freedom, equality and justice, into laws and reforms.

But, even if the claim for national independence has often associated universalistic principles with the defense of a concrete, historically and culturally defined community, from the second half of the XIXth Century on, aggressive nationalism has been more and more predominant as the defense of the specificity and even of the superiority of a given Volk or Narod, to mention German and Russian notions. We reached extreme points of anti-liberalism, both with a racial or ethnic definition of the nation and with a cultural or a religious one.

It is inaccurate to think that economic globalization overcomes and limits nationalism. On the contrary, our world is dominated by the growing separation between ‘open’ economies and ‘closed’ cultures, dissociation which entails a basic crisis or even a decomposition of all social and political mediations.

We feel the necessity to reassert the role of political, national or local institutions not as instruments of legitimation of the State but as mediations between globalized economies and identity-obsessed cultures.

Learning from the Swiss experience, this article argues that federalism and direct democracy are effective mechanisms for dealing with the diversity of interests, languages, cultures and religions in Europe. These institutions only partly harmonize economic, social and cultural politics. By far more important is that federalism and referenda foster competition between the various interests, but do so within a well-defined basic constitutional design so that competition produces beneficial effects. Federalism is not an alternative to referenda but rather a prerequisite for the effective working of a direct democracy. In small communities, the information cost of voters deciding on issues or judging representatives' performance are much lower than in a large jurisdiction. The more fiscal equivalence is guaranteed, the better the benefits of publicly supplied goods can be acknowledged and the corresponding costs be attributed to the relevant political programmes or actors. Thus, while federalism provides for cheaper information, referenda enable citizens to use this knowledge effectively in the political process. The interdependence of federalism and referenda also works the other way around: referenda improve the working of federalism. Besides the possibility of voting with their feet, citizens may also vote directly. This represents a double incentive for politicians to take their citizens' preferences into account; otherwise, they may lose their tax base to another jurisdiction or may be forced by referenda and initiatives to meet the demands of the voters.

Scientific research is unpredictable and may produce results that change the world—for better or for worse, it is impossible to say. Views and attitudes towards the benefits and dangers arising from the development of science have altered during the author's lifetime. Some questions are posed, but none are answered.

In the Hohenheim tree-ring laboratory, two long tree-ring chronologies have been built, spanning the past 11 600 years. This is the world's longest continuous tree-ring calendar. It has become the backbone of the calibration of the radiocarbon time scale, offering absolute and accurate dates for archaeology, vegetation history and paleoclimate studies. 14C analyses of the tree-ring chronologies provide insight into the process controlling the production of cosmogenic nuclides, i.e. mainly the geomagnetic dipole moment and solar variability. They also set geochemical constraints to variations in the carbon cycle during a major climatic excursion.

Plant gene engineering has become a promising sector of biotechnology. Recently, genetically engineered tomato and pumpkin varieties have been put on the market in the US. Many other crops are undergoing field tests and will soon be commercially available. The development of pest-resistant varieties may provide a substantial contribution to a sustainable agriculture. Pest resistance and higher yield are important in the face of the growing world population. There are also major industrial applications, such as engineering a desired oil or starch composition and increasing the level of certain valuable secondary metabolites.

Even agents possessed of free will must—if rational—be substantially predictable. However, there will be some situations where the act-choices of rational agents will not be predictable—for example, in circumstances of underdetermination due to insufficient information. And moreover, unpredictability can also result in situations of analysis overdetermination that arise when equally cogent analyses yield disparate results, as in the example of Dr. Psychic Psycho. The Prisoner's Dilemma affords yet another instance of this. Clearly, when determination fails even after rationality has had its say, then rationality's predictive power is exhausted! Fortunately, however, that does not mean that our human resources of issue-resolution are at the end of their tether.

In spite of the need for harmonisation resulting from the internal market, competition between rules has increased considerably during the last years. Several factors have contributed to this development, in particular the principle of mutual recognition, the new method for harmonisation, the decreasing sensitivity with respect to differences in the costs of production and the principle of subsidiarity. The use of the directive as the privileged instrument for harmonisation is contrary to the principle of subsidiarity at the level of control of Community rules. It is therefore appropriate to substitute framework regulations to directives in order to facilitate the control of implementation by interested individuals and companies.