Thorvald Stoltenberg President of the Norwegian Red Cross Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board Despite the very optimistic language on the imminence of new accessions to the European Union that came out of the June 2001 European Council in Gothen burg, it will serve no good purpose to neglect the fact that EU membership for the Central and Eastern European applicants remains a difficult process. Painful experience makes it prudent to exercise caution in predicting developments with in the European Union. Negotiations may drag out, snags may appear and some thing may happen on the way to ratification. So perhaps it is wise to take a broad er view of European integration - and therefore integration within the North European, Barents and Baltic Sea region that is the focus of this Yearbook. EU membership for those countries that are able to satisfy the Copenhagen requirements - and the chapters of the acquis communautaire that have subse quently been specified - is certainly a prize worth fighting for. But all is not lost if some of the applicants end up not joining the Union as a result of the current enlargement round. Even more important than formal membership is the process of growing together that has taken place simultaneously with the membership negotiations. We are dealing here with integration in the real world of trade, investments, division of labour, politics, environment, hard and soft security, people-to-people relations etc.

At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

This book provides an unconventional account of post-1989 education reform in Romania. By drawing on policy documentation, interviews with key players, qualitative data from everyday school contexts, and extensive textbook analysis, this groundbreaking study explores change within the Romanian education system as a process that institutionalises world culture through symbolic mediation of the concept ‘Europe’. The book argues that the education system’s structural and organisational evolution through time is decoupled from its self-depiction by ultimately serving a nation-building agenda. It does so despite notable changes in the discourse reflecting increasingly transnational definitions of the mission of the school in the post-1989 era. The book also suggests that the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ institutionalised by the school are gradually being redefined as cosmopolitan, matching post-war patterns of post-national affiliations on a worldwide level.