New deadline for abstracts May 15, 2004

The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies (MCTS) in the Netherlands, consisting of 25 transatlantic universities in the Americas and Europe, invites scholars to participate in the conference on Democracy & Culture in the Transatlantic World, 27th-30th October, 2004. The overall aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from across the world and from across the arts, humanities and social sciences, to discuss the nature and changing traits of Democracy and Culture through the lens of the transatlantic perspective.

The Conference on Democracy and Culture in the Transatlantic World addresses several inter-locking dimensions. First, what is the nature of transatlantic relations in the past and the present? What do we mean by the western community, western values and the western project and what often are addressed as westernization? Second, what constitutes a cross-Atlantic culture and what roles do language, religion, literature, music and art play in the cross-Atlantic relationship and its development? Third, how do we understand western democracy and the western political culture? What constitutes western democracy and is there a unified perception of the content of such values and the way they are promoted in a post-Cold War era?