In this commentary, the author continues his first reflections on European Union cultural history, which opened up this field and introduced the theory of ‘paradoxical coherence’. Revisiting sociological and cultural-historical works by Beck and Gumbrecht, he argues that the EU can be seen as a ‘cultural shared risk community’, the sources of identity-building and sense-making consisting of the European citizens’ shared cultural risks and fears. From this he suggests a new agenda for cultural-historical research on the EU.

As an interdisciplinary but distinct field of cultural research, metal music studies is, as a research discourse, structurally interwoven with post-modern and post-colonial cultural history. In this article, the author examines the ways the music of the Middle Eastern extreme metal band Melechesh, called ‘Mesopotamian Metal’ by the artists themselves, constructs a hybrid cultural pattern that could help us solving cultural conflicts in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Mesopotamian Metal constructs an innovative cultural discourse, hybridizing fragments of different ‘Western’, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Oriental’ streams of culture. Its main power lies in its way of historical storytelling: it uses the logic of hybridization, via the imagination of historical distance, to provide us with an innovative historical narrative, fashioned in the globally understood cultural outfit of extreme metal music. Explaining this empirical case by post-colonial hybridization theory adds new aspects to current research debates on the interconnections between global extreme metal discourse and regional/local cultures in metal music studies.

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The Koralmbahn railway line between Graz and Klagenfurt is an essential part of the Baltic-Adriatic corridor. The new high-speed rail link will create new capacities and provide much better conditions for environmentally friendly rail goods traffic. The current journey times for passenger traffic will be considerably reduced. The Koralm tunnel with a length of about 32.9 km is the core piece of the new Koralmbahn. The tunnelling work will produce about 5 m m 3 of excavated material in the consolidated state. For this reason, work on a programme for the economic and environmentally friendly processing of the material to be excavated from the tunnel has been undertaken since the earliest design phases, the aim being the highest possible degree of recycling and the lowest possible need for tipping.

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