  Wigner's famous 1939 classification of positive energy representations,
combined with the more recent modular localization principle, has led to a
significant conceptual and computational extension of renormalized perturbation
theory to interactions involving fields of higher spin. Traditionally the clash
between pointlike localization and the the Hilbert space was resolved by
passing to a Krein space setting which resulted in the well-known BRST gauge
formulation. Recently it turned out that maintaining a Hilbert space
formulation for interacting higher spin fields requires a weakening of
localization from point- to string-like fields for which the d=s+1 short
distance scaling dimension for integer spins is reduced to d=1 and and
renormalizable couplings in the sense of power-counting exist for any spin.
This new setting leads to a significant conceptual change of the relation of
massless couplings with their massless counterpart. Whereas e.g. the
renormalizable interactions of s=1 massive vectormesons with s<1 matter falls
within the standard field-particle setting, their zero mass limits lead to much
less understood phenomena as "infraparticles" and gluon/quark confinement. It
is not surprising that such drastic conceptual changes in the area of gauge
theories also lead to a radical change concerning the Higgs issue.
